In memory of Yuval Naaman (1925-2006)

Yuval Na'am combined in his life a brilliant scientific career with military, security, academic-administrative and political activities, each of which alone would have given him a place of honor in the history of the country

By: Haim Shmueli

How can one define Yuval Neman, who died about a month ago - on April 26, 2006 - at the age of 81? One of the most prominent scientists that Israel has produced? One of the fathers of Israel's national security? An extinct politician? Naman was an unbelievable and almost impossible combination of all these, and combined in his life a brilliant scientific career with military, security, academic-administrative and political activities, each of which alone would have given him a place of honor in the history of the country.

Milestones

It is impossible without some necessary landmarks: Naaman was born in Tel Aviv in 1925 and graduated from the Herzliya Gymnasium at the age of 15 and engineering studies at the Technion in 1945. He was active in the defense and in the War of Liberation he served as deputy battalion commander in the Givati ​​Brigade. Later he was appointed head of the operations branch under the command of Yitzhak Rabin and in 1954 he served as deputy head of AMN. In 1958, he was appointed a trustee of the military annex in London and at the same time completed his doctoral studies in physics at the University of London under the guidance of Abdus Salam, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century.

Upon his return to Israel, he was appointed the scientific director of the reactor at Nahal Sorek and also contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear research facility at Dimona. He was also a member of the Atomic Energy Committee and an advisor to the Minister of Defense and the chief scientist in this office. Yuval Naman founded the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, and initiated the Faculty of Engineering, the Institute for Strategic Studies and the Observatory near Mitzpe Ramon. In the seventies he served as president of Tel Aviv University. During his tenure as Minister of Science, he founded the Israel Space Agency and headed it until recently.

Alongside his scientific activity, Na'am took part in the political life of Israel. In 1979 he initiated the establishment of the revival movement and headed it, despite being an atheist. Naman was a political hawk and strongly opposed the Camp David Accords and naval evacuation. He was elected to the Tenth Knesset and served as Minister of Science and later as Minister of Science and Technology and Minister of Energy and Infrastructure in the Shamir government. In 1981 he pushed for an operation against Iraq's nuclear reactor. In 1992 he retired from the government and following the failure of the revival in the elections - also from political life.

Thanks to his scientific achievements in physics, Naman won, among other things, the Israel Prize, the Einstein Medal, the AMT Prize and honorary membership in the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. He has published hundreds of articles and 25 books, many of them popular science books. He devoted much of his time to lectures for youth and the general public.

His great scientific achievement

But there is no doubt that Yuval Neman's great achievement, thanks to which his name will be engraved in the history of physics, is in identifying basic symmetry principles found at the foundation of the world of elementary particles of nature. By the end of the XNUMXs, researchers had discovered hundreds of subatomic particles that were all considered elementary, and no one knew how to classify them or find more elementary particles of which they are composed. In particle accelerators, the physicists could create certain particles in collisions between other particles, but also create the first particles from the particles created in the first reaction.

In 1962, Naman dispelled the heavy fog of the origin of a new order in the world of elementary particles: at the same time as the American Murray Gell-Mann and independently, he showed that it is possible to explain the existence and properties of all known subatomic particles with the help of a model based on the SU(3) symmetry group. His sorting method made it possible to arrange the two families of subatomic particles - bullies and mesons according to the electric charge and another quantum property known as "strangeness" in a way that maintains a symmetrical structure. This method enabled the classification of the elementary particles in a manner similar to that of Mendeleev's periodic table and even here it was possible to confirm the prediction using a subatomic particle that the Neman and Gell-Mann method predicted but was previously unknown. The particle called omega-minus was indeed discovered in February 1964 in the Brookhaven bubble chamber and its mass, electrical charge and strangeness matched the prediction wonderfully.

The theory that was nicknamed "The Eightfold Way", due to the classification of particles into families of 8 particles each and as a tribute to Buddhism, was the basis for the development of the quark model that make up most of the known matter in the universe, with the exception of electrons and more exotic particles, and subsequently to the standard model of particles - The theory of all the known particles and of all the fundamental forces in nature with the exception of gravity.

Yuval Naman made important contributions not only in particle physics but also in astrophysics, cosmology and philosophy and history of science. In recent years he has devoted much attention to the history of physics in Israel in the last hundred years. He also researched the contribution of the Jews to science throughout history. His research shed light on the contribution of the Rambam and especially the Ralbag and Rabbi Hesdai Karskash to the development of physics from Copernicus to Newton. The popular science books he wrote "The Particle Hunters" and "Physics of the Twentieth Century" were hugely popular. His death interrupted the continuation of his plans. Of blessed memory.

Haim Shmueli is a scientific editor in the field of physics at Scientific American Israel