Hartland Snyder

Hartland Sweet Snyder (1913, Salt Lake City – 1962) was an American physicist[1] who, together with Robert Oppenheimer, showed how large stars would collapse to form black holes.[2] This work modeled the gravitational collapse of a pressure-free homogeneous fluid sphere and found that it would unable to communicate with the rest of the universe.[3] This discovery was depicted in the movie Oppenheimer, where Snyder was portrayed by actor Rory Keane.[4] Historian of physics David C. Cassidy assessed that this prediction of black holes might have won a Nobel Prize in Physics had the authors been alive in the 1990s when evidence was available.[5]

Some publications Snyder authored together with Ernest Courant[6] laid the foundations for the field of accelerator physics. In particular, Snyder with Courant and Milton Stanley Livingston developed the principle of strong focusing that made modern particle accelerators possible. The Courant–Snyder parameters, a method of characterizing the distribution of particles in a beam, were an important part of that contribution.[7]

In 1954, Snyder bet against Maurice Goldhaber that antiprotons existed, and won.[8]