Memorial for Virgil E. Barnes, II (1935-2024)

Virgil E. Barnes, II was a Professor of Physics at Purdue for 49 years and a leader in the golden age of subatomic particle discoveries since the 1960s that led to the modern understanding of the building blocks of the Universe.

Born November 2, 1935, in Austin, Texas, Dr. Barnes studied physics at Harvard before completing his PhD in 1962 at the University of Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship. His advisor was the luminary Otto Frisch. Dr. Barnes’s first job was at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, then the center of particle physics research in the United States. In 1964, he was on the team that discovered the Omega Minus particle, a key experiment which confirmed the quark model in high energy Physics and contributed to at least one Nobel Prize.

After joining the faculty at Purdue in 1969, Virgil became a founding member of the groups building particle detectors both at Fermilab near Chicago and at CERN in Europe. He developed techniques (still used around the world) for precisely measuring the energy of particles, key to identifying them and allowing many further discoveries.

In 1995, Dr. Barnes and the team at Fermilab discovered the top quark, completing the discovery of this class of elementary particles, begun 31 years earlier. In 2012, he was also a member of the team that discovered the Higgs Particle, which gives all other particles mass. This was the most important discovery in particle physics of the last few decades.

Dr. Barnes spoke French and German, loved classical music, and collected African and Asian art. He delighted his sons and grandchildren with toys and geometric creations, including a wand to create 20-foot-long bubbles and a dodecahedron version of the Rubik’s Cube. He even built his own harpsichord.