Alex Pines, formerly the Glenn T. Seaborg Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, had a remarkable career as a groundbreaking researcher and beloved teacher. Pines was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society; held honorary degrees from the Universities of Rome, Paris, Marseilles, Amritsar, and the Weizmann Institute of Science; and his many awards included the Wolf Prize in Chemistry. In his honor, the Pines Magnetic Resonance Center (PMRC) at Berkeley was launched on November 28, 2023, at a gathering for the Alexander Pines Endowed Lecture in Physical Chemistry, presented by Lyndon Emsley, professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. 

While he was at MIT, Pines co-wrote a landmark paper describing time reversal in a seemingly irreversible process. The paper, entitled “Violation of the Spin Temperature Hypothesis,” demonstrated the Loschmidt demon or paradox, which contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. The Loschmidt demon presents a challenge that scientists have wrestled with since the late 19th century, following on the work of Ludwig Boltzmann, creator of statistical mechanics.

For his subsequent research at Berkeley, Pines insisted that credit go to the self-dubbed “Pinenuts,” the students and postdocs who came through his lab over 50 years, many of whom continue to flourish as leaders in academia, industry, and government. Pines and the Pinenuts are known for multiple quantum spectroscopy, wherein groups of nuclear spins flip while absorbing groups of radio frequency quanta. These concepts and methods are used in an array of areas, including quantum information processing, a growing area of research that brings together quantum mechanics and information theory. Pines and his dynamic team have repeatedly reframed assumptions about the essential behavior of the molecules that govern our world. Their ongoing contributions to solid state NMR include expanding the reach of the technology to analyze molecules that have nuclei that were previously considered not suitable for NMR analysis. Using simultaneous rotation of a given sample around two axes in space, the Pines group took a novel approach that enables imaging by emulating the symmetry of a geometric solid described by Plato, the icosahedron. Pines and his group also invented zero-field NMR — that is NMR without a magnet, which initially sounded very far-fetched, but is now an exciting methodology being deployed in areas from analytical chemistry to fundamental atomic physics. While their approaches in zero-field and solid state NMR were initially met by the magnetic resonance community with skepticism, Pines and the Pinenuts have repeatedly proved successful at turning seemingly impossible ideas into viable experiments.

While he began at Berkeley teaching graduate students, Pines enthusiastically shared his love for chemistry with undergraduates. The large lecture halls of foundational chemistry courses he taught were abuzz with students in Chemistry 1A responding to his “ChemQuizzes” — opportunities to solve problems together in class and then share their insights with the group as a whole. It’s no surprise that Pines’ many accolades include Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award — his charisma, magnetic personality, openness, and enthusiasm for his subject were infectious.