Wolfgang Panofsky, 88; Physicist, Fought For Disarmament

Wolfgang Panofsky was the founding director of the renowned Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the recipient of major government honors. (Stanford University)

Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, 88, who fled Germany as a teenager to become one of America's foremost particle physicists, an outspoken arms-control adviser and the winner of major government honors, died Sept. 24 after a heart attack at his home in Los Altos, Calif.

Dr. Panofsky was the founding director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, home of one of the most productive devices built in the last century to seek out the secrets of matter and energy.

The two-mile-long machine drove electrons to great speeds, smashing them into other particles in a search for clues to ultimate physical reality. Research at Dr. Panofsky's center led to many discoveries, including some for which scientists received the Nobel Prize.

His scientific, engineering and administrative abilities were credited with getting the great machine built and running beneath the eucalyptus groves of Northern California. Dr. Panofsky was also known for conscience and principle.

"He really believed in disarming the world," his daughter Carol Panofsky said.

It was necessary, Dr. Panofsky once said, to "create conditions in the world to make feasible a worldwide prohibition of nuclear weapons."

His daughter said Dr. Panofsky "wanted to further pure science for the sake of pure science" throughout the world. He was, she said, a man who "felt science belonged to everybody."

Dr. Panofsky, nicknamed Pief, was on the physics faculty at the University of California at Berkeley before moving to Stanford in 1951 as a professor of physics and head of Stanford's high-energy physics laboratory.

When the linear accelerator project started, Dr. Panofsky became its leader. He was its director until he retired in 1984.

In 1990, Richard E. Taylor of Stanford won the Nobel in physics for helping confirm the reality of quarks, a basic component of matter. That contributed to the development of the "Standard Model," by which scientists explain the structure of matter.

"He was my teacher and mentor," Taylor told an interviewer about Dr. Panofsky at the time. "He's an infinitely superior physicist. It's sad that they don't give Nobel Prizes for his kind of achievement -- the creation of truly great experimental machines."

Many honors did come Dr. Panofsky's way, including the National Medal of Science and the Atomic Energy Commission's Enrico Fermi Award.