John Amos Kadyk

John Amos Kadyk, a resident of the Berkeley area since 1959, passed away on Monday, February 27, 2023, at the age of 93. He is survived by his two children, Lisa C. Kadyk of San Francisco and John C. (Chris) Kadyk of Oakland and by two grandchildren, Khiven R. and Claudette M. Kadyk-Chiaverotti.

John was born on November 10, 1929 in Springfield, Illinois, the son of David James Kadyk, an attorney, and Helen Jackson Kadyk. Later, when his father became a partner in the Chicago law firm of Lord, Bissell and Kadyk, the family moved to Winnetka, Illinois. In high school, John took an interest in electronics and built his own amateur radio in his bedroom, putting the antenna through the roof of the house. He learned Morse code and communicated by telegraph key with other amateur radio operators around the world including once with someone in the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. After graduating from New Trier high school, he attended Williams College and M.I.T., obtaining degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering, respectively.

John then moved to Pasadena to pursue his PhD in Physics at CalTech. There he studied quantum mechanics with Richard Feynman, and his thesis advisor was Carl Anderson, the discoverer of the positron and muon. It was in Pasadena that he met Ann Marie Ford at a folk dancing class. The two shared a love of the natural world and Ann loved his ability to explain the scientific basis for natural phenomena. In 1957, they married and moved to Ann Arbor for two years while John taught at the University of Michigan. John then took a research position at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (then called Lawrence Radiation Laboratory) where he remained for the rest of his career (apart from a one-year European sabbatical) searching for the smallest building blocks of matter.

John and Ann’s two children, Lisa and Chris (John C.) were born in Berkeley in 1960 and 1961, respectively. John loved spending time with the family, preferably on an outing to someplace beautiful – locally in the Bay Area on weekends, or to the Sierra for summer vacation or winter skiing. He took the kids to local rock-climbing spots such as Indian Rock to practice rope techniques in preparation for mountain climbing in the Sierra.

On John’s birthday in 1974, he was monitoring output from an ongoing experiment at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center when he observed a signal that was later confirmed to be the tracks made by a previously undescribed elementary particle, now known as the psi or J meson. For this discovery, the leader of his research group, Burton Richter, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976, shared with Sam Ting, whose group independently made the same discovery at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In 1977, John and Ann moved the family to France for a year while John worked at CERN, the physics research lab outside of Geneva. While living in France, the family enjoyed the French food and wine and traveled through much of Europe in an old Peugeot station wagon, which John managed to continue driving even after its clutch failed in Hungary.

John loved backpacking and mountain climbing, summiting all fourteen of the then-named California peaks above 14,000 ft, often with one or both of his children. He was also a runner, bicyclist and skier. He and Ann spent many years doing Scottish Country dancing, and John sometimes performed with their dancing group at the annual Scottish games.

In their 60s and 70s, John and Ann traveled the world, visiting all continents except Antarctica, usually with good friends who shared their love of adventure and nature. John adopted Ann’s passion for birds and many of their trips centered on bird watching. They were also subscribers to local theatre, symphony and chamber music series.

After Ann passed away in 2015, John continued to live at home in Berkeley, but needed increasing help from caregivers as his spinal stenosis and arthritis caused pain and limited his mobility. He nevertheless persevered, exercising at the YMCA even when he needed a walker to get around, mentoring students as he worked on the problem of how to detect dark matter, and keeping up on the latest revolutions in science, such as the molecular details of CRISPR gene editing.

Lisa and Chris want to thank some of the wonderful caregivers who made John’s life easier in the final years, including Pascale Roger, Alyce Bond, Elizabeth Mendoza, Menchie Cary, Sara Osaba, Woeser Dolma, Martha Roberts and Jennifer Holton. Your dedication and companionship were invaluable to him and to us.