Matthew Linzee Sands (October 20, 1919 – September 13, 2014) was an American physicist and educator best known as a co-author of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

After the war, Sands studied cosmic rays for his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Bruno Rossi.

Sands later joined the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) as a professor of physics, and served as its Vice Chancellor for Science from 1969 to 1972.

He was encouraged to study mathematics and science by his high school math teacher, John Chafee, a graduate of Brown University.

[2] After high school, Sands entered Clark University, where he studied physics and mathematics, and eventually received his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

As part of a job subsidized at 35 cents per hour by the National Youth Administration, they assigned him to build physics equipment in the machine shops, where he became familiar with the drill press, lathe, and other metalworking tools.

After discussing the situation with Wilson, he appeared unannounced in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the office of Dorothy McKibbin, who had been designated to meet newcomers to Los Alamos Laboratory.

[2] Rossi was most interested in the group's nuclear electronics equipment: pulse counters and amplifiers, discriminators, and scalers.

Sands worked with Walker on a piezoelectric pressure measurement of the atmospheric shock wave produced by "the gadget", a prototype of the Fat Man weapon later dropped on Nagasaki.

This book presented many ideas and circuits developed at Los Alamos, and became a standard reference for post-war nuclear instrumentation.

[14] After the success of the Manhattan Project and the Radiation Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) moved into a new era of "big science" funded by the US government.

[15] This era was predicted in a 1945 report, Science, The Endless Frontier,[16] written by Vannevar Bush, who was an MIT graduate and influential head of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development.

[17] Within MIT's new Laboratory for Nuclear Science, headed by Zacharias, Rossi was assigned to create a cosmic ray research group.

[2] With Rossi as his academic advisor, and with the aid of a Boeing B-29 Superfortress aircraft borrowed from the United States Air Force, Sands carried out his thesis research on the slow muon component of cosmic rays.

He measured the intensity of low energy muons as a function of altitude up to 40,000 feet (12,000 m), and derived their spectrum at production and as they propagated through the atmosphere.

[22][23] In early 1950, in his words: ... my ex-wife had a father who had a fair amount of money, and they decided to make trouble for me, and were going to throw me in jail as a bigamist because they claimed my (Reno) divorce was not legal and so on.

[24] Sands later joined the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) as a professor of physics, and served as its Vice Chancellor for science from 1969 to 1972.