Thanks to Sidney Millman, passenger planes don’t crash into each other, doctors can determine just what you did to your knee without operating, and you can warm up a frozen pizza in three minutes.
But you’d never hear it from him.
Millman, a quiet and self-effacing physicist whose work contributed to the invention of radar, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and the microwave oven, died Saturday, Nov. 11 at Danville’s Reutlinger Community for Jewish Living, where he resided. He was 102.
Millman’s scientific papers list his birth year as 1908 but his son, Michael, said Sidney Millman was at least three or four years older than that. He was probably born around Oct. 15, 1904 in David-Gorodok, Russia.
After his parents died in the early 1920s, Millman’s siblings urged him to join them in America to escape rampant anti-Semitism. Since it was far easier for orphans under age 15 to gain entry to the United States, they simply rolled back his birthday (actually, no one is quite sure exactly when Millman was born, only that it was right around Yom Kippur).
He attended New York public schools, Brooklyn College and the City College of New York (where the physics department still awards the Sidney Millman prize annually). As a doctoral student at Columbia University, he worked in the laboratory of professor I.I. Rabi, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1944.
Rabi and his disciples, including Millman, are credited with creating a renaissance of American physics and snatching the mantle of innovation away from their European colleagues. Even among his brilliant peers, Millman was known for his voracious intellectual curiosity.
“He left the labs one night at Columbia stuck on something and was taking the subway home and suddenly he had this idea of what the explanation was for an anomaly on a resonance curve,” recalled son Michael.
“The next day he said, ‘Fire up the ovens and reverse the polarity of the magnetic fields and see if the anomaly shifts.’ And it did. He would walk around thinking about puzzles and problems and figure them out. He loved to solve problems. He got a kick out of it.”
Millman’s wartime research at Columbia helped to develop the radar. His work as a doctoral student and, later, at New Jersey’s Bell Laboratories on nuclear magnetic resonance also reaped significant commercial benefits.
Millman worked at Bell Labs — where he believed he was the first Jew given a significant technical position — for nearly 30 years, advancing to the position of executive director of research, physics and university relations (where he played a part in hiring top doctoral students).
In a way, he still does his part in churning out top scientific talent, as he endowed a scholarship at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa later in his life.
Millman and his wife, Dorothy, moved to Reutlinger in 1993 in part to be closer to Michael, an Oakland lawyer, and several of their three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
The couple gave around $200,000 to the Contra Costa Jewish Community Center’s Alzheimer’s day care program, which is now known as the Dorothy and Sidney Millman Alzheimer’s Respite Center.
Thanks in large part to the Millmans’ donation, the program expanded from a couple days a week to five, serving 20 seniors a day.
“He was a remarkable man, very humble, and you’d never hear him speak of his accomplishments, which were many,” said Lillian Roselin, former director of the Millman Center.
Millman would rather talk about opera or how proud he was of Dorothy’s work on behalf of Alzheimer’s patients.
“He was very kind and had a wonderful sense of humor. He was the kind of person who touched your life, and you don’t exactly know why, but you know your life was better for it,” Roselin said.
She never saw Sidney apart from Dorothy; the couple was married for 74 years and was “what I would describe as inseparable.”
Sidney Millman was buried Tuesday, Nov. 14 at Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge, N.J.