David Mark RITSON né RITTENBERG

1924 - 2019  (94 years)

• Name	David Mark RITSON né RITTENBERG
  Birth	10 Nov 1924	Hampstead RD   [1, 2]
  Gender	Male
  _UID	D042E9EC04404E92911B80F925FE21E75B8F
  Death	4 Nov 2019	Stanford, Santa Clara, California, USA   [3]
  Notes	David's surname appears on the birth registration as RITTENBERG and his mother's maiden name as MINTER. David Ritson made a number of crossings between the UK and America in the early 1950s including the following, found at ancestry.com. - left Southampton on 24 June 1950 on the Queen Elizabeth, arrived New York on 29 June 1950. At that time David was 25, a scientist and his address was 5 Merrion Square, Eire. - left New York on 1 July 1952 on the Queen Elizabeth, arrived Southampton 6 July 1952. David now 28, a scientist whose address was 77 Hillfield Crt, London NW3 - left Southampton on 3 September 1954 for New York on the Liberté, David, 29, Caterina, 27, Marc, 2 and Francesca, 1, all of 38 Pierce Rd, Watertown, Massachusetts. The children were both born in New York. David M RITSON, passport no. C 126961, was admiited to the USA on 28 August 1961 having flown in to Boston from London. He gave his address as Weston Rd, S Lincoln, Mass. U.S., Naturalization Record Indexes, 1791-1992 (Indexed in World Archives Project): naturalized as a US citizen on 12 December 1961. Obituary copied from https://cerncourier.com: David Mark Ritson, professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University, died peacefully at home on 4 November 2019 [according to the obituary at legacy.com, he died on 25 October], just shy of his 95th birthday. He was the last of the leaders of the original seven physics groups formed at SLAC: four of the other leaders were awarded Nobel prizes in physics. Dave Ritson was born in London and grew up in Hampstead. His ancestors emigrated from Australia, Germany and Lithuania, and his father, a Cambridge alumnus, wrote Helpful Information and Guidance for Every Refugee, distributed in the 1930s and 1940s. Dave won scholarships to Merchant Taylors' School and to Christ Church, Oxford. His 1948 PhD work included deploying the first high-sensitivity emulsion at the Jungfraujoch research station, and then developing it. Within the data were two particle-physics icons: the whole p ? µ ? e sequence, and t-meson decay. Dave moved to the Dublin IAS, to Rochester and to MIT, doing experiments which helped prove that the s-quark exists. His results were among many that underpinned the "t– ? puzzle", solved by the discovery of parity violation in beta and muon decay. Dave also assisted accelerator physicist Ken Robinson with the proof that stable storage of an electron beam in a synchrotron was possible. In 1961 he and Ferdinando Amman published the equation for disruption caused by colliding e+e– beams. "Low beta" collider interaction regions are based on the Amman– Ritson equation. Dave edited the book Techniques of High Energy Physics, published in 1961, and then took a faculty position in the Stanford physics department – bringing British acuity and economy to the ambitious SLAC team. Between 1964 and 1969, he and Burt Richter submitted four proposals to the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) for an e+e– collider, all of which were rejected. Dave designed the 1.6 GeV spectro-meter in End Station A to detect proton recoils, which were used to reconstruct "missing mass" and to measure the photoproduction of hard-to-detect bosons. After 1969 Dave founded Fermilab E-96, the Single Arm Spectrometer Facility, and obtained contributions from many institutions, including Argonne, CERN, Cornell, INFN Bari, MIT and SLAC. It was unusual for accelerator labs to support the fabrication of experiments at other lab's facilities. Meanwhile, SLAC found internal funding for the SPEAR e+e– collider, a stripped-down version of the last proposal rejected by the AEC and led by Richter, driving the epic 1974 c-quark discovery. Dave returned to SLAC and in 1976 led the formation of the MAC collaboration for SLAC's new PEP e+e– collider. The MAC design of near-hermetic calorimetry with central and toroidal outer spectrometers is now classic. Bill Ford