Obituaries
Andrew Lange
1957 – 2010
Andrew Lange, the Goldberger Professor of Physics at Caltech, passed away on January 22, 2010. He was 52.
Lange had been at Caltech since 1993. He graduated from Princeton University with his BA in 1980 and received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1987. He first came to the Institute as a visiting associate in 1993–94, was appointed a full professor in 1994, and was named the Goldberger Professor in 2001. In 2006 he was named a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and in 2008 was appointed chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. He had recently resigned from his chairmanship of the division.
The principal focus of Lange’s research was the cosmic microwave background, or CMB—the afterglow from the Big Bang that fills the entire universe. He developed a new generation of radio-frequency detectors that he employed as the leader of a string of experiments to study the CMB. He is perhaps best known for coleading the BOOMERanG (Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics) experiment. BOOMERanG was the first experiment to map the CMB in fine enough detail to show that the universe is flat, meaning that space is neither closed, like the surface of a sphere, nor open, like a hyperbolic saddle. The data also measured the abundance of the dark matter known to hold galaxies together, and supported previous measurements that suggest that the universe’s expansion is proceeding at an ever-increasing rate, implying either a violation of Einstein’s general relativity or that the universe is filled with “dark energy,” some exotic, unknown repulsive force. BOOMERanG also confirmed the predictions of the inflationary theory, which aims to explain the very earliest fraction of a nanosecond after the Big Bang.
Lange’s subsequent work improved upon these measurements and attempted to detect gravitational waves by their effect on the CMB.
Lange was also one of the leaders of the recently launched Planck satellite, a collaboration between U.S. and European scientists designed to image the CMB with unprecedented precision.
Lange was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Physical Society. Lange and Saul Perlmutter (from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) were jointly named the 2003 California Scientist of the Year for their seminal contributions to cosmology. Lange shared the 2006 Balzan Prize for Observational Astronomy and Astrophysics with Paolo de Bernardis (of the University of Rome), his BOOMERanG coleader. The two shared the 2009 Dan David Prize with Paul Richards, a coleader of the parallel MAXIMA experiment.
He is survived by three sons, ages 12, 14, and 20; his sister, Karen; his brother, Adam; and his parents, Joan and Alfred. A memorial service is being planned.
