Essays

Robert Bacher (1905-2004)

 

Background

Bacher was a nuclear physicist known for his leadership at the Los Alamos laboratory during the Manhattan Project. He received his bachelor’s and PhD degree in physics at the University of Michigan. After graduation, he held teaching positions at Columbia University, and later Cornell University, advancing from assistant professor to tenured professor in 1945. At Cornell, Bacher measured neutron absorption with a neutron velocity spectrometer, which was also used for experiments at Los Alamos. He also worked on radar research at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. During this time, he was contacted by Robert Oppenheimer due to his work connected with the Radiation Lab. Oppenheimer was “was very much interested in the problems that one would run into in setting up a new laboratory. This was why he came to us.”

Manhattan Project

Robert Bacher headed the experimental physics division of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the war. As a partner with Oppenheimer in setting up the new Los Alamos lab, he “felt very strongly that a laboratory could not be a military laboratory”, because doing so would go against the ideals of scientific research and thus established it as a civilian laboratory. He started as a leader in the physics division. In 1944, Bacher lead the G, or “gadget” division of the lab, which came up with the design of the implosion-type ‘Fat Man’ atomic bomb. In the transition from a uranium bomb to developing a plutonium bomb, Bacher’s division experimented with the symmetry of implosion to compress the plutonium center. He was also one of the scientists that participated in the 1945 Trinity test of the bomb’s plutonium core.

After the war and the AEC

Post-war, Bacher remained involved in policy as a United Nations technical advisor to Bernard Baruch. He also joined as a member of the Atomic Energy Commision as it’s only scientist. In an interview he stated, “I felt that for the Atomic Energy Commission to start up without having scientific representation on it was not the right thing to do,” especially at the highest level of policy-making. During the first half of his time on the board, Bacher conducted investigations at the Los Alamos and Hanford nuclear facilities and discovered they were not producing bombs at the rate the US government had hoped for their nuclear stockpile. Under his guidance, the labs were able to resume weapon production to a suitable level. In the later half of his time at the AEC, Bacher was able to propose alternative, non-weaponized uses of nuclear power. After his time on the Atomic Energy Commision, he returned to Caltech as faculty and head of the Physics, Math and Astronomy division, where he remained until retirement.

 

Written by Sabrina Tsui

Sources:

Interview of Robert Bacher by Finn Aaserud on 1986 February 13, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA.

Robert Bacher Biography. Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

Sherwin, Martin J. “Robert Bacher’s Interview – Part 1.” Robert Bacher’s Interview – Part 1, Manhattan Project Voices, 29 Mar. 1983.

Ward Whaling. Robert F. Bacher A biographical Memoir. National Academy of Sciences, 2009.

 By: evan West

Introduction and Early Life

Frederick Reines was a highly awarded physicist who worked at the Manhattan Project starting in 1944 and discovered the fundamental particle known as a neutrinos. He was born on March 16, 1918 to Gussie Cohen and Israel Reines. Reines describes his early education as strongly influenced by the educational ambitions of his elder siblings: he was the youngest of four and had two brothers and a sister. His sister went on to become a doctor and his brothers both became lawyers. In High School Reines was drawn to literary pursuits and struggled with sciences. However, by this junior year this changed after a science teacher took a strong interest in the young man. To describe his principle ambition in the yearbook, Reines simply stated: “To be a physicist extraordinaire.”

Higher Education and the Manhattan Project

Frederick Reines earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a masters of science degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology graduating in 1941. During this time Reines sang in the chorus where he performed solos in many major pieces and was provided with lessons from a vocal coach from the Metropolitan Opera free of charge. For a time, Reines seriously considered a professional singing career but decided against it and went to New York University for graduate school. He earned a PHD there in 1944. Reines was recruited into the Manhattan Project, while finishing his thesis, by Richard Feynman to work at the Los Alamos Laboratory. During his time working in Los Alamos, Reines “sang solos with the town chorus and performed with the dramatic society.” Reines worked under Feynman in the Theoretical Division and about a year later became a leader of a group working on diffusion problems. Diffusion is an important area of study for doing critical mass calculations correctly.

Reines participated in many Nuclear Arms tests, writing numerous reports on these tests. However, eventually Reines became concerned about the negative environmental effects of Nuclear testing and became an advocate for moving Nuclear tests underground.

Discovery of the Neutrino

After leaving the Manhattan Project in 1951, Reines started studying the properties and interactions of neutrinos. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are similar to electrons with a key difference: neutrinos carry no electric charge. There are three kinds of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. Each type is related to the a charged particle it’s named for.

“Neutrinos are constantly being produced from nuclear power stations, particle accelerators, nuclear bombs, general atmospheric phenomena, and during the births, collisions, and deaths of stars, particularly the explosions of supernovae.”

In June 1956 Reines and Cowan succeeded in doing what many at the time considered impossible: detecting the neutrino. They detected the electron neutrino using a nuclear reactor, which as noted above would generate neutrinos. “The neutrinos would then interact with protons in a tank of water, creating neutrons and positrons. Each positron would create a pair of gamma rays when it annihilated with an electron. The gamma rays were detected by placing a scintillator material in a tank of water.” The test was further refined and the results were published in 1956. In recognition of the work Reines did to discover the neutrino he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics.

