Joel Primack, Physicist Who Helped Explain the Cosmos, Dies at 80

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Joel Primack, Physicist Who Helped Explain the Cosmos, Dies at 80

A professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he was a key contributor to a landmark paper that laid out how the universe came to look like it does today.


Joel Primack in 2021. The paper that he and three colleagues published in Nature in 1984 provided a coherent story of how the universe evolved over billions of years after the Big Bang. Carolyn Lagattuta/UC Santa Cruz

By Kenneth Chang
Jan. 17, 2026

Joel R. Primack, a physicist who helped explain how tiny quantum fluctuations at the birth of the universe led to the formation of galaxies, galactic clusters and even larger structures spanning the cosmos, died on Nov. 13 in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 80. ... The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Nancy Ellen Abrams. ... As a professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Dr. Primack was a key contributor to a landmark paper, published in the journal Nature in 1984, that laid out how the universe came to look like it does today.

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Dr. Primack also played an influential role in the world of science policy. When he was a graduate student at Stanford, his thesis adviser was Sidney Drell, who was continually flying to Washington to make recommendations to President Lyndon B. Johnson on military technology and national security matters.

In an oral history interview with the American Institute of Physics, Dr. Primack recalled: “I would keep asking Sid, ‘How come this stupid Vietnam War is going on? You’re meeting with the president frequently, serving on his science advisory committee. Can’t you tell him how dumb this war is?’” ... He said he did not receive much of an answer — Dr. Drell said the discussions were classified — but Dr. Primack nonetheless was inspired to undertake similar efforts. He and other Stanford students decided to organize workshops on political and social issues, including a course on how the federal government could do a better job of managing science and technology.

One eventual outcome was that the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a group based in Washington, began offering a fellowship for scientists and engineers to advise members of Congress on policy. The program, which began in 1973, continues today. ... That era was one in which scientists were increasingly “open to rethinking their relationship with their larger responsibility for science and society, saying when things were nonsense,” said Frank von Hippel, a theoretical physicist who wrote about science policy with Dr. Primack in the 1970s.

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Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.

[WestMichRad]

1. Scientists were...

… “open to rethinking their relationship with their larger responsibility for science and society, saying when things were nonsense.”
We need much more of this now, please!!

RIP Dr. Joel Primack. Thank you for your vision and vital contributions.