from Colorado used MAC to first observe the long b-quark lifetime. In 1983 Dave led the close-in tracker (vertex detector) project with the first layer only 4.6 cm from the e+e– beams, and verified the long b-quark life with reduced errors. He formally retired in 1987 but was active until 2003 in accelerator design at SLAC, CERN, Fermilab and for the SSC. He helped guide the SLC beams through their non-planar path into collision, and wrote several articles for Nature. He also contributed to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dave was intensely devoted to his wife Edda, from Marsala, Sicily, who died in 2004, and is survived by their five children. Harry Nelson University of California at Santa Barbara. Obituary copied from legacy.com: David Mark Ritson passed away peacefully in the comfort of his home, surrounded by loving family members, on October 25, 2019. David passed a few weeks before his 95th birthday. David was a member of the Stanford Campus community for 56 years, where he raised five children with the help of his beloved wife, Edda. David was born on November 10, 1924 in London, England. He studied classical languages at Merchant Taylor's Boarding School and then chemistry at Oxford. He received a PhD in Physics with work at Oxford and Bristol University. This early collaboration of universities was one of the starting places for modern particle physics. He became a professor at Rochester University (USA), where he met his wife Edda on a blind date in New York. They married. David and Edda moved to Massachusetts where David taught at MIT. In 1961, David accepted a position at Stanford University in the Physics department teaching and continued state of the art particle breaking work in high-energy physics. David worked both as a senior educator for Stanford and as a researcher at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, (SLAC), and at the other major particle accelerator centers. David's brilliant mind guided many physics student to careers and contributed to the discovery of sub-atomic particles and the most fundamental interactions of sub-atomic-particles. David and Edda enjoyed the opportunities to live and travel widely. He took his family on two sabbaticals to Italy and England, providing them with wonderful educational and enjoyment opportunities. David and Edda loved art, music, finding scenic spots and pleasant restaurants to enjoy. After retiring from physics, David used his analytical skills to help make sense of global warming data and wrote multiple articles on the subject. David was a very loving father for his children, a very devoted husband, and an inspiration to all that knew him. David is survived by his daughter Francesca, sons Peter, Matt, Vincent, and Marc, seven grand children, and one great grandson. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Filoli, Bay Area Open Spaces, or the Avenidas Senior Center. A memorial service will be held on Dec. 28, 2019 at 3 PM at David's home, 756 Santa Ynez, Stanford. All are welcome to attend and recount remembrances of David.
  Person ID	I14	Adoption
  Last Modified	3 Apr 2025

  
  

  Father	Max Mark Lion RITSON né RITTENBERG,   b. 18 Apr 1880, Moore Park, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia d. 15 Jan 1963, London NW3 (Age 82 years)
  Mother	Daisy Caroline Minter née MAINZER,   b. 9 Jan 1892, Acton, Middlesex d. 13 Feb 1987, London NW3 (Age 95 years)
  Family ID	F5	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Caterina Edda MARTINEZ,   b. 10 Apr 1927, Marsal, Trepani, Sicilia, Italy d. 6 Aug 2004, Stanford, Santa Clara, California, USA (Age 77 years)
  Marriage	3 Mar 1951	Queens, New York, New York, USA   [4]
  Children	1. Marc RITSON   2. Francesca RITSON   3. Peter RITSON   4. Matt RITSON   5. Vincent RITSON
  Family ID	F18	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	3 Apr 2025

  
  

• Sources

  [S3] BMD index, Q4 1924 Hampstead 1a/834. (Reliability: 3). [S19] U.S., Naturalization Record Indexes, 1791-1992 (Indexed in World Archives Project) at ancestry.com. [S20] Obituary at https://cerncourier.com. [S22] New York, New York, U.S., Marriage License Indexes, 1907-2018 at ancestry.com.