Harry Leonard Swinney was born in Opelousas, Louisiana, on April 10, 1939. His parents were Leonard R. Swinney and Ethel Bertheaud Swinney. In 1967 Harry Swinney married Gloria T. Luyas, and in 1978 they had a son, Brent Luyas Swinney. Brent died of cancer in 1995 and Gloria died of cancer in 1997. Harry Swinney married Lizabeth Kelley on August 12, 2000.
Education
Swinney attended elementary school in Austin, Texas, and in 1957 graduated from Homer Louisiana High School. In 1961 he was awarded a B.S. with honors in physics by Southwestern at Memphis, where he was inspired by his physics professor and research mentor, Jack H. Taylor. In 1968 he was awarded a Ph.D. in physics by Johns Hopkins University; his advisor was Herman Z. Cummins.
Swinney conducts research on instabilities, chaos, and pattern formation in diverse systems, including fluid, chemical, and granular media. Swinney together with his students, postdocs, and other collaborators have:
determined the decay rate of order parameter fluctuations for fluids near the critical point
observed a transition to chaos—deterministic yet nonperiodic behavior—in experiments on a fluid flow
characterized chaos from time series data by computing the largest Lyapunov exponent and the mutual information
discovered multiple transitions to different patterns of fluid flow between concentric independently rotating cylinders
designed a laboratory experiment that yielded a stable vortex for conditions mimicking those on Jupiter. This result provides a plausible explanation of the stability of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which was first observed by Robert Hooke in 1664.
observed the emergence of a spatial pattern in a chemical system, as predicted in 1952 by Alan Turing
determined the scaling of power dissipated in strongly turbulent flow between concentric rotating cylinders
observed anomalous diffusion and Lévy flights in a fluid flow
discovered localized structures, dubbed "oscillons", in an oscillating granular layer; oscillons were subsequently found in many dynamical systems. The granular experiments also investigated various extended spatial patterns, shock waves, and fluctuations.
observed resonant pattern formation with frequency locking in chemical systems
found fractal cascades of waves on the edges of leaves, flowers, and garbage bags
found a resonance in internal wave boundary currents generated by tidal flow on a slope; this resonance apparently selects the angle of the continental slopes of the oceans
discovered a new protein, Slf, which is produced by neighboring colonies of Paenibacillus dendritiformis bacteria. Slf is lethal to bacteria near the edge of a colony that faces another P. dendritiformis colony.
found that fluctuations in the number N of bacteria swimming in a volume varied as N^, in contrast to the N^ scaling of fluctuations for systems in thermodynamic equilibrium
Other
Swinney, together with Rajarshi Roy and Kenneth Showalter, founded a two-week Hands-On Research School for early career scientists from developing countries: . The schools, sponsored by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, are described in a 3-minute video .
