Michael Cohen, last surviving co-founder of Aspen Center for Physics, remembered

Michael Cohen was a man who enjoyed solving problems.

Sometimes, he sought answers to the greatest mysteries in our universe; other times, the challenges presented in climbing a rock face are what kept him going.

And he found a refuge in Aspen that allowed him to pursue both passions to the fullest.

“My dad was a person who had very high expectations for himself and for those around him,” said Adam Cohen, one of Michael’s three children. “He did his best to find new ways of looking at things, but at the same time, he was always acutely aware of the humor in a situation. For him, I think Aspen really was a unique place. It was a place for him where he was the most alive.”

A noted physicist who spent 66 years working in some capacity for the University of Pennsylvania, Cohen was known locally as a co-founder of the Aspen Center for Physics alongside Robert Craig and George Stranahan.

Cohen died June 30. He was 94.

“The Physics Center in a lot of ways represented this union between his love of the outdoors and his profound need to try and understand how the universe worked,” Adam Cohen said. “The Physics Center and the mountains were sort of the yin and the yang of his personality.”

After graduating from Cornell, Michael Cohen worked on his Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech under Richard Feynman, an eventual Nobel Prize winner who is one of the more celebrated physicists of our time.

Following their breakthrough work around liquid helium, Cohen did a second postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” and central character of the recent Hollywood film that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

It was in 1962, about four years after joining the staff at Penn, that Cohen co-founded the Aspen Center for Physics. Originally part of what became the Aspen Institute, the center became an independent not-for-profit in 1968.

Craig, who also was the first director of the Aspen Institute, died in 2015. Stranahan died in 2021, and among his long list of accomplishments was the creation of the Woody Creek Tavern. Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey, which was started by fellow local Jess Graber, bears his name.

“For him, the most important thing he ever did was work with George Stranahan and Bob Craig to create the Aspen Center for Physics,” Adam Cohen recalled of his father. “I know it was the thing he was the proudest of and the thing he felt had the most far-reaching impact. It just brought him such joy to know all of the important physics projects that have been spawned out of the center over time.”

Michael Cohen’s climbing legacy is nearly as robust as his work in quantum mechanics. He’s credited with completing the first ascent of the north face of Capitol Peak in 1963 alongside George Bell and David Michael. He also climbed regularly with Harvey Carter, the founder of Climbing Magazine and one of the sport’s pioneers.

Adam Cohen said there are at least two climbing routes around Aspen that still bear his father’s name: Cohen’s Crown and Cohen’s Last Problem.

“He loved problems that other people saw as difficult or potentially unsolvable. I think that applied both to him in physics and in the outdoors. That was what drew him to the mountains,” Adam Cohen said. “He would come to Aspen pretty much every summer, up into his 70s. He liked to come, and he would try to spend a month there. That was divided between the Physics Center, and hiking and camping.”

Adam, who lives in Oklahoma City, said his father continued to climb well into his 80s. Along with his two siblings, Adam plans to bring his father’s ashes permanently back to Aspen.

“We are going to go up there next summer. We got my dad’s ashes, and we want to take them to Capitol Lake and spread them right at the base of Capitol,” he said. “On his 70^th birthday, my brother, my sister, and I all climbed Capitol with him. We didn’t go up the north face because that’s a little beyond our capacity, but we all went across the Knife Edge ridge, and it was a three-day quest that I think none of us will ever forget.”

The family requests that any donations in Michael’s honor be made to the Aspen Center for Physics.

acolbert@aspentimes.com