Katz Applies Military Work To Career in Physics

Robert Katz, visiting professor of Physics from Kansas State University, has applied to civilian life some of what he learned in wartime government service. From 1939 until 1943 Katz worked at Ohio's Wright Field, X-raying airplane parts in the hope of discovering any faults in the castings. Many years later, after moving to Kansas, he devised a way to use similar techniques for searching out insect larvae in wheat grains.

It was a development "of some service to the State of Kansas," Katz comments mildly.

Another investigation he took part in had equally obvious immediate practical results. It concerned the cord "pigtails" one still sees adorning the wings of various propellor driven planes. The subject under study was "precipitation static" - an electrical charge picked up when a plane passes through certain kinds of rain or snow storms. These charges, pilots found, interfered with radio communication. Since electricity tends to concentrate itself on pointed surfaces, such as radio antennas, the investigators suggested the pigtails as a harmless discharge point for any excess charge.

Since the war, Katz has moved into some of the more abstract branches of physics, particularly those dealing with atomic nuclei. Currently, he is trying to determine the existence of the "magnetic pole"--a hypothetical particle some investigators assume to be present in cosmic rays.

Katz took his undergraduate degree at New York's Brooklyn College, later performing graduate level work at Columbia and, Illinois. He has never taught at the Summer School before this year.