From Anonymous
Jan. 22, 2023

In 1959 I was a young girl on the Stanford tennis court watching a beautiful athletic man demolishing his opponent when an errant ball from their game rolled up to my feet. I reached down, picked it up, looked up to give it to the figure standing over me…and looked into the bluest eyes I had ever seen. And I was lost to Hans. We became a couple and Hans introduced me as an inexperienced girl into the joy of womanhood and true love. He was ineffably sweet, kind, and gentle to me in this transition and now, over 60 years later as an aging grandmother, I still cherish Hans and the memories of our time together. We parted when I left for Austria to study and when I returned time had changed both of us and we had a literally tearful good-bye to our relationship. We both moved on to different lives and loves and I never saw him again after that rainy afternoon of our final good-bye.

From Joann Heidgerken
May 18, 2020

Hans was important to me as a young woman in Pallo alto in 1959. I met his friend Heinz while traveling and living in Vienna I may be the example of his concern and caring for people less fortunate and his ability to care and reach out He was always kind and I shall remember his memory always

From Dana Morawitz
Feb. 4, 2019

Here is a link to Hans's Memorial Service at Ladera Community Church on February 4th, 2018. https://vimeo.com/album/5598235 You will find a slideshow of his life, as well as a recording of the entire Memorial service. Thank you so much for joining us for a special day of remembrance! If we missed you there, I hope you will enjoy some of these memories. He is loved, and his life will continue to be celebrated each and every day!

From Dana Morawitz
Dec. 3, 2018

Below is a link to Hans's Memorial Service at Ladera Community Church on February 4th, 2018. It contains the slideshow, as well as the entire Memorial service. Thank you so much for joining us for a special day of remembrance! If we missed you there, I hope you will enjoy some of these memories. He is loved, and his life will continue to be celebrated each and every day!