He died on August 26th, 1998 and is survived by his wife Sylvia and their children.

Sources

1“Frederick Reines.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Mar. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Reines.

2“Frederick Reines – Biographical.” Nobelprize.org, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1995/reines-bio.html.

3“All About Neutrinos.” Neutrino Detector, icecube.wisc.edu/info/neutrinos.

4“Neutrinos: 1956.” IceCube Neutrino Observatory, icecube.wisc.edu/info/neutrinos/1956.

“I was raised to love my country. I had no compunction about bombing an enemy if it meant ending the war.”

BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS

American physicist Hugh “Brad” Bradner was born on November 5th,  1915. After spending most of his childhood in Findley, Ohio, Bradner eventually moved out to attend college, graduating from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He later earned his Ph. D in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1941.

Starting in 1941, Bradner worked for two years at the United States Naval Ordinance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. during World War II, where he was tasked with designing and building magnetic anti-shipping mines. Eventually Bradner became bored, even infuriated at the slow pace of activity in the workplace, and requested a transfer.

As per his request, Bradner was transferred to Chicago in February, 1943, where he would start his work on the Manhattan Project.

WORKING on THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

Shortly after transferring to Chicago, Bradner was recruited by Julius Robert Oppenheimer to work on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratories. During his time at the laboratories, Bradner worked in conjunction with other scientists to develop high explosives and exploding bridge-wire detonators for use in atomic bombs, as well as searching for a way to trigger a nuclear chain reaction.

Apart from developing on mechanisms for atomic bombs, Bradner was also involved with designing the new town to be situated around the Los Alamos laboratories, searching Chicago phone directories for businesses which could be put in the town (Bradner apparently forgot to put a bank in the town, so people weren’t able to conveniently manage their finances).

Bradner was given informal permission to record video around Los Alamos during his time working on the Manhattan Project. Though he mostly recorded non-work related activities such as hiking and skiing, Bradner occasionally recorded clips of scientific experiments, one clip being of the RaLa “radioactive lanthanum” Experiment which tested the design of a plutonium-based weapon. Bradner also recorded scientists departing for Trinity, the codename given for the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, in which he himself had also attended.

According to Bradner’s family, Bradner had said on the subject of the usage of nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945, “I was raised to love my country. I had no compunction about bombing an enemy if it meant ending the war.”

POST MANHATTAN PROJECT

After World War II and his time at the Los Alamos Laboratories, Bradner returned to California to become a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, as well engaging in research on high-energy physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

During his off-time, Bradner was pursuing his hobby of diving. This love of diving, along with his intellect and physics knowledge, is what led Bradner to eventually create a neoprene-suit, which could trap water in between the neoprene layer and the body,  warming the trapped water and thereby keeping the body warm. Bradner was eventually nicknamed and known as, “father of the wetsuit”.

Bradner continued his research on nuclear physics at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1951, and on Operation Greenhouse (a nuclear test series) also in 1951. Eventually Bradner made the jump from nuclear physics to geophysics in 1961, joining the Scripps Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics as a geophysicist and becoming a professor of geophysics in 1963.

RETIREMENT and the next great adventure

Bradner eventually retired from Scripps in 1980, but continued research on oceanographic research, as well as doing work on the DUMAND deep ocean neutrino astronomy project, a project for a proposed underwater neutrino telescope to be built in the Pacific Ocean.

On May 5th, Bradner passed away at the age of 92 in San Diego, California, due to complications of pneumonia. This marked the death of a great American physicist who contributed to many great things to American society.

---

SOURCES

• “Hugh Bradner.” Atomic Heritage Foundation. N.p., 05 Nov. 1915. Web. 07 Jan. 2018.
• Rainey, C. “Wet Suit Pursuit: Hugh Bradner’s Development of the First Wet Suit”. UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
• “The Birth of High-Energy Neutrino Astronomy: A Personal History of the DUMAND Project”. University of Hawaii.
• “Hugh Bradner.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 Jan. 2018. Web. 07 Jan. 2018.
• “Trinity (nuclear Test).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 Jan. 2018. Web. 07 Jan. 2018.

“We all knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, few people cried, most were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” -J.R. Oppenheimer

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist that was known for his many contributions to modern science and most famously for his involvement as the head of the Manhattan project. Many people also credit him as the “father of the atomic bomb” although his contributions to science were not trivial either. Some of his notable contributions include predicting the existence of black holes, positrons, and the Born-Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions.

Early Life

Oppenheimer was born in New York City in April 22, 1904 to Julius Oppenheimer and Ella Friedman. Their family had no money or an understanding of the English language, but his father got a job in a textile company and quickly became an executive.

Oppenheimer initially majored in chemistry at Harvard but after a bout of colitis he came back to school. He made up for lost time by studying physics independently and was admitted to graduate standing in his first year. He graduated summa cum laude in three years.

