Medford Webster

Medford Sherman Webster

Born January 17, 1932, in Marilla, NY. Died May 12, 2022, at the age of 90, in Highlands Ranch, CO

He was preceded in death by Lillie Mae George Webster (mother), Samuel Willis Webster (father), June Marjorie Webster (sister), Ann Chandler Scott Webster (spouse). He is survived by 3 daughters: F. Amelia Webster (Jeff Emanuel, CO), Sarah A. Winters (Jacky Winters, TN), L. Amanda Webster (Amjad Al-Jundub, IN), 7 grandchildren - Muhammad, Israh, Emily, Somayah, Ian, Merriam and Abdulrahman - and 2 great grandchildren – Layla and Sami.

Raised in a rural farming community outside Buffalo, NY, Medford was the first in his family to attend college, graduating from Union College in Schenectady, NY in 1953 with a BS in Physics. His senior project was searching for millisecond bursts of cosmic rays to explore the possibility that some micrometeorites might be composed of antimatter. He earned his PhD in Physics from Washington University in St. Louis, MO in 1959, holding a General Electric Fellowship and working at Berthoud Pass in Colorado to acquire chamber data for his thesis on strange particle production in cosmic ray interactions. He met Ann Chandler Scott while she was studying for her Master of Arts in Music (Voice) at Washington University. They married on August 15, 1959, at the Little Church Around the Corner in Manhattan, NY. They settled in Patchogue, NY on Long Island and had 3 daughters.

Medford’s academic and professional accomplishments included a National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship at MIT (1959-1961) and an Asst. Physicist position at Brookhaven National Laboratory (1961-1963). In 1963, the 80-inch bubble chamber at Brookhaven was the largest particle detector of its type in the world. Medford was part of the team of physicists who made its most famous discovery, that of the Omega-minus particle.  This discovery led to the concept of "quarks" as the constituents of hadrons.

In August of 1967, Medford packed up his family and left Long Island for Nashville, TN where he would spend the next 39 years at Vanderbilt University. From 1967-2006 he was a Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt and was Chairman of the Physics and Astronomy Department from 1976-1979. During his time there, he developed a measuring and scanning laboratory for Bubble Chamber Film on the Vanderbilt campus. He was also able to continue with research while giving his family once-in-a-lifetime experiences during sabbaticals in Munich, Germany (1974-1975 as a Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute) and in Ferney Voltaire, France (1979-1980 as a CERN Fellow in Geneva, Switzerland). In 1980, the collaborative efforts of his and fellow physicists at the Max Planck Group were published in an article in Nature, describing their investigation of particle lifetimes in the HYBUC bubble chamber. His early interest in cosmic rays then led him to Hawaii and the DUMAND effort to develop an array of water Cerenkov detectors in the deep Pacific Ocean to search for ultra-high energy, extraterrestrial neutrinos.

He retired from formal academia in 2006 but remained a life-long learner and teacher, always anxious to study new topics, always doing his work unassumingly – a model for any scientist in the field. This was demonstrated by his passionate participation in the Quarknet project in which he worked with local high school faculty and their students on projects studying cosmic rays and particle physics on Mount Mitchell.

Medford adored the outdoors and dreamt of returning to the mountains of CO where he’d done his post-doctorate work and owning Morgan horses. Although he never became a rancher, he visited “his mountains” many times through the years and he and his daughter, Amelia even bought a piece of property where Morgan horses were boarded!  In 2018, after 51 years in Nashville, all spent in the same home where he’d raised all 3 of his children, he moved to Denver, where he could see the Rockies with their often-snow-covered peaks from his window.

Medford was passionate about giving and donated regularly to numerous charitable organizations and academic institutions, often in the form of tuition for a grandchild. And though he claimed to be tone-deaf, he had an unwavering love for music, opera in particular, Wagner’s RING cycle being his favorite.

The list of things we will miss about Medford is long and includes his steadfast support of family, his calm demeanor and patience in all things, his sense of humor that lay quietly beneath his reserved expression, and his intellectual capacity which made almost every conversation meaningful and memorable. We will miss having to let him know that we arrived home safely, despite our ages and years of driving experience. We will miss the unique and often previously untold stories he shared privately on our birthdays, always surprising us with his amazingly detailed memory. His undying love for Ann, who passed away in 1996, was beautiful and inspiring. He was thoroughly selfless, forever putting others’ needs before his, as evidenced by his final donation – that of his brain to the Memory and Aging Study at Vanderbilt.

We are thankful for his time with us, but greedily and selfishly wish for more. Beautiful memories of him in our lives will be long-lasting and plentiful.  A small, private, family observance will occur in early June and then a celebration of life gathering Thanksgiving  weekend when his ashes are placed next to Ann's in Nashville. Should you wish to commemorate his life, we're sure he would appreciate a donation to the New York Metropolitan Opera, Friends of Radnor Lake, or to any higher learning institution, particularly for education or research in physics.