May 2025: William (Toby) Dittrich
Portland Community College, Sylvania Campus, Portland, Oregon
William (Toby) Dittrich
- Member since 1993
- Retired Professor of Physics
- Portland, Oregon
About William (Toby)
I am very fortunate to have had a lifelong experience with physics. I was born in 1946, and my father, William J. Dittrich, was a grad student in physics and took a teaching position at Western Washington University. He joined the AAPT in 1949 (together, there has been a William Dittrich in AAPT for 76 years). I grew up in his lab while in the WWU Campus school, watching his demonstration of a Tesla coil behind the hall door, powering a light bulb on the hall table. I was inspired at Bellingham High in math by my calculus teacher. I studied physics at WWU, including taking a course in General Relativity, which later proved useful, and in 1968, I entered graduate school at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and became a candidate for the PhD. I was a Research Assistant at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics when the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram was not completely understood, and I was a teaching assistant with the great mentor Dr. Albert Bartlett. During the summers while at CU, I was able to join the Juneau Icefield Research Program as a student in 1970, which led to being a Fulbright Scholar in Physics to England in 1972, where I analyzed my wave velocity data on the glaciers of Alaska. In 1973, I received the MS degree in Physics and started my 40+ years of teaching physics, having retired in 2025 from Portland Community College. During these 40 years on the Juneau Icefield, I studied and learned a lot about rocks on glaciers called Cryoconites.
1971 2010
Measuring wave velocity on Juneau Icefield Research Program
Vaughan Lewis Glacier Faculty and Board Member
In the 70’s, my experience as an inventor started when I was an avid basketball player at the collegiate level at CU. I wanted to dunk the basketball, so I built and in 1976-82 patented the Dittrich Dunking Device, which led to inventing the collapsible basketball rim, which changed the game of basketball worldwide, and the prototype is now in the Basketball Hall of Fame, and the patent papers are in the Smithsonian. Teaching physics continued into the 21st Century when, in 2005, I was fortunate to be diagnosed with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia, with no chance to live. Then, 21 days later, I was found to be in remission, and after three years of chemo, it has not returned. Cancer lit up my life, and I began publishing many papers in The Physics Teacher and AJP and became active in AAPT. I received many more patents on the use of voice recognition into education, and today these patents are seen in applications everywhere.
In 2016, I wondered what I could do to involve students in the upcoming 2017 total solar eclipse, and with some NASA grants, we performed the Modern Eddington Experiment with four students. We collected 42 stars on 23 images, and the students became the first students in history to measure the curvature of space in the optical. In 2024, the experiment was again performed, and 40 students and faculty were successful by measuring 300 stars on hundreds of images (more data than all previous experiments combined). Now plans for 2026,27 and 28 are underway and by measuring stars in the inner corona the goal is to finally after more than 100 years the Einstein Deflection Law will be adequately verified.
Now, in retirement, I can create sessions like "What Have We Learned from JWST ?" for AAPT Summer 25 and continue designing a new thermodynamic cycle for high-power space-based power generation, which I started while receiving the MS in Aeronautical/ Astronautical Engineering from the University of Washington in 1982. I live in Vancouver, Washington, with my wife, Bridget, and continue to fly our Cherokee 180 airplane and exercise my privileges of my Single Engine, Multiengine, and Instrument Flight Instructor Certificates.
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