Bernard Vonnegut
From Philosopedia
Vonnegut, Bernard (29 August 1914 - 25 April 1997)
Vonnegut was a physicist, one of two researchers who first figured out how to wring more raindrops from cloud cover for croplands below. He taught atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany. During the 1940s, when his colleague Vincent J. Schaefer found that a tiny grain of dry ice produced millions of ice crystals when dropped into a cloud of water droplets below the freezing point, Vonnegut established that silver iodide got better results in nucleating clouds than did dry ice.
Vonnegut's wife, Lois Bowler Vonnegut, died in 1971. They had five sons.
About his brother, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote,
- There is original virtue as well as original sin. My late brother, Bernard Vonnegut, whom I loved, had original virtue. He was a Ph. D. physical chemist out of M.I.T., famous for discovering that silver-iodide particles can make it snow or rain sometimes. From birth to death, Bernard was merrily appreciative of all the physical universe was doing, and was always generous and amiable, although somewhat absent-minded, no matter what was going on in the human sphere. . . . When he died of cancer at the age of 82 last April, a widower for 25 years with five sons, he had become, arguably, the world’s outstanding theoretician about thunderstorms. And, as I have said, Bernard was kind and reasonable. He was funny, often verging on hilarious, because devising and carrying out experiments was for him so terrifically amusing. It was almost as though, man and boy, he were playing jokes on Mother Nature, putting salt in her sugar bowl, say, to make her reveal a previously unsuspected facet of her personality.
His brother's novel, Cat's Cradle, might have used his working with silver iodide as the inspiration for Ice-Nine.
In 1997 Vonnegut was awarded (posthumously) the Ig Nobel Prize in Meteorology for his report, "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed."
Following Vonnegut’s death from cancer, a private non-religious service was held. Peter, one of his five sons, has confirmed that his father was not a member of any organized faith.
{The New York Times, 27 April 1997; The New York Times Magazine, 4 January 1998; Peter Vonnegut to Warren Allen Smith, 28 Apr 1997}
