Remembering Ray Manzarek, Heinrich Rohrer, Joe Farman, Alan O'Day

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• published: 19 Jun 2013
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One Of the Great Openings In Rock Music BACH, ROCK, ATOMS, AND OZONE HOLES Ray Manzarek came out of Chicago with a background in classical and jazz piano. In the mid-1960's he met Jim Morrison in Los Angeles, they formed The Doors and Manzarek made the organ onto a rock instrument. His organ intro to Light My Fire is one of the most distinctive riffs in rock and roll. Heinrich Rohrer was one of the inventors of the scanning tunneling microscope, which allowed scientists to see and move atoms around, and is instrumental in the field of nanotechnology. Joe Farman was the British scientist who discovered the hole in the ozone layer, which led to the Montreal Protocol phasing out the use of chlorofluorocarbons. Alan O'Day was a 1970's one-hit wonder with his song Undercover Angel. The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger. The band took its name from the title of Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception,[1] which itself was a reference to a William Blake quotation: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."[2] They were among the most controversial rock acts of the 1960s, due mostly to Morrison's wild, poetic lyrics and charismatic but unpredictable stage persona. After Morrison's death in 1971, the remaining members continued as a trio until finally disbanding in 1973.[3] They were signed to Elektra Records in 1966. The 1967 release of The Doors was the first in a series of top ten albums in the US, followed by Strange Days (1967), Waiting for the Sun (1968), The Soft Parade (1969), Morrison Hotel (1970), Absolutely Live (1970) and L.A. Woman (1971), with 19 Gold, 14 Platinum and 5 Multi-Platinum album awards in the United States alone.[4] Although The Doors' active career ended in 1973, their popularity has persisted. According to the RIAA, they have sold 32.5 million certified units in the US.[5] The band has sold over 100 million[6] albums worldwide.[7] Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger toured as "Manzarek--Krieger" or "Ray Manzarek & Robby Krieger of The Doors" for legal reasons, performing Doors songs exclusively. The Doors were the first American band to accumulate eight consecutive gold LPs.[8] In 1993, The Doors were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rohrer was born in Buchs, St. Gallen half an hour after his twin sister. He enjoyed a carefree country childhood until the family moved to Zürich in 1949. He enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1951, where he was student of Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Scherrer. His doctoral dissertation was on his work measuring the length changes of superconductors at the magnetic-field-induced superconducting transition, a project begun by Jörgen Lykke Olsen. In the course of his research, he found that he had to do most of his research at night after the city was asleep because his measurements were so sensitive to vibration. His studies were interrupted by his military service in the Swiss mountain infantry. In 1961, he married Rose-Marie Egger. Their honeymoon trip to the United States included a stint doing research on thermal conductivity of type-II superconductors and metals with Bernie Serin at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 1963, he joined the IBM Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon under the direction of Ambros Speiser. The first couple of years at IBM, he studied Kondo systems with magnetoresistance in pulsed magnetic fields. He then began studying magnetic phase diagrams, which eventually brought him into the field of critical phenomena.