By Martin Weil
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 28, 2007; B07

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.

Wolfgang Kurt Hermann Panofsky was born in Berlin on April 24, 1919, the son of world-renowned art historian Erwin Panofsky. With the rise of the Nazis, Dr. Panofsky and his brother, Hans, "were given a lot of trouble in school," Carol Panofsky said. Their father was "seeing the handwriting on the wall," she said. In the early 1930s, the family came to America.

Dr. Panofsky and his brother, who were close in age, enrolled at Princeton University. As seniors in 1938, they were voted the most brilliant in their class. Hans compiled a perfect record; Wolfgang fell slightly short. As a result, scholars have amused themselves by calling him "the dumb Panofsky."

In part, Carol Panofsky said, circumstance led the brothers to science. On their arrival in America, "their English was marginal," so science, with similarities between many English and foreign terms, was "much more accessible."

She also said the brothers "were always interested in mechanical things." The Erector Set "was one of their favorite childhood toys." Hans, an astronomer and meteorologist, died in 1988.

Wolfgang Panofsky obtained a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology and worked during World War II on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

After retiring as chief of the accelerator center, Dr. Panofsky, who had been a science adviser to presidents, was chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on International Security and Arms Control from 1985 to 1993.

His wife, Adele, is the daughter of one of his Cal Tech professors. None of their children, Richard, Margaret, Edward, Carol or Steven, followed Dr. Panofsky into physics. But at least one grandchild is a physics major at Harvard University.