A daugther remembers

By: Linda Holmstrom Keesling

Posted: 1/23/08

Fred Holmstrom

Born: March 31, 1927, in Salt Lake City, Utah

Died: Jan. 14, 2008, in Reno, Nev.

He is survived by his wife, Sherri Holmstrom; two daughters, Laurie McCrea of Salt Lake City and Linda Keesling of Fort Collins, Colo.; three sons, Mike, Matt and David Holmstrom of San Jose; 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

The son of Swedish immigrants, Fred grew up in an extremely impoverished one-parent family in Salt Lake City. Being sixth in a family of eight children made him extremely inquisitive and inventive as a child. At the age of 13, he bought and restored his first car. After that his mother let him rewire the house, dig a full basement, and build cinderblock walls under the house by hand. He went through secondary school at West High in Salt Lake City and worked in a gas station at the same time.

Fred served as a missionary in Stockholm, Sweden, from 1947 to 1949. He started college in 1949 at the University of Utah and majored in engineering but later changed to physics because he liked it so much. As a graduate student at the University of Utah, he found his first calling to become a teacher. He built a cyclotron, a radioactive particle counter, for his doctoral thesis that remains functional even now. The findings of his experiments are still cited in scientific papers written today. During his summers at the University of Utah he contracted for the Navy in California, helping to build the first Doppler radar. He graduated with a doctorate in physics in 1958.

After graduating, Fred moved his young family to San Jose, where he worked for IBM. In 1961 they moved to Northridge, where Fred could work for Rocketdyne, which built the engines for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecrafts. Physics did the calculations for structural strength and thrust. He always said engineers build things but physicists tell you whether they can fly. He also taught physics at Cal-State Northridge. His students and colleagues there encouraged him to move forward with teaching.

In 1963 the family again moved to San Jose, where Dr. Holmstrom took chairmanship of the physics department at San Jose State. Fred built the first laser at SJSU in the 1960s. This started an increased interest in lasers in Bay Area colleges, cradle of the Silicon Valley. Teaching all of the graduate classes in physics and astronomy at both San Jose State and Stanford University during his tenure honed his clever wit and style. He started each graduate class period with a joke. He also taught many classes at area community colleges, where he was loved by his students.

Among his other activities were jobs as a civilian contractor for NASA Ames Research, IBM and Lick Observatory, where he explored the existence of black holes, quasars and pulsars. Fred was the first scientist to use the linear accelerator at Lawrence Livermore Labs, where he did experiments on particle wave motion that helped to redefine the universe as we know it. His calculations, from this data, on the CREA computer at UC Davis showed we live in a universe with at least 12 dimensions and that no surface is truly solid but just an expression of wave motion. Later he invented a golf ball called Polara, which flies straight, in 1977. In the week of its release, it made front-page center of the Wall Street Journal on the West Coast. Toward the end of his career he was seeking information on string theory, neutron stars, white holes and dark matter. Dr. Holmstrom retired from teaching in 1997 and moved to Northern California.

Fred's greatest loves were teaching and writing. He was a very dynamic and intelligent individual. He didn't like to be idle, and one could find him painting the house, doing yard work or finishing cement in his off hours. Though he was very learned, he was deeply religious as well. Speaking of the mix of science and religion, Dr. Holmstrom coined the phrase "Truth is truth, no matter the context." He always said science and religion go hand-in-hand and that the more he learned, the more evidence proved that God is the author of the universe. On the subject of creation, he taught that "God works with, not in opposition to, the natural laws of the universe."