Arthur Rosenfeld - Fermi's Last Graduate Student - To Receive Fermi Prize

Show up in Arthur Rosenfeld's office in downtown Sacramento to ask about his life and he immediately starts talking up the virtues of compact fluorescent light bulbs. "One of these replaces eight to 10 incandescents," he says in a lightly gravelly voice. "It costs, what, less than 5 bucks? It will save 50 bucks of electricity over its lifetime. Back at the power plant, it saves the equivalent of a barrel of oil."

Few people can offer this piquant blend of statistics and passion over a light bulb, but then, Rosenfeld is a physicist whom everyone calls the Father of Energy Efficiency. One of California's five energy commissioners, Rosenfeld has spent the past 30 years creating and expanding the field of energy efficiency. As he approaches his 80th birthday, tributes to his contributions are pouring in, and the need for his talent is greater than ever. In late April, influential scientists in energy and the environment gathered in Berkeley for an all-day symposium dubbed "The Rosenfeld Effect" to honor the man with presentations on how efficiency may be applied to today's energy supply problems and global climate change.

On Wednesday, Rosenfeld will be in Washington, to accept the federal government's oldest and most prestigious science and technology prize, the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award. Established as a memorial to the Nobel laureate -- who ushered in the atomic age by achieving the first nuclear chain reaction in 1942 -- the Fermi award is given to scientists of international renown for lifetime achievement in energy.

"It's an award that seemed particularly to fit Art's case: scientists contributing to society," said Charles Townes, a UC Berkeley professor, who nominated Rosenfeld for the award. Townes, inventor of the laser, is himself a Nobel winner in physics. Rosenfeld is trained in particle physics but took a left turn in his career in the 1970s to study why the United States used energy so wastefully. On the faculty of UC Berkeley at the time, he helped found the Center for Building Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy lab up the hill from campus. Scientists at the center, which Rosenfeld directed for 20 years, have contributed to many technologies in common use today, including electronic ballasts for fluorescent lights that led to the development of compact bulbs; and windows with transparent insulating films, known as low-emissivity windows. Rosenfeld also wrote a computer program to model energy consumption in buildings and test efficiency measures. The software has become a basic tool in government and industry.

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