Prof. Yigal Talmi, one of the founders of the field of nuclear physics and one of the most prominent representatives of the pioneering generation in Israeli science, has passed away.
Prof. Yigal Talmi, one of the founders of the field of nuclear physics and one of the most prominent representatives of the pioneering generation in Israeli science, passed away today, just days after his 101st birthday. Less than two weeks ago, the funeral of his wife of the past 77 years, Hanna Talmi (nee Kibilevich), who passed away at the age of 100, was held.
Yigal was one of the decipherers of the structure of the atomic nucleus, and some of the theories and calculation methods he developed are used by physicists to this day. As part of his doctoral thesis under the supervision of the 1945 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Yigal developed a method that greatly simplifies calculations in the shell model that describes the structure of the atomic nucleus. After completing his doctorate in 1951, he went to Princeton University for postdoctoral research with another Nobel Prize winner – the Jewish-American Professor Eugene Wigner. Upon his return to Israel in 1954, Yigal joined the Weizmann Institute of Science and was one of the founders of the first nuclear physics department in the country. In 1963, Yigal, together with Professor Amos de Shalit, also a pioneer of the nuclear physics department, published the book Nuclear Shell Theory, which was widely distributed and is considered a basic book among nuclear physicists around the world. Another book that Yigal wrote on the subject – Simple Models of Complex Nuclei: The Shell Model and the Interacting Boson Model – Published in 1993.
Over the years, Yigal has been recognized and honored in Israel and around the world for his contributions to the field of nuclear physics. He was invited as a visiting professor to MIT, Yale, Princeton, and other leading universities in various countries. Until his retirement in 1995, he was a professor at the Institute and over the years he also served as Chairman of the Institute's Professors' Committee, Head of the Department of Nuclear Physics, and Dean of the Faculty of Physics. He was also a member of the Israeli Atomic Energy Committee and the Research Subcommittee. Yigal has been a member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences since 1963. Over the years, he has won the Weizmann Prize (1962), the Israel Prize for Exact Sciences (1965), the Rothschild Prize (1971), the Hans Bett Prize of the American Physical Society (2000), and the A.M.T. Prize (2003).
The Butterfly Hunter from the Jezreel Valley
In 1925, year-old Yigal immigrated from Ukraine with his parents, Moshe and Leah Talmi (formerly Smilansky), and his 10-year-old sister, Tahya. His parents, who were Hebrew teachers, took their family by ship from Odessa to Jaffa after the Soviet government closed Hebrew schools in the Soviet Union. The pioneering family settled in Moshav Kfar Yehezkel – the second workers’ settlement in Israel. There, at the foot of Mount Gilboa, in the heart of the Jezreel Valley, Yigal grew up and attended the school run by his father.
His close childhood friend was the naturalist Tuvia Kushnir, who was later killed in the War of Independence as a fighter in the Hellenic Army. In their free time, the two boys enjoyed wandering the wild landscape of Gilboa, hunting butterflies, examining plants and documenting their details. "Butterfly Hunters" was what their friends mockingly called them. A particularly adventurous trip the two took place during the Passover vacation of 1942 to Mount Hermon (in Lebanon) and is described in Deborah Omer's book "A Storm in Spring."
Yigal, a nature lover, dreamed of studying biology, but to do so he had to finish high school. The days were the days of World War II, and his parents were afraid to send him to study in Tel Aviv and decided that he would study on his own. Yigal began studying, among other things, with the help of an old physics book they had at home, and discovered that it was possible to calculate natural phenomena, such as the free fall of bodies. The discovery ignited his imagination and he slowly abandoned the idea of studying biology and focused on physics. However, his self-study was not successful. Yigal studied the subjects that interested him and abandoned "uninteresting" subjects. Ultimately, despite the war, his parents decided to send him to Tel Aviv, to live with their friends and to study at the Herzliya Gymnasium.
After completing his studies, in 1942, he volunteered for the Palmach. In those days, the Palmach bases were in kibbutzim, Palmach members worked on the kibbutz for two weeks a month and the rest of the time was devoted to training. After a few months in Tel Yosef and Ramat HaKovesh, Yigal was released in 1943 for health reasons and began studying physics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; his friend Tuvia, who studied biology, also arrived there two years later. In the physics department, Yigal met Uri Haber-Sheim and Yitzhak Shimoni, later pioneers of Israeli television. A year later, they were joined by those who would later become founders of the nuclear physics department at the Weizmann Institute of Science – Amos DeShalit, Gabi (Gavirol) Goldring and Gideon Yekutieli. The physics lecturer who impressed the group was Professor Yoel Rakech, who had immigrated from Italy due to the racial laws in his country.
"Yigael was one of the decipherers of the structure of the atomic nucleus, and several of the theories and calculation methods he developed are used by physicists to this day."
When he finished his studies and received a master's degree in physics, Prof. Rakeh offered Yigal to become his intern and continue his doctorate in atomic spectroscopy. But Yigal set his sights on the Zurich Institute of Technology (ETH) and Professor Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel Prize winner, who taught there. When the fighting began in Israel in 1947, he postponed his trip because he realized that a long and difficult campaign lay ahead.
During the war, Yigal fought in Ramat Rachel and Neve Yaakov. Rakeh and others urged him to join the Science Corps (Chamad). Aharon Katzir even asked his girlfriend at the time, Hana – later his wife – to influence him in the matter, but she refused. After a while, Yigal was forced to move "by order" to the Chamad base in Rehovot. By a rough route, equipped with a grenade, he got off in a jeep on the way to Burma. At six in the morning, he knocked on the door of his sister, a resident of Rehovot, who was very excited to see him.
Also serving in the Hamad were Haber-Sheim, Yekutieli, De Shalit, and Goldring. The group tried to maintain an academic atmosphere and held lectures and seminars. They realized how far physics in Israel was lagging behind, compared to Europe and the United States, and discussed among themselves that they would have to go abroad for studies and research, and when the time came, return to Israel to put what they had learned into practice here. They spoke about this with their superiors, Katzir and Ernst Bergman, and they said that perhaps the state would send them. Ben-Gurion was very attentive to matters of science, and especially to Katzir and Bergman. Despite the poverty of the young state, De Shalit, Haber-Sheim, Yekutieli, Talmi, and Israel Falch were sent abroad at its expense, while Goldring traveled at the expense of the Hebrew University. Yigal, who was already married to Hannah, fulfilled his original plan: the couple traveled to Switzerland to study for a doctorate with Professor Pauli.
Upon the young physicists' return to Israel, they became part of the pioneering generation of science in the young country and played a major role in shaping the image of the Weizmann Institute. They saw their students as research partners and allowed them, from a very early stage, to engage in topics that interested them. In doing so, they broke with the European system of a professor leading the group while his assistants and research students did their talking, and laid the foundation for groundbreaking Israeli science.
Even in his adulthood, Yigal did not abandon his love of nature, and his hobby in the last decades of his life was birdwatching. He came to this hobby at a relatively late age following hiking trips with his eldest son. The late Hana and Yigal had two children – son Prof. Yoav Talmi, an ENT and head and neck surgery specialist, and daughter Prof. Tamar Dayan, a zoologist from Tel Aviv University, founder and chairwoman of the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.
