Albert Báez

Albert Vinicio Báez ( ; ; November 15, 1912 – March 20, 2007) was a Mexican-American physicist and the father of singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña, and an uncle of John C. Baez. He made important contributions to the early development of X-ray microscopes, X-ray optics, and later X-ray telescopes.

Early life Albert Báez was born in Puebla, Mexico, in 1912 to Alberto B. Báez and Thalia Báez. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother was a social worker for the YWCA. In 1948, Báez co-invented, with his doctoral program advisor, Paul Kirkpatrick, the X-ray reflection microscope for examination of living cells. This microscope is still used in medicine. Baez received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford in 1950, and wrote his thesis titled "Principles of X-Ray Optics and the Development of a Single State X-Ray Microscope". In 1948, while still a graduate student at Stanford, he developed concentric circles of alternating opaque and transparent materials to use diffraction instead of refraction to focus X-rays.

Academic life As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s, Báez's talent was in high demand in the burgeoning arms race, yet his family's pacifism moved him to refuse lucrative defense industry positions, and he devoted himself instead to education and humanitarianism.

From 1950 to 1956, he held a professorship at the University of Redlands, where he continued his X-ray research. Báez took leave for a year to work with UNESCO in 1951, and stationed his family in Baghdad to establish the physics department and laboratory at Baghdad University. In 1956, Báez returned to Stanford and began to work with Jerrold R. Zacharias. Together, they worked on the Physics Science Study Committee, which was an effort to reshape the way physics was taught in high schools. Báez made nearly a hundred films on physics from 1967 to 1974 for the Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corp. Báez chaired the Commission on Education of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources from 1979 to 1983.

Retirement After his retirement, Báez occasionally delivered physics lectures and was the president of Vivamos Mejor/USA in 1986. His lectures often included the "importance of the 3 Cs- curiosity, creativity, and compassion." He had three grandchildren and one great-granddaughter. He died of natural causes on March 20, 2007, at age 94 in the Redwood City care home where he had lived for the prior three years. Báez had been divorced from his wife, Joan Bridge Baez, for several years, at the time of his death. According to the singer Joan Baez, speaking at the 2009 Newport Folk Festival, her parents married each other a second time before his death. His obituary in the New York Times states that "his survivors include his wife, Joan Bridge Báez of Woodside, Calif."

Publications

Báez, Albert V. (1967). The New College Physics: A Spiral Approach. W.H. Freeman and Company.