Melvin Schwartz, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former Stanford professor who founded his own pioneering Internet company in Silicon Valley, died Monday in Twin Falls, Idaho, after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease. He was 73. Dr. Schwartz earned early fame for his role in designing the arcane experiments and machines that he and his colleagues in theoretical physics needed to explore the subatomic universe of strange particles.
He taught physics at Stanford for 17 years until 1983, when he left to found a Mountain View firm called Digital Pathways, which provided systems for the secure management of data communications. His departure from the university was in part the result of his experiments requiring larger and larger machines, and the bureaucracy and grantsmanship necessary to create them becoming more onerous. His highly successful enterprise was later sold to a succession of even bigger Silicon Valley companies. "Mel was a wonderfully creative experimental physicist with a deep understanding of the theoretical aspects of the subnuclear world," said Sidney D. Drell, the retired deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center who was Dr. Schwartz's close friend and co-worker when Dr. Schwartz was a group leader at the center and a Stanford professor.
Leon Lederman, the former director of Fermilab near Chicago, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988 with Dr. Schwartz and Professor Jack Steinberger of Columbia, said of his colleague: "He was brilliant, a terrific experimenter and a totally passionate guy. The spectacularly successful experiment we designed was his great idea and the forerunner of more major experiments that continue to this day."
Dr. Schwartz, who was born in New York City, became fascinated by physics when he was only 12 and entered the Bronx High School of Science, where many other future Nobel laureates studied. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, he majored in physics under the late I.I. Rabi, another Nobel laureate, and earned his doctorate under Steinberger, who became his close colleague in the work that earned the two of them and Lederman the Nobel Prize. In 1958, Dr. Schwartz joined the Columbia faculty and worked as a full professor of physics until he went to Stanford as a professor in 1966.
It was at Columbia's NEVIS laboratory in Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y., one of the early high-energy atom-smashers, that the three young physicists began studying the nature of neutrinos, ghostlike particles with no mass that have intrigued scientists for many decades. Later, using the higher energy of the synchrotron accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., the three conducted experiments with the neutrino beam Dr. Schwartz devised, and their work -- as the Nobel committee later said -- "led to discoveries that opened entirely new opportunities for research into the innermost structure and dynamics of matter."
Dr. Schwartz did not completely cut his ties with Stanford after leaving the faculty, but remained a consulting professor there until 1991, when he returned to Columbia as a professor and associate director for high-energy and nuclear physics at Brookhaven, N.Y.
After retirement in 1997, Dr. Schwartz moved with his family to Ketchum, Idaho, and lived there until his final illness overtook him and he entered a nursing home in Twin Falls. Survivors include his wife, Marilyn; a son, David, of New York; two daughters, Diana of Chicago and Betty of San Francisco; and six grandchildren.
Having been born in 1932, at the peak of the great depression, I grew up in difficult times. My parents worked extraordinarily hard to give us economic stability but at the same time they managed to instill in me two qualities which became the foundation of my personal and professional life. One is an unbounded sense of optimism; the other is a strong feeling as to the importance of using one's mind for the betterment of mankind.