Longtime physics technician brings different views

By Jenny Bryers

Peering through his glasses, 80-year-old Mike Murray carefully bends dozens of colorful resisters, capacitors and transistors into a credit-card sized circuit. He sits on a simple metal stool over a table saturated with electrical projects, many of which, like the circuit, will be added to the L. R. Ingersoll Physics Museum.

Having worked in the physics department since 1949, Murray has been involved with much of the electrical work involving experiments in Sterling Hall. He spent several years on the electrical wiring for the linear proton accelerator in the basement of Sterling Hall, he organized the nearby electronics shop for nuclear physics, then reorganized it when a bomb exploded just outside the shop in 1970, and he is organizing the physics department’s main electronics shop in Chamberlin Hall while it relocates from Sterling to Chamberlin, the new home of the physics department.

Myron “Mike” Murray, an electronics technician research senior in the Department of Physics Electronics Shop, wears a jeweler’s eyepiece while working on a time-delay circuit destined for the new physics museum in Chamberlin Hall. The 4-inch eyepiece magnifies Murray’s standard vision 4.5 times.

Most of the equipment that students use in physics classes were built or modified by Murray, one of two technicians who run the electronics shop for the physics department. He custom builds equipment for researchers in physics and other departments and collaborates with other electronics and machine shops in the department.

“The experimental professors we work with all the time,” Murray says. “Today I have two professors coming in. Tomorrow I’ll have one. And so the week goes. But it won’t be the same ones; otherwise I’m not doing a good job.”

Richard Prepost, a high energy physics professor, says Murray has been involved in wiring many of the instruments for his laboratory. Murray designed and built a nuclear magnetic resonance experiment and a Mossbauer scattering experiment for students in the Advanced Modern Physics Laboratory. The devises use, respectively, a radio frequency signal and nuclear gamma ray detector.

“If it had electronics associated with it, he would work on it,” says Albert Erwin, professor emeritus in the Department of Physics. “He still has a really good memory about where things are — and every little part. I don’t know how we’ll get along if he retires.”

Murray also works with graduate students in building equipment for their research. Zhimin Li, a graduate student in medical physics, says Murray has helped him with at least five major projects and has given suggestions on several others he’s built in the last few years. He describes Murray as nice, helpful and patient. “I think I’ve learned many practical things, what to avoid and pay attention to,” Li says of working with Murray.

Murray started his long career in electronics as a radio mechanic for the U.S. Army. He fixed radios and set up radar sites as part of a four-man team during World War II. Once out of the Army, he enrolled in the electrical engineering department at UW–Madison and worked as a student hourly in the physics department. Although he didn’t finish his degree, he stayed with the physics department, applying his electrical knowledge.

Murray has seen the department grow from a close-knit group of a few dozen employees who met for coffee to a far-flung department with about 60 faculty members and a large supporting staff. He’s set up many of the electronics and instrument shops that serve areas such as nuclear, plasma and atomic physics. The laboratory storage rooms are filled with multimeters, oscilloscopes, power supplies and amplifiers that Murray has built throughout the decades. And since Murray has been in the field for so many years, he still remembers how things used to be built.

Murray says he gets a lot of satisfaction in seeing his projects work: “I like building things. I hate fixing things. That’s why I build them so they don’t break.”

Co-workers in the physics department will miss more than Murray’s skill if he retires, which he says he will soon — although he hasn’t set a date. His rapport with technicians in other shops is apparent as they meet and banter in the halls or in the other machine shops in the department.

Erwin says as a standing joke, every time he greets Murray, Murray will turn around as if looking to see whom Erwin is really greeting.

Billy Gates Jr., who has worked as a technician alongside Murray for three years, says Murray is an invaluable source of advice on difficult projects. “He knows when and how things were, and his view puts things in a different perspective,” says Gates. “He has an amazing attitude.”

And Murray’s enthusiasm for his job and the wonders of physics is undeniable. In giving a tour of the Physics Museum, Murray touches each exhibit as he passes, delighting in some and scrutinizing others for how they could be improved. He laughs as he watches a coin circle slowly around the gravity pit display. He points out the spectrum tube demonstration as one of the projects his shop has recently finished and discusses the principles behind each exhibit. There is a list in his shop of several dozen other displays that he, Gates and others are creating and customizing for the museum’s opening in Chamberlin Hall early next year.

Murrays says one of the benefits of staying working at a place for so many years is that his requests are often granted, such as his desire to see the museum cater to a younger crowd of physics enthusiasts, those aged 3 to 25. And so he works on new displays to fill the museum’s additional space. The circuits he is building will automatically shut off displays in a few minutes, after a youngster moves on to the next exhibit.