From Paul Grant
Feb. 3, 2018

It’s early Fall, 1965. My wife Joan and I had just arrived in San Jose, I having been assigned by the IBM Research Division to the staff of its tiny lab just off Cottle Road, on the site of the company’s multi-acre “disk drive” manufacturing facility (at the time not the toys today in your PC, but 16 inch diameter monsters on corporate plant floors). I had recently received my PhD in Physics from a former divinity school in East Massachusetts…I think it’s called Harvard. I attended Harvard as an employee of IBM and was targeted to join the main research facility in Yorktown. But I’m a skier, and was tired of New York/New England ice and bare slopes, and fantasized descending the trails surrounding Lake Tahoe. But this remembrance is not about me. At lunch my first week or two at the San Jose site, a new fellow staff member come over and sat with me. He had a strange accent…weird…which turned out to be Austrian (I think!). His name was Hans Morawitz. We bonded almost immediately. Hans and I shared two life skills…as skiers and soccer players. Oh. And we were also both physicists, but he was a “pencil and paper” theorist, and I a spectroscopy experimentalist and computational modeler. But it was on flat fields and downhill slopes where we bonded…and maybe a little bit on a tennis court. Our collaboration as physicists took another decade to cement. Hans was the captain and organizer of our IBM Research soccer team, which competed against those of other divisions on the San Jose plant site, and occasionally those of other companies located in Santa Clara County. The team would “practice” over lunch on the San Jose plant recreation facility field. Hans was always center-half, and I played left-outside, my high school position, and occasionally left-full. Our team always did quite well. We had an advantage. The research lab had a postdoc program whereby an IBM company abroad would sponsor two-year visits of new PhD graduates from the UK and Europe. Naturally, several were excellent soccer players, and Hans and I would “steal” employee identities from our San Jose colleagues and re-assign to them so they could play on our team! In one practice session in the late 70’s, I had my right leg broken, and Hans helped take me off the field, called an ambulance and had my wife Joan take me to the hospital. I healed reasonably quickly, and was able to resume play about three months later, but Hans assigned me to the goal…which I hated but nonetheless tolerated for the peace of the team! Now on to skiing. Hans and I had both been skiers essentially from birth. The winter following my arrival in 1965, I joined the ski patrol at Alpine Meadows. As such, I had the privilege to invite one or two guests to accompany me on the slopes, and, of course, Hans would be often number one. We would often descend the Ward Peak trails at Alpine together with several of our less accomplished IBM colleagues? (unnamed). And then there were the stopovers in Alta returning from those occasions whenever the annual APS March Meeting was held east of the Rockies. Especially memorable were our experiences on the Swiss slopes during conferences held near Interlaken and Lausanne. Our Swiss, Italian, German, French and Norwegian colleagues were always taken back by my skills on the slopes (as an American!). I would respond I was taught to ski by Hans…their response would sort of like…”OK, now we understand!” Tennis. Enough said. Hans was the best tennis player on the San Jose plant site. He did teach me how to play “doubles defense.” Very useful later helping my daughter Sandra and I winning a Watson Trophy in an IBM San Jose mixed doubles tournament sometime in the 1980s. Personal. The decade of the 1980s was a period of “difficulty” for me in social relationships and family life. Hans comforted me and advised me throughout and helped me eventually emerge healed. Many such “consultations” took place in local bars throughout the USA and Europe. A story to be told at a later time in my memoirs. OK. Back to Science. In the late 70s and early 80s, Hans, even though a “pencil and paper” theoretician, took the lead in organizing our collaboration with the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) utilizing XANES (x-ray-absorption near-edge structure) to study the cation-anion charge distribution in organic conductors and superconductors which were the rage in solid state physics of the time, which had a significant impact on focusing research on these compounds worldwide. It’s now 1986, and our colleagues at IBM Zurich discovered materials superconducting above the temperature of liquid air, an outstanding event that took the world of science at the time by storm. At Almaden, we followed up with our own program. Hans would hang out in my lab annoying the team with questions…what’s causing superconductivity at such high temperatures? And that question remains unanswered even today. However, in late 1987, Hans, collaborating with Vlad Kresin of LBNL, postulated a possibility…a combination of “plasmons and phonons.” Suppose history proves them right? What a legacy to leave humanity! What follows is a brief anthology of publications coauthored by Hans and myself and our colleagues at IBM Almaden. Simply copy and paste the URLs into your favorite browser. Publications: • http://w2agz.com/Publications/Science%20&%20Technology/IBM/31%20(1979)%20The%20Role%20of%20AsF_5%20in%20Modifying%20the%20Electrical%20Properties%20of%20Polyacetylene,%20(CH)_x.pdf • http://w2agz.com/Publications/Science%20&%20Technology/IBM/37%20(1980)%20The%20Mechanism%20of%20Arsenic%20Pentaflouride%20Doping%20of%20Polyacetylene.pdf • http://w2agz.com/Publications/Science%20&%20Technology/IBM/39%20(1980)%20X-Ray%20Absorption%20in%20Polymers.pdf • http://w2agz.com/Publications/Science%20&%20Technology/IBM/51%20(1984)%20X-ray%20Absorption%20Near-Edge-Structure%20Studies%20in%20(HMTSF)%20and%20(HMTSF-TCNQ)%20and%20(HMTSF-TFTCNQ).pdf Presentations: • http://w2agz.com/Presentations/1978/21%20EXAFS%20CHx%2027%20March%20APS%20DC%20(1978).pdf

From Vladimir Kresin
Feb. 2, 2018

A great majority of scientists are focusing on their own projects and do not follow new publications in scientific journals. Hans was entirely different. In addition to being active as a scientist, he spent every day a couple hours in library reading various journals and learning about achievements by other scientists.Because of his fantastic memory, he was uniquely knowledgeable in physics. In addition, he was very happy to learn about some new results obtained somebody else. Simply speaking, he loved physics, not himself in physics. I want to describe one story, which demonstrates his unique erudition. Once, as the editor of scientific Journal, I sent the manuscript submitted by some scientist from India for publication in our Journal, to Hans for his comments and recommendations. Such a referee process is rather common. Several days later I received a letter from Hans and he informed me that exactly the same paper was published about 8 years ago in the Italian Journal Nuovo Cimento (rather obscure Journal). The author made a serious violation, because during the submission he stated that this submitted material was new and had never been published before. The manuscript was immediately rejected. This author had really bad luck. I am sure that nobody else, but only Hans, had known what was published in some obscure journal eight years ago. I remember I was greatly impressed by Hans’s letter. And I think it demonstrates vividly his fantastic erudition.

