Professor receives Humboldt Award for physics

IU professor and physicist Hans-Otto Meyer remembers a year ago when his colleagues in Germany said they were nominating him for an award, but admits he largely forgot about it.\nNeedless to say, Meyer was caught off guard when he learned that he had received the prestigious Humboldt Research Award for his lifetime achievements in nuclear physics.\n“I am proud that something I did in my research was recognized by someone; work that actually had some practical implications,” Meyer said.\nThe Alexander von Humboldt Foundation annually honors up to 100 scientists and scholars, giving them $80,000 in prize money as well as an invitation to travel to Germany and work with colleagues on any research project they choose.\nIn November, Meyer will put the money to use when he travels to a research center in Julich, Germany. \nMeyer said thorough research holds the key to unanswered questions in physics.\n“What is going to happen?” Meyer asked. “We don’t know. It is possible that someone will stumble upon something that is really breathtaking like we have in the past. But you will not stumble upon these things if you do not do the research in the first place.”\nMeyer, who was born in Switzerland, first studied mathematics at the University of Basel in Basel, Switzerland, but changed his course of study to physics after taking a few physics courses for his minor.\nHe said the University of Basel had a strong nuclear physics program while he was there. His studies led him to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Washington at Seattle before he finally came to IU in 1978.\nThe physics department had an experimental piece of equipment called the IU Cyclotron Facility, which Meyer would become well-known for using.\n“It was called a Cooler,” Meyer said. “It was unique and it produced experiments that were pioneering.”\nMeyer describes the IU Cyclotron Facility as a storage ring for protons where electron beams improve the quality of photon beams, which can then be used to measure observations important to nuclear physics.\n“Meyer attracted other physicists to the laboratory and generated more ideas for new experiments than could be exploited,” IU Cyclotron Facility Associate Director Edward Stephenson said in a news release. “He traveled the world describing the new results, bringing them to the attention of physicists everywhere.”