FAYETTEVILLE — Otto Henry (Bud) Zinke

was born to Frank and Evelyn (Van Cleave) Zinke on August 13, 1926, in the family home in Webster Groves, Mo. He died on December 1st, 2023, in Fayetteville, Ark. His siblings were Frank Zinke (deceased), Robert Zinke, Mary Elizabeth Irwin, John Zinke (deceased), and Susan Ellen Snell. His wife of over 60 years was Marjorie Lois (Nowakowsky) Zinke, and their children were Laura Lynn (Gottfried) Wolf, Otto Henry (Taz) Zinke Ill (deceased) and Frank Van Cleave Zinke(deceased). Zinke is survived by his wife, his daughter, four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Otto attended the public schools of Webster Groves to graduation in 1944. He worked part-time during all his high school years. His first job was folding newspapers for the Webster NewsTimes. He worked part-time as a stock boy and as a clerk in a department store, delivering flowers for a florist, sorting and delivering mail for the post office, and as a service station attendant. He played upright bass in a swing band on weekend evenings. He worked summers as a dishwasher in a summer camp, as a clerk in a fruit market, as a clerk in a department store, and as a track laborer for the Terminal Railroad of St. Louis. He enlisted and went into service in the summer of 1944. In the U.S. Navy, he was trained as a radar technician and was promoted at the age of 18 to Electronic Technicians Mate 2/c (the Navy equivalent of a staff sergeant)

He was honorably discharged in the summer of 1946 and took a job as a radar/radio technician with Chicago and Southern Airlines. He trained in Memphis and was transferred to St. Louis. In February 1947 he entered Washington University of St. Louis and received his A.B. in June 1950. While an undergraduate he worked first as a service station attendant and then designing an artillery fuse testing device and artillery fuses for Parke Thompson of Kirkwood, Missouri. He played upright bass evenings with Sam Gardner’s combo in and about St. Louis. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he started immediately on his master’s degree at Washington University. He earned his master’s degree in 1954. For 18 months from 1952 to 1953, he worked in New York City for Nuclear Consultants, Inc. (known in St. Louis as Nuclear Research and Development, Inc.). He was a consultant in the use of nuclear isotopes in medicine and industry. He also served as a salesperson and consultant for an isotope program for physicians and hospitals from New York to Washington D.C. He received his Ph.D. from Washington University in 1956 and worked from 1956 to 1957 in the physics of separation of neutral gases for the Linde Company, a division of Union Carbide, Inc. in Tonawanda, N.Y. In 1957 he joined the physics department at the University of Missouri, Columbia as an assistant professor and came to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville in the same capacity in 1959. There he was promoted to associate professor in 1963 and full professor in 1969. He retired as an emeritus professor in 1989. On retirement he started a small (and not very successful) company, International Validators, Inc., to do work on the nondestructive evaluation of metals. He published papers on the subject in 2018 with the last paper being a measurement of anomalous behavior of strain in a freeway bridge (1-49) at Mountainburg, Ark. In high school and university, he developed a reputation as a prankster. At the University of Arkansas, his graduate students continued that tradition.

