Ford's principal research was in the theory of
nuclear structure, with some work in
particle and mathematical physics. He exploited the
nuclear shell model and the
collective, or unified, model, and also worked extensively on
muonic atoms. His first paper, co-authored with
David Bohm in 1950, used data from low-energy neutron scattering to give evidence for the transparency of nuclei to neutrons. A 1953 paper showed how regularities in the energies of the first excited states of
even-even nuclei can be interpreted in terms of the deformations of these nuclei. Later papers analyzed muonic-atom data to give evidence on the distribution of electric charge within nuclei. Ford's 1959 papers with
John Wheeler provided a semiclassical theory of scattering. In 1963, he participated, with
Henry Kolm and
Eiichi Goto, in a search for
magnetic monopoles. Although Ford's initial appointment at
Indiana University in 1953 was as a
postdoctoral researcher, he was given the opportunity to teach a graduate course. In later appointments at Indiana and other universities, he continued to teach both graduate students and undergraduate. Subsequent to retirement, he taught high-school physics at
Germantown Academy (1995–98) and at
Germantown Friends School (2000-2001). In 1958, after a year's leave from Indiana University in Los Alamos, Ford took up new faculty duties at
Brandeis University, where he continued research, supervision of graduate students, and, for the first time, taught introductory physics. He also served as department chair at Brandeis, 1963–64. In 1964, he was recruited by the soon-to-open new campus of the
University of California at Irvine as its first physics chair. he was instrumental in recruiting future
Nobel Prize laureate
Frederick Reines to the faculty at Irvine. In 1970, for family reasons, Ford left Irvine for the
University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was a professor. In 1975, he accepted the job of president of the
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NM Tech). He spent 7 years at New Mexico Tech, resigning after receiving a vote of no confidence from the faculty. Ford then became
executive vice president of the
University of Maryland System. That job lasted for slightly more than a year, during 1982–83, before Ford took his first non-academic job as president of Molecular Biophysics Technology in
Philadelphia. When Molecular Physics of Technology's research results failed to measure up to expectations and the company had to shut down, Ford took a position as education officer of the
American Physical Society. Then, in 1987, he became the director of the
American Institute of Physics and later helped to shepherd its move from
New York City (to which he'd been commuting from Philadelphia) to
College Park, MD. Ford's retirement from the institute in 1993, at age 67, coincided with its move to College Park, along with other physics organizations. Ford wrote eleven books (counting one three-volume work as three books), one of them with a co-author—five before his retirement and six after. His first book,
The World of Elementary Particles, written in 1961-62 and published in 1963, did well enough and was satisfying enough to encourage him to write more. The thick textbook
Basic Physics followed in 1968 and the three volumes of
Classical and Modern Physics in 1972–74. Following his retirement and while teaching at
Germantown Academy, he joined with
John Wheeler to write Wheeler's autobiography,
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, published in 1998. In 1999, this book won an
American Institute of Physics Science Writing Prize. There followed
The Quantum World in 2004,
In Love with Flying (a memoir) in 2007,
101 Quantum Questions in 2011, and
Building the H Bomb in 2015.
Basic Physics was reissued in 2017, repurposed as a resource for teachers. In 2021, he published a second memoir,
The First 95 Years, which was a collection of short essays about a variety of things in his life. ==Issues with secrecy==