A Pioneer in Physics: Philip J. Wyatt

 

From Florida State Times
February/March 2009
By Bayard Stern
Managing Editor

Philip J. Wyatt

In 1959, when Philip J. Wyatt was a promising young new doctoral student in The Florida State University Department of Physics, he witnessed the installation of its famous EN Tandem Van de Graaff nuclear accelerator. Now, at 76, Wyatt is a highly regarded physicist and a pioneer in the field of laser light scattering and particle size measurement, a technology that turned out to be quite similar to his nuclear physics scattering work at Florida State.

Wyatt’s career has largely been dedicated to developing the methods and instruments used to decipher  the unknown physical properties of molecules that make up, well, just about everything. Some of his early support came from a company that cared deeply about its closely guarded ingredients.

"Believe it or not, some of our early funding came from the Coca-Cola Company,” Wyatt said. “I sent a paper into the Applied Optics journal concerning a comparison of the scattering properties of various cola drinks. They were very interested to see if we were discovering their secret formula.”

Wyatt’s productive career and innovative research was recently highlighted when he was awarded the 2009 Prize for Industrial Application of Physics by the American Physical Society. The prestigious honor was established to recognize excellence in the industrial application of physics and came with a $10,000 award. His citation read, “For pioneering developments in the physics of the inverse scattering problem: new applications of laser light scattering and the successful sustained commercialization of new related analytical methods and instrumentation.”

“Essentially, we want to measure how light scatters from some unknown object,” Wyatt said about his specialty. “Trying to determine the physical properties of that object, just from scattered information alone, is called the “inverse scattering problem” — the solution of which we hope to deduce. This ability has tremendous applications in many different fields.”

Before coming to Florida State and earning a doctoral degree in physics, Wyatt earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, a master’s Degree from the University of Illinois, and studied at the University of Cambridge.

Wyatt remembers Florida State’s first three students to earn doctorates in physics: Kiuck Lee, Prakash Sood and N.V.V.J. Swamy. Wyatt became the fourth. All were students of notable Florida State physicist Alex E.S. Green.

“During Green’s 1958 sabbatical at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he arranged for me to spend six months there to use its supercomputer for my thesis research,” Wyatt said.

Wyatt said two other professors he interacted with while at Florida State also were an important part of his education.

“It was a young, rapidly growing physics department,” he said. “It was an exciting time, and I had some great professors, including Mike Kasha (Distinguished University Research Professor, Molecular Biophysics) and Ray Sheline (Professor Emeritus, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry). They were a very wonderful and famous group. We also started the Florida State Chapter of Sigma Pi Sigma, a physics honorary society.”

Wyatt founded his company, Wyatt Technology Inc., 26 years ago and is its chief executive officer. It develops, manufactures and sells analytical instruments that are described as  absolute light-scattering spectrometers. In 2008, his company was voted one of the best places to work for scientists by ” the journals The Scientist and Chemical and Engineering News.

“You can bring your dog to work,”  he said. “We cannot be successful in fulfilling our commitment to our customers unless our staff is fully supportive of one another. It’s a very interesting company, and I’m having a ball.” 

Wyatt’s two sons have followed him into the business, and now they help lead it. Geofrey Wyatt is the president of the company and Clifford Wyatt is the executive vice president.

“Our instruments are used in 53 countries around the world,” Philip Wyatt said from Santa Barbara, Calif., where the company is based. “At present, many of our customers are in the biotechnology, chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical and government arenas. Of course, many academic institutions use them,  including FSU’s Department of  Chemistry and Biochemistry.”

Wyatt has written more than 50 published articles, co-written three textbooks, and was a finalist for the nation’s first Apollo scientist-astronaut selection program in 1965. As a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, he has had more than 30 foreign and domestic patents issued relating to laser light scattering. He is a registered patent agent before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and is a member of the executive committee of the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics of the American Physical Society.

“My sons asked me when I’m going to retire,” Wyatt said. “I said maybe when I’m 95.”