From Douglas Scalapino
Feb. 2, 2018

While I don’t have any photographs, my memory of your father remains clear. He carried himself as an athlete and there was a special grace about him. He cared about people and when one talked with him he would listened carefully. He was a great friend. Doug Scalapino

From Alan Luntz
Feb. 1, 2018

Hans was the first friend I made when joining IBM in 1969, and he taught me a lot about physics (I was trained as a pure chemist). We became much closer friends when we carpooled together for ca 4 years starting with the oil shortages in 1973, sometimes with others and sometimes only the two of us. We discussed all kinds of things during our 1½ hours together each day in the car—his life in Austria, how he met Terry, his spontaneous trips to Mexico as a student at Stanford, his trips with the family to the mountains & his risky escapades there, his work with Committee for Green Foothills, etc.. We also talked a lot of politics & actually were in good agreement since both of us were quite liberal. But of course even if we agreed as to what should be right, we had some arguments since I am a realist and Hans was an idealist. In fact this idealism in life, people, politics, science and everything really seemed to define Hans for me. We never seemed to have lunch together—Hans was off playing soccer and I was often playing tennis. However, I did occasionally get Hans to play tennis with me, although he didn’t really want to do so very often since I couldn’t give him a competitive match. We stayed pretty close over our years together at IBM—never quite working in the same area but having similar interests and were in the same IBM group for some years, so we often talked science along with many other things happening in the world. When high temperature superconductivity was suddenly discovered, Hans was then completely captivated and we became orthogonal scientifically, so basically just talked about life’s opportunities and challenges together afterwards. After we both left IBM in ca 1993, we still kept in pretty close contact, even through his depression and later physical problems. Of course this was more difficult, but we quasi-regularly had dinner together, either at our house or later at more or less the same fixed restaurants—the Afghani house when he lived in Mountain View or the Fish Market when he lived in Los Altos. Until almost the end, Hans kept the same sense of idealism about the world so we kept up very fun discussions. He also liked to talk about his family and the latest events in their lives, while I told him about any of our mutual friends that I had news about as well as Bonnie & my latest doings. I will miss Hans. Until the very end, his outlook kept reminding me to be more idealistic and not too pessimistic.

From Peter and Hilda Reineker: Ulm, Germany
Jan. 31, 2018

I do not remember the details when I met Hans for the first time. But most probably it was during one of the Molecular Crystals conferences, one of which was held in the early seventies in Elmau. Definitely we met again in 1980 during a summer school on quantum optics in Italy at a rural place close to Florence. There I asked Hans whether I could spend my first sabbatical with him at IBM in San Jose. He suggested that I should apply at IBM Germany and after an astonishingly short period I received a contract which allowed me to work with Hans for a period of 6 months. In this way I could collaborate with Hans during summer 1981 on hole burning. For me this was a new field which turned out to be quite fruitful and which resulted in several publications and after my return to Ulm/Germany also in a diploma thesis and the PhD thesis of Klaus Kassner, who now is a professor of physics in Magdeburg. Also the personal relations developed quite nicely and I could meet Terry, Hans, Werner and Dana in their house at Dedalera Drive in Portola Valley. I remember also a summer party with dancing in the area close to the house where I had the opportunity to meet a lot of friends and neighbors of the Morawitz family. During the summer school vacations in Germany, my wife Hilda and my two daughters Katja and Nina could join me and we lived in an area called Foxborough not far from the IBM Lab. We enjoyed the time in California very much including two trips in various National Parks in the west of USA. Just by chance, friends of us and of the Morawitz family from Germany, Axel, Ingrid and Jan Schenzle were also around and I remember a nice evening in the Dedalera Drive house with Hans, Terry, Mike Philpott, Victoria Woodrow, and Axel. After several short meetings at various places, Hans and I received a NATO Grant and we could visit each other both at the new IBM Lab, where I also met W.E. Moerner for the first time, and at Ulm University, where Hans presented a series of talks. I do not remember exactly, but I also did stay with Hans some time in his house in Sunnyvale. Attached is also a photo taken in 1995 in California during a half way stop on a back trip with Hilda (who took the picture) from Cairns in Australia to Ulm in Germany. Hans was also very helpful to one of my PhD students, Roland Winkler, his wife Ute and his two daughters, in arranging a stay as a Postdoc at the IBM Lab with Do Yoon. Recently, it was sometimes not easy to get in touch with Hans, but due to the support of his family, and especially of Werner, the contact could be continued. I appreciate Hans as an interesting and creative theoretical physicist, and our family liked his friendly and helpful personality and his sense for a fine humor. We all miss Hans and will remember him as a good friend.

