My mother saw an obituary for a former Vanderbilt physics professor in a Tennessee newspaper this morning. She contacted me with the news that my undergraduate mentor, Charles Brau, had died. In fact, he died on the 7th of June (the image below comes from his obituary, found here).
When I learned of Charlie's passing, I was in the middle of preparing to go to Seattle. FIFA invited me up there to film for its World Cup coverage. After a few minutes of real sadness during which a couple of tears were shed, a joyful thought hit me like a ton of bricks. I was about to be filmed by the governing body of the world's most popular sport for its most important tournament. I was going to talk about some of the wonderful physics behind the beautiful game. And part of the reason I had that terrific opportunity was due to Charlie Brau.
I first met Charlie when the spring semester of 1989 got underway at Vanderbilt University. Sitting in a lecture with my mates during our first year, we were about to embark on a fun semester of introductory physics. I enjoyed the way Charlie talked about Gauss's Law, and I will always remember with delight his use of Alice and Moe while discussing special relativity. Charlie told us that he came from Santa Barbara and was now at Vanderbilt to help them get their Free-Electron Laser (FEL) facility going. I did not realize at the time just how established Charlie was in the field of laser physics.
My final exam in Charlie's class is one I will never forget. I had mononucleosis and felt sick as can be while I took his exam. I went from having the highest grade in the course to a final grade of B+. Higher education was much different 37 years ago. Wet blankets and endless excuses were still locked in Pandora's Box. Charlie did not offer a different day for my final exam, and I did not ask for one. It was bad luck for me to be sick on final exam day, I did my best, and I moved on.
Where I moved on turned out to be quite special. Because I was the first in my family to go to university, I felt out of place at Vanderbilt. I loved my courses, but the students seemed so different from me. Many were from rich families and drove nice cars. I had to live at home while attending Vanderbilt because although my academic scholarship covered my tuition, room and board were not covered. Very little about the world of science was known to me. But I was determined not to work some crappy minimum-wage job during the summer of 1989. I mustered up the courage, walked up to Charlie's office after the semester had ended, and I asked him if he had a job for me. He told me that he was working on a book that concerned free-electron lasers and wondered if I might like to help him create some figures for his book. He offered $5/hour, a good bit more than the $3.35/hour minimum wage at the time. I told him, "YES!"
Where I moved on turned out to be quite special. Because I was the first in my family to go to university, I felt out of place at Vanderbilt. I loved my courses, but the students seemed so different from me. Many were from rich families and drove nice cars. I had to live at home while attending Vanderbilt because although my academic scholarship covered my tuition, room and board were not covered. Very little about the world of science was known to me. But I was determined not to work some crappy minimum-wage job during the summer of 1989. I mustered up the courage, walked up to Charlie's office after the semester had ended, and I asked him if he had a job for me. He told me that he was working on a book that concerned free-electron lasers and wondered if I might like to help him create some figures for his book. He offered $5/hour, a good bit more than the $3.35/hour minimum wage at the time. I told him, "YES!"
I got to know Charlie that summer because for a few weeks, I worked in his office with him. He taught me how to program in Excel, and he went with me to the campus computer store when my computer needed another 512 KB of RAM (can you believe that?!?). One day I asked him who was shaking hands with him in a photo he had on the wall. Charlie said, "That is Deng Xiaoping." Wow. After a trip to the physics library revealed to me that Charlie was co-inventor of the excimer laser, I realized that I was working for a very prestigious physicist. But Charlie never made me feel like I was merely a peon doing grunt work for him, which would not have been an inaccurate description. He was a genuinely nice person and easy to talk to.
When my sophomore year ended in the spring of 1990, I asked Charlie if I could work for him again. He offered an enthusiastic affirmative and had me working two floors underground in Vanderbilt's FEL facility. I was pretty wide-eyed at that time. It was so cool when the modulator arrived, when I could help get wires tied, and when I assisted with laying out the wave guide. I barely had an idea how all of it fit together and worked to create laser light. Lucky for me, Charlie never seemed to tire of my elementary questions.
