John A. Eddy

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John A. Eddy : biography

March 25, 1931 – June 10, 2009

Post-academia

Eddy was laid off from the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 1973 due to budget cutbacks and the poor performance reviews he earned due to his interdisciplinary forays, which were frowned upon at the time. He then was hired by NASA to write a book, which enabled him to travel east to do research in the great astronomy libraries, particularly at Harvard and the Naval Observatory, which he used to also do research on the Maunder Minimum. His work on this was published in the journal Science as a cover story,, and established his fame. After publication, his former employers at the HAO tried to hire him back.

The fame resulting from "The Maunder Minimum" paper landed him on the international lecture circuit, giving over 50 talks a year around the world about his work and history.

In 1987 Eddy was awarded the Arctowski Medal by the National Academy of Sciences for studies in solar physics and solar-terrestrial relationships and specifically for "his demonstration of the existence and nature of solar variations of long term and the consequences of these changes for climate and for mankind."

Childhood and education

Midshipman John Allen Eddy, U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1953.John Eddy was born (March 25, 1931) and raised in Pawnee City, Nebraska, a small town of 1600 people in the southeastern corner of the state. John’s brother Robert was two years his senior and his sister Lucille was two years his younger. John’s father managed a cooperative farm store where John worked until he started high school. John’s mother had attained college for one year and was a county schoolteacher until she married John’s father. The Eddy family lived in a modest but happy home but were of limited economic means and there was serious concerns that they could not afford a college education for John. As it turned out, John was the only member of the family to graduate from college. In 1948 John attended Doane College in Crete, Nebraska for one year, a distance of some from his home. In 1949 he was appointed by Senator Kenneth Wherry (R) of Nebraska, who also resided in Pawnee City, to the U.S. Naval Academy. At Annapolis, there were few science courses but John attended a course in celestial navigation and it was this course which gave John a love of the sky. So great was his interest in the night sky that once after Taps, John crawled out on the roof of Bancroft Hall to look for the Constellation Draco and was caught by an officer who gave him 5 hours of extra duty for not being in bed.

Upon graduation in 1953 from the United States Naval Academy he served for four years at sea as a line officer on aircraft carriers during the Korean War and later in the Persian Gulf as navigator and operations officer on a destroyer in the Atlantic Fleet. In 1957 he left active service in the Navy to continue his education. He was discharged and accepted into the graduate school at the University of Colorado’s mathematics program but switched departments, before the start of the Fall 1957 semester, upon discovering the University’s little observatory and a small program in astro-geophysics that had just been started, becoming the program’s first student. Later he joined the High Altitude Observatory at the University of Colorado.

Petition to name the next significant solar minimum

There was an online petition underway, organized by Anthony Watts, to be submitted to the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society in June 2009, in Boulder, Colorado by solar astronomer Leif Svalgaard, to name the next significant solar minimum the "Eddy Minimum" to honor Eddy’s contributions to this line of research.

During an interview, in a statement which may yet prove prophetic, Eddy first used the term "Eddy Minimum" while explaining why he rejected it:

EDDY: And, you know, the temptation was to think that it might someday be called the "Eddy Minimum": that is, to call it nothing in the hope that someone else would do that. But being from Nebraska, I could never do anything like that. I also knew I wasn’t the first to find it, and it wasn’t really mine. I think I did quite a bit for Maunder with that name. Particularly because he also got the idea from somebody else. He got it from Sporer who was a German astronomer. So, among the shots I took after publishing the paper were some from Germany that said, "You know, you really named it after the wrong person." Which I knew very well.