From Doug Scalapino
Jan. 31, 2018

Dear Dana, While I don’t have any photographs, my memory of your father remains clear. He carried himself as an athlete and there was a special grace about him. He cared about people and when one talked with him he would listened carefully. He was a great friend. Sincerely, Doug Scalapino

From Chris Carlsmith
Jan. 11, 2018

My relationship with Hans Morawitz began a decade before I was even born. Hans and my father, J. Merrill Carlsmith, were fraternity brothers at Chi Psi fraternity at Stanford in the early 1950s. Alas, I have no stories to tell of their Greek experiences together, but it’s no surprise that they were good friends: both were unusually bright, both were gifted amateur athletes, and both were quite shy. They each went on to earn a Ph.D., they each married a kind and gentle woman, and they each settled in lower Ladera during the 1960s. Together with their respective wives, both were deeply involved in the Ladera community, particularly in the areas of education, athletics, and community governance. Both families enjoyed the opportunity to travel nationally and internationally, from the Pacific Coast and Lake Tahoe to Europe and beyond. Hans’ son, Werner, was my best friend throughout childhood and adolescence. Thus I spent a great deal of time at the Morawitz house on Dedalera, and I can still visualize every inch of the house in my mind. Hans and my father coached AYSO soccer together; owing to his European upbringing Hans knew a lot about the game, while my father had to learn about it from scratch. Werner and I both learned to play tennis on the Ladera courts, with Hans as a stern taskmaster demonstrating his beautiful strokes. Hans also served on the LCA Board with my mother Lyn Carlsmith for a number of years, and we regularly had family picnics and outings together as well as dinner parties. For many years my family vacationed at Pajaro Dunes, while the Morawitzes were just up the coast at Sunset beach—I remember playing in the sand dunes and exploring the surf with Werner and Dana as well as with my two siblings Kevin and Kim. Despite regular efforts to do so, I never made it to Sun Valley with the Morawitzes, although I know it was an important site for Hans and his family. Fifteen years ago I was finally able to ski Mt. Baldy with Werner, and two years ago I was able to visit him and his family there during a summer road trip. Sleepovers and playdates in Hans’ Ladera house reflected a more rigorous discipline inspired by his Austrian heritage and his physicist’s precise mindset. TV was forbidden. Extra homework in math and reading was expected of Werner, and of me when I was a guest. Proper behavior was called for inside the house. These stern expectations were tempered by Terry’s gentle affection at all times, and it was a house full of love that always welcomed me with open arms. Hans was thus a memorable figure in my life, and contributed in important ways to my intellectual, emotional, and athletic development. My friendship with the Morawitz family has spanned more than fifty years, and I share my sympathy and condolences with Terry, Werner, Dana, and their families.

From Dana Morawitz
Jan. 8, 2018

From Austria to California tie-dye...

From Dana Morawitz
Jan. 8, 2018

always loved the mountains...

From Dana Morawitz
Jan. 8, 2018

... and tennis!

From Dana Morawitz
Jan. 8, 2018

Was partial to the beach...

From Dana Morawitz
Jan. 8, 2018

...and the Sun Valley snow!

From Ingeborg H. O'Bourne
Nov. 14, 2017

Dr. Hans Morawitz was the man who brought me from Austria to the United States to take care of his two children, Hans Werner, and Peter, who were very small at the time. I have only good memories of this kind man, whose gentle humor made my first year so far away from home much easier. I've thought often of him and his family, and blessed them from afar. My condolences to all of you who loved him.