One day while I was in the lab, Charlie called. He said, "I just got a $10 million grant. Want to go to lunch?" My response was, "That is GREAT! Congratulations! Where do I meet you for lunch?" We had lunch together many times during my undergraduate days. On a few other days, Charlie and I played tennis. All of those informal interactions meant a lot to me. By the time my junior year was about to commence, I began to think I might be able to make my living as a physicist.
I spent ten weeks of the summer between my junior and senior years at North Carolina State University as a research student in atomic theory. When I got back to Nashville, Charlie was kind enough to let me work in the FEL center for a few weeks before the semester got underway. And then Tuesday, 20 August 1991 arrived. I got to work nice and early. Charlie asked that I help him move some books and other items from the physics building to the FEL center. Of course I told him I would help him. We fetched a large cart from the second basement in the FEL center and took the service elevator up so that we could wheel the cart over to the physics building and pick up what Charlie wanted. The bloody elevator door to the main exit would not open. We decided to open the back elevator door, which opened to the loading dock. Unlike the front of the building, which had a ramp we could have wheeled the cart down, the back of the building had only the four-feet-high loading dock. Charlie got down to the ground. I was to help lower the cart from the top. And if that strikes you as a stupid thing to do, it was. I went down with the cart when it fell. I was scratched up pretty good, but I had no idea of the extent of the damage because I never felt what seriously injured me. Charlie said, "Eric, we need to get to the hospital. NOW!" I looked down and saw that my left pinkie finger had been crushed by the cart and was barely attached to my left hand. I saw a lot of blood. I held my crushed digit in my right palm and followed Charlie to Vanderbilt's hospital.
I was very lucky that day. Vanderbilt has one of the world's top hospitals. And one of the world's best hand surgeons was working at Vanderbilt at the time. He was only at the hospital on Tuesdays. Charlie took care of everything once we got inside the hospital. Before I knew it, I was being prepped for surgery. Charlie apologized many times and told me that we should have tried something else. I told him not to worry about it. Had I not fallen, neither of us would have thought of that moment ever again. Life happens. Charlie really endeared himself to my parents who were touched that he stayed with me until they arrived. My left pinkie finger got masterfully repaired after two hours on the operating table, and it remains a goofy finger to this day.
My Vanderbilt graduation day was Friday, 8 May 1992. That was also first light day at the FEL center. Why the same day? Edward Teller was the special guest, and he was a bit controversial in those days. With attention focused on graduation, we could have a first-light event without drawing protesters. Because of Charlie, I met an 83-year-old Edward Teller.
Before moving to Bloomington, Indiana for graduate school, want to guess who I worked for during the summer of 1992? I got to see Vanderbilt's FEL center go from mostly empty building to housing a functioning laser during my undergraduate years. Charlie had already given me a signed copy of his book on free-electron lasers. What he gave me after graduation was a pay raise. I did, after all, have a freshly-minted BS from Vanderbilt in physics and mathematics. It was a fun final summer working with Charlie. He helped me feel like I belonged at the next level when I got to Indiana that fall.
Though I only got back to Nashville a time or two each year after I left, I almost always made a point to drop in on Charlie. In September 1993, Charlie attended the wedding to my first wife. I emailed him a note of congratulations when I learned that he won the FEL Prize in 1996. When I last saw Charlie in person, about 20 years ago, he gave me a copy of his book on electromagnetism. He was hoping that an approach different from the one Jackson took would be popular. I was fortunate enough to have some email back and forth with Charlie in his retirement years.
To conclude this post that honors my undergraduate mentor, I leave a quote from the Acknowledgements section of my PhD thesis. "A special thanks goes out to Professor Charlie Brau of Vanderbilt University. Working with him for four years as an undergraduate gave me a model of a great scientist and a good person."
