Kenneth William Ford (May 1, 1926 – December 5, 2025) was an American theoretical physicist, teacher, and writer, residing near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the first chair of the physics department at the University of California, Irvine, and later served as president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) and as Executive Director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics.
Early life and education Ford was born on May 1, 1926, in West Palm Beach, Florida, to parents Paul Hammond Ford (1892–1961) and Edith Timblin Ford (1892–1992) and was the second of their three children. He spent most of his childhood in Kentucky, living one year in Georgia when he was eight and nine. He attended Highlands High School in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, from 1940 to 1942, then Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, graduating in 1944. In 1948, he received an A.B. from Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1953, studying under John Archibald Wheeler. During 1950-1952 he interrupted his graduate studies to join the H-bomb design team at Los Alamos National Laboratory (then Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) and at Princeton University's Project Matterhorn.
US Navy In April 1944, just before his 18th birthday, while still at Exeter, Ford enlisted in the US Navy. After summer employment at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Ford was called to active service and began the Navy's Electronic Technician Training. In June 1945, he transferred into the V-12 Navy College Training Program, studying at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In three four-month semesters completed in one year, he was able to secure credit for two years of college work and entered Harvard University as a junior in the fall of 1946 following his discharge from the Navy in June of that year.
Graduate work and the H-bomb In the fall of 1948, Ford began graduate studies in physics at Princeton University. In 1950, he took a leave of absence from graduate work to work on the H-bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory (then called the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) with his mentor John Wheeler. Others in Wheeler's immediate group were John Toll and Burton Freeman. They worked closely with other lab staff members such as Carson Mark, Conrad Longmire, Edward Teller, and Stanislaw Ulam, and with lab consultants such as John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, and Hans Bethe. Following the radiation implosion idea offered by Teller and Ulam early in 1951, the focus of the work was on this new design idea. In June 1951, Ford returned to Princeton to continue the H-bomb work there at Wheeler's Project Matterhorn. Much of Ford's work was concerned with writing programs and doing calculations related to thermonuclear burning, first using human "computers" with desk calculators, then IBM card-programmed calculators (CPCs), and later, with Project Matterhorn, the SEAC computer at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. A SEAC calculation, programmed by Ford with the assistance of John Toll and the guidance of John Wheeler, provided the final predicted yield of 7 megatons for the Mike test on November 1, 1952. The actual yield was approximately 10 megatons.
"I was aware of the fact that Oppenheimer was expressing opposition to the development of the H-bomb, for various reasons, from technical to moral. But I was also an accidental participant in what may have been the critical moment in changing his point of view. In June of '51 there was a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission [actually a broader gathering that included the GAC] meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study. They were meeting in a first floor room on, if I remember correctly, a Sunday morning. Maybe it was a Saturday morning. It was a weekend. [It was Sunday, June 17.] Wheeler was scheduled to make a presentation on the latest results of our calculations on the CPC in New York. I was working every night, all night, that week prior to that meeting trying to get the latest and best results that we could.
"The night prior to this meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study, I took a morning train down from New York with the latest results, went over to the Matterhorn building, got out a very large piece of paper, maybe about two feet by three feet in size, a large rectangle of paper, and sketched out a graph showing our latest calculation of thermonuclear burning, still very crude of course, because of those calculations, yet extremely encouraging. I then rolled up this large graph and drove over to the Institute and walked up to the first-floor window of the room where the meeting was in progress and either rapped gently on the window or signaled through the window to catch Wheeler's attention. As it happened, Wheeler had just taken the floor. It had just become his turn to speak. He interrupted his speech, walked over to the window, opened it, took from me this large graph, carried it back and pasted it on the blackboard for all to see. And then, at that moment, according to the reports of those who were there, Oppenheimer suddenly decided, 'This does look encouraging. I think they've really got something. It looks like it's going to work after all.'"
In the fall of 1952, Ford left project Matterhorn and spent the next six months completing his graduate dissertation on the collective model of the nucleus. After defending his dissertation in the spring of 1953, and after spending that summer working in Los Alamos, he took up a post-doctoral research appointment at Indiana University, beginning that fall. Ford furthered his professional education in two subsequent leaves of absence: in 1955–56 at the Max Planck Institut in Göttingen, Germany, mentored by Werner Heisenberg and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship; and in 1961–62 at Imperial College, London and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mentored by Abdus Salam, Herman Feshbach, and Victor Weisskopf and supported by a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship. It was during this second leave that Ford wrote his first book, The World of Elementary Particles. In 1964, Ford took a job as professor and department chair at the newly opened University of California, Irvine, setting up the physics department there for its opening in the fall of 1965.
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