Erwin Hahn Professor Emeritus of Physics and dedicated educator for more than 70 years, passed away on Tuesday, September 20, 2016. He was 95.
Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania on June 9, 1921, Erwin grew up in Sewickley, being the seventh child of Hungarian/German Jewish immigrants. Hahn received his BS in Chemistry in 1943 from Juniata College and afterwards completed a year of graduate studies in Physics at Purdue University. He continued his studies in Physics at University of Illinois, earning his MS in 1947 and his PhD in 1949.
Prof. Hahn had several interesting possibilities for a career, among them the US Navy, movies, and music. Luckily he decided a career in science in the magnetic resonance and optics area. Prof. Hahn created pulsed NMR sequences with which he discovered the spin echo and the first recording of nuclear free induction decay due to free precession, all of which are of monumental significance to many areas of science. The occurrence of echoes and other time reversal phenomena has important implications in the statistical physics of processes which appear to approach equilibrium, and were the first manifestation of the Loschmidt-Boltzmann Paradox. The prominent use of spin echoes and gradient echoes in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most significant developments in medical diagnostics history.
Read more from Berkeley Physics: https://physics.berkeley.edu/memoriam/memories-professor-erwin-hahn