Horace Richard Crane (November 4, 1907 – April 19, 2007) was an American physicist, the inventor of the Race Track Synchrotron, a recipient of President Ronald Reagan's National Medal of Science for the first measurement of the magnetic moment and spin of free electrons and positrons.
When I was a boy in Turlock, California (around 1920) I started taking violin lessons from a Hungarian named Anton Ruby. He was the organist at the local movie theater. In those days the silent movies were accompanied by piano or organ music.
While I was a student at Cal Tech working on my PhD in nuclear physics in the early 1930’s, I studied under many well-known scientists including Robert Millikan (Nobel Prize in 1923 for his study of the elementary electronic charge and the photoelectric effect); and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, in the early days, taught us the theoretical implications of the results of our research projects.
Those of us who lived in the Faculty Club at the Athenaeum took our meals there in the dining room. At lunch-time one of the things everyone did was sit with other people and move around. One of the people I had lunch with as a graduate student on occasion was Edwin Hubble. Another would have been Albert Einstein, and most of the other visiting and resident professors.
Look Magazine photographer Stanley Kubrick, took this picture of University of Michigan physicist Horace Richard Crane (November 4, 1907 – April 19, 2007) on February 14,1949. Crane was the first to measure the magnetic moment of free electrons and the inventor of the Race Track Synchrotron (a particle accelerator).
An extraordinary physicist with relentless curiosity and quiet intensity, H. Richard crane contributed actively to science, first at Caltech for five years as a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, and for the next 70 years at the University of Michigan. this is his story. - Jens Zorn
A first-person account is given of the serendipitious route leading to the most accurate measurement of the gyromagnetic raio or g-factor of the electron at the University of Miochigan in the early 1950’s. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan awarded Crane the National Medal of Science for this work.