Zinke’s research interests were wide-ranging. For his master’s thesis, he developed one of the first automatic gamma-ray spectrometers. With it, he found that many previous gamma-ray schemes were in error because of the way scintillation detectors worked. His Ph.D. research involved an accidental discovery in a beam of electrons emitted from a magnesium sample which eventually resulted in the detection of a family of monoenergetic electrons in such a beam. Pierre Auger had postulated the existence of these monoenergetic electrons. However, they had not previously been observed. His first research chore at the University of Arkansas was making slide-rule calculations of the neutron flux in a non-critical, nuclear reactor. Based on the calculations, the university received a grant for such a device from the Atomic Energy Commission. At the same time, he realized that pulsed plasmas (very hot, ionized gases) could be analyzed through the use of a time-of-flight technique. With his students, he applied the technique to plasmas produced by gaseous discharge and by exploding wires. With the time-of-flight and other data, they were able to trace stepby-step the manner in which million-degree plasmas were produced in explosions of gold wires. Working in his home laboratory he developed and patented a novel sensor with which he could measure extremely small changes of temperature (and resistance) in metal samples without physically contacting the sample. He brought this sensor, which he later named the “complex-reluctance bridge,” into his university laboratory where he and his students were able to extend the lengths at which diffusing heat could be detected from millimeters to about ten centimeters. The research established that the emissivity (rate of heat loss) of diffusing heat differed greatly from the emissivity of static heat. In work done with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the same sensor was shown to detect microscopic cracks in aluminum and other metals and to chart the downward path of the crack in the metal. It was also shown to detect pre-crack strain in aluminum. It could be used for noncontact detection of both static and dynamic strain in iron and steel and brought a greatly increased sensitivity to such measurements. Professor Zinke, while giving lectures on physics techniques used in archaeology, came up with a novel way to determine when aboriginal ceramics were fired. The technique was shown to work on Hohokam pottery in a blind test and with the cooperation of an Arizonian archaeologist. He also published a theoretical article on the disappearance of the monopole term of the magnetic vector potential. This paper solved a pedagogic problem appearing in all previous textbooks on electromagnetic theory. He published an article on Bose-Einstein condensation. He also published the theory of alternating, magnetic-flux circuits. Later he named two of the variables appearing in that article: “impermanence” and “reluctance.” The ability to measure small changes in temperature in metals was used in his physics laboratory to measure Thomson coefficients, a thermocouple effect involving a never-resolved physics problem of almost two centuries. The problem was an assumption by Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) which was bitterly fought over in the 19th century.

Zinke’s group showed experimentally that Thomson’s assumption was wrong. A further implication of the research was that thermal radiation had to be included in the theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. This theory is important in assessing the “heat death” of the universe. The experimental results were so controversial that publication was refused in the 1970s when the work was done. In 2017 it occurred to Zinke that a function of thermal radiation required to remove a measured anomaly found in his research might remove some rather severe errors and anomalies found in Thomson coefficients published by others. The function mended approximately thirty measurements of Thomson coefficients for a number of metals measured over a fifty-year period. The Thomson paper was resubmitted with this information, and the research was finally published in 2019, almost 45 years after the discovery. He amassed something over 40 publications. His research work was variously supported by the United States Atomic Energy Commission, the National Science Foundation, The Southwestern Electric Power Company, and the Army Missile Command, and, in the case of the Thomson work, not at all.

Professor Zinke served as chair of the University of Arkansas chapter of the American Association of University Professors. He went on to chair the Southwestern Regional Conference and the Arkansas State Conference of that organization. He was one of the founders of the Arkansas Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and was its first secretary and second chair. For the first several years of the affiliate, the state ACLU telephone was in his home. He also served for four years on the national board of the ACLU. He dated his continuous membership in the ACLU to 1952.

He was the energy/environmental advisor of Governor Dale Bumpers from 1971 to 1976. He was supported during part of this period by a Ford Foundation grant. He may possibly have been the first energy advisor to any governor in the nation. In this capacity be became vice-chair of the Southern Interstate Nuclear Board which was at the time the energy advisory board to the Southern Governors Conference and which later became the Southern States Energy Board. He was an energy/environmental advisor to the Ozarks Regional Commission. He chaired the Governors Energy Forum. He worked briefly in the United States Senate as senior science energy advisor to Senator Dale Bumpers. He wrote Energy in the Near Term. He was an expert witness on energy matters for the Arkansas Public Service Commission against the Arkansas Power and Light Company and later for the Arkansas Power and Light Company against the Arkansas Public Service Commission.

Zinke was an advocate of free speech and spearheaded a successful faculty drive to remove Administrative Memorandum 45 through which the administration of the University of Arkansas sought to control who spoke on campus. He was one of the three principals who forced the integration of the Fayetteville swimming pool, and he helped peripherally in integrating a local motion picture theater. He was an activist against the Vietnam War and appears in several sportsbooks on the great “Arkansas Texas Shootout” in that capacity.

He enjoyed fishing Arkansas and Missouri creeks and streams for small-mouth bass. He and his wife enjoyed camping, hiking, and backpacking together in the Colorado Rockies. Both were avid readers, and he read extensively on American and Civil War history. He was a frequent letter writer to the Voices page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He led a very busy life.

To place an online tribute, please visit www.bernafuneralhomes.com.