John Blewett

John Paul Blewett (12 April 1910, Toronto, Ontario – 7 April 2000, Chapel Hill, North Carolina) was a Canadian-American physicist, known as "a key figure in the development of particle accelerators".

Biography At the University of Toronto, Blewett graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics in 1932 and a master's degree in physics in 1933. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1936. An abridged version of his doctoral dissertation was published in Physical Review. On the 9th of June 1936, he married Myrtle Hildred Hunt, who was also an accelerator physicist. He spent a postdoctoral year at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he worked under the supervision of Ernest Rutherford, Mark Oliphant, and others. Blewett and colleagues at General Electric used McMillan's new synchrotron idea to build a 70-meV synchrotron, which his colleagues completed in 1947. However, shortly before the synchrotron became operational, Blewett and his first wife Hildred Blewett moved in January 1947 from Schenectady to Long Island, where both had jobs at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). When the Blewetts arrived at BNL, security authorities of the Atomic Energy Commission barred them from going to work for six months because of a false guilt-by-association concern raised against John P. Blewett. He married Joan Nelson Warnow on June 8, 1983, in San Francisco. Joan Warnow-Blewett was an archivist for the American Institute of Physics.

Blewett was the coauthor, with M. Stanley Livingston, of Particle Accelerators, published by McGraw-Hill in 1962. In 1970 Blewett became the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Particle Accelerators, published by Gordon & Breach.

He was the deputy chair of BNL's accelerator department until 1973 and then, until he retired in 1978, was a special assistant to the director. In retirement John Blewett participated in creating the proposal for BNL to build the National Synchrotron Light Source. He also was a consultant for Taiwan's National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center. and in 1980 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 1993 he received the Robert R. Wilson Prize from the APS.

Selected publications