Did Not Realize That Sean Twomey Had Passed Away

Finally stumbled across a blog comment from Bob Rabinoff (lost in the blog spam) that Dr. Twomey passed away. May well have been the smartest man I ever met. A true inspiration!

There is an on-line guestbook (valid till 11/04/2013) on legacy.com:

TWOMEY, SEAN ANDREW Dr. Sean Andrew Twomey of Tucson, Arizona and San Diego, California has passed away following a brief illness in Tucson. Born in Cork, Ireland in 1927, Dr. Twomey graduated from University College Cork in 1948 with a Master of Science degree and was awarded a Doctorate degree in Physics by the National University of Ireland in 1955. He accepted a position with CSIRO in Australia, where his research and papers rapidly established his reputation as one of the world's preeminent atmospheric physicists. During his move to Australia, he met the love of his life, Marie McInerney, on the deck of an ocean liner making its way across the Indian Ocean. In the late 1950s, Dr. Twomey joined a team of researchers and physicists developing a payload for the Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard project. Shortly thereafter he was hired as a research scientist at NRL, and he relocated his family to Oxen Hill, Md. While there, he played a crucial role in the development of weather satellites launched by NASA and other research institutions around the world. In 1962, a tragic car accident claimed the life of Dr. Twomey's son, Patrick, and resulted in his hospitalization for over a month as he battled life-threatening injuries. In 1967, Dr. Twomey returned to CSIRO, and the family relocated to Sydney, Australia. In 1974 Dr. Twomey published a paper (Pollution and the Planetary Albedo) that significantly changed the understanding of the impact of pollution on the climate and was a precursor to the scientific community's concern for global climate change. In 1976, Dr. Twomey accepted a research professorship at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he moved with his family. Dr. Twomey's passions were physics, mathematics, and horse racing. He enjoyed tennis, sailing, horseback riding, public transportation, and classical music. He was preceded in death by his father Tadhg O'Tuama and his mother Lil(Walsh), his wife of 56 years, Marie, and his son Patrick. He is survived by his brother Fergus (Dublin, Ireland), sister Ide (Dublin, Ireland), daughter Adele (Geelong, Australia) , sons Timothy (Cobb, CA), Kieran (San Diego, CA) and Damian (Tucson, AZ), and grandchildren Kenneth (Long Beach, CA), Bridgid (Santa Barbara, CA), Linda (Geelong, Australia), and Sofia (Cobb, CA). A memorial service will be on Wednesday the 21st of November at 3 p.m., in the winner's circle at Del Mar Race Track. low.

Published in San Diego Union-Tribune on November 18, 2012

Dr. Twomey was always an inspiration - the smartest man I ever knew. I helped him grade freshman meteorology exams, and found myself surprised that what he thought simple often befuddled poor grad student me.

I suspect that Dr. Twomey often thought with images as much as did with text or equations. His most-famous work regarding planetary albedo started with an examination of fax copies of weather satellite pictures showing ship tracks in the stratus cloud deck often found southwest of San Diego. What caused these tracks, and what did it portend for climate?

Dr. Twomey was always approachable. When I had a question he would mull it over for a second, gesture towards the library, and reply "Have you looked in the big black book?" (meaning Pruppacher & Klett), or sometimes the "big red book" (meaning Abramowtiz & Stegun), or "the big book" (meaning Gradshteyn & Rhyzik). An extraordinary man.

After class, he would sometimes repair to the bar, often in the company of E. Philip Krider and adoring graduate students, to discuss (and eventually publish about) the rate at which bubbles in the beer rose to the frothy surface.

I remember he once told the story of how he was working alone on a weekend on some problematic equipment that had, in the recent past, generated small electrical shocks, when suddenly he received a very powerful shock. He stood back in surprise, and realized he had stopped breathing. Alone, and before he lost consciousness, he methodically taught himself how to breathe again.

I remember him discussing how he was roped into a panel concerning the complete failure of one of the early U.S. Explorer satellites. The expensive multi-million-dollar satellite had gone wildly out-of-control just as soon as it was released from its rocket booster. NASA demanded to know why.

The book-shaped satellite was to achieve stability by rotating about one of its three solid-body axes: in this case, not its longest axis, or its shortest, but the in-between one. Dr. Twomey, and several other physicists on the panel, immediately grasped the problem. Every undergraduate physics education includes a discussion of rigid-body rotation as part of its mechanics curriculum, and every student must demonstrate that rotation about the second axis of a book-shaped object is inherently unstable. Only rotation around the longest and shortest axes is stable. The engineers who designed the satellite had apparently never received this education, or forgot it, because they missed this glaring design flaw in their satellite. So, after about a ten-minute forehead-slapping session, the panel was able to adjourn with its conclusion.

Dr. Twomey didn't always interface well with some of the early PC technology. He was too impatient with floppy disk drives, that were being used for the new system to download data from the Mt. Lemmon Observatory to Tucson. He opened the disk drives prematurely, to the exasperation of the computer support people. But he understood technology, and science, better than just about anyone.

I think Dr. Twomey had trouble adjusting to campus politics in the late 80's. National Science Foundation shifted its funding priorities to emphasize climate change, and in a fair world Dr. Twomey's program stood to benefit. Nevertheless, the University instead chose to try to emphasize the burgeoning field of numerical climate forecasting rather than prioritize its funding for its deserving but underfunded home-grown aerosol research program. Like other decisions the University administration had a hand in, like entering the high-prestige competition for the Superconducting Super Collider, this eventually proved to be a bad decision. Aerosol behavior is crucial to understanding climate change, and the University could have gotten a head start had it only understood. Alas, it was getting harder and harder for simple but gifted physicists to gain funding. Increasingly, only entrepreneurial scientific politicos got the bucks, to science's and society's loss.

Dr. Twomey came along at the right time, after World War II, when science itself was most-prized. We live in a darker age now, but an age that is still lit by his example, and the example of other pure scientists.