During his stay in Europe, he was known for being a chainsmoker who often neglected to eat during times of intense focus. He also had some self destructive tendencies. In one disturbing instance when his friend Paris Fergusson tried to distract him from his depression and told him that he would marry his own girlfriend. Oppenheimer jumped on Fergusson and tried to strangle him. He apparently once told his brother ” [He] needed physics more than friends.”

In 1926, he studied in the University of Gottingen under Max Born, which was one of the leading centers of theoretical  physics. Oppenheimer made friends with many great physicist including Enrico Fermi. During his stay, he was known for being too enthusiastic during discussion and even caused his peers to sign a petition threatening to boycott the class unless Born made him calm down. It was here at Gottingen that he made many important contributions such as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, his most cited work.

Early Works

Oppenheimer began a split fellowship between Harvard and Caltech in September 1927. At Caltech, he became friends with Linus Pauling and began researching  the nature of the chemical bond, with Oppenheimer supplying the mathematics and Pauling interpreting the results. This was short lived, however, when Pauling discovered that Oppenheimer was making moves on his wife Ava Pauling.

After briefly visiting the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, Oppenheimer accepted a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. Most of students were engrossed by him and adopted his walk, speech, and other mannerisms, and even the fact that he likes to read books in their original languages.

Manhattan Project

In May 1942, James B. Conant, the National Defense Research Committee, invited Oppenheimer to take over work on fast neutron calculations. One his first acts working there  was to host a summer school for the bomb theory/ With a group of physicists and his own students, they calculated what would be needed and how to make a bomb.

Many were surprised when Oppenheimer was selected to be the head of the lab because he had some communist ties and was never involved in a large scale project. Groves, the director of the Manhattan project, chose Oppenheimer based on the fact that he had an end to end grasp on the construction of the atomic bomb, and because of his wide knowledge base.

Initially, the project only employed a few hundred people, but by 1945 there was over 6000 people working on the Manhattan project. Oppenheimer was an iconic figure to his peers because he could “acquaint himself with the essential details of every part of the work” “He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and physically present at each decisive step”.

Trinity was the site of the first artificial nuclear explosion .

After Trinity, Oppenheimer was granted an interview with  President Harry S Truman. The meeting went badly after Oppenheimer said that he felt like he had “blood on [his] hands”, which infuriated Truman and caused him to end the meeting. He later told his secretary “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”

For his work as director of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was awarded the Medal of merit from President Truman in 1946.

Later Years and Death

Later in his life, Oppenheimer struggled politically and was accused of being too sympathetic to communist causes, which caused to lose his security clearance a day before it was to expire. During his hearing, he testified willingly on the left-wing and is seen by many in the scientific community as a martyr  to McCarthyism. Later after extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks from the KGB archives, Oppenheimer was never involved in espionage with the Russians.

Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer and after an unsuccessful surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation treatment, fell into a coma and died in February 18, 1967 at age 62. His funeral was held in Princeton and attended by 600 of his scientific, political, and military associates.

 

Sources:

“J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 5 Oct. 2015, www.biography.com/people/j-robert-oppenheimer-9429168.

“J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Jan. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer.

Author: Matthew Rhea

Pre-War

Before his involvement with The Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi spent his early life as a professor of physics at the University of Pisa in Italy. It was during this time and Fermi’s following professorship in 1927 at the University of Rome where he developed heavy interests in the field of nuclear and particle physics.

Before the professorship, he discovered the Statistical Laws. Known nowadays at Fermi Statistics. These laws describe principles which govern the behavior of particles contingent on Pauli’s Exclusion Principle — a principle which states that any number of identical fermions are not able to be in the same quantum state in the same system simultaneously. Following this discovery was his election as a professor until 1938 where, after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons” [1], Fermi fled Italy to America.

Fermi first arrived in New York where he became a professor at Columbia University in 1939. From this university, he continued his work on nuclear fission with support from the Uranium Committee – and later by its successor, the National Defense Research Committee, both agencies within the United States’ government. With help from the Columbia University football team, Fermi worked on building chain reaction piles of graphite and uranium. These piles were named quite literally. The scientists and football team layered uranium and graphite. More on the construction of the piles will be later when the more prominent one, the Chicago Pile-1, is discussed.

During the War

At the peak of World War II in 1942, Fermi moved to Chicago to work within the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. Similarly, he recruited the football team to developed Chicago Pile-1 which became the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear reaction on December 2, 1942. Essentially, layers of graphite bricks were construction on top of a wood framing. Many of the graphite bricks had holes drilled into them to make space for uranium to be placed insides. With each uranium filled brick, there were neighboring “dead uranium” [2] bricks. In order to control the nuclear reaction, some of the graphite bricks has much larger holes drilled in (upwards of fourteen feet) to contain cadmium, which would cause the reaction to go critical if removed from the pile.

The Chicago Pile-1 was the model nuclear reactor for following reactors such as the X-10 Graphite Reactor and the B Reactor at Hanford. With its success, Fermi saw a similar success and was recruited by J. Robert Oppenheimer for the Manhattan project in 1944. After recruitment, Fermi saw himself become the Associate Director of the laboratory at Los Alamos. He was placed in F Division at the laboratory, and oversaw much of the theoretical and nuclear physics at the lab. Within this division, there were four branches: F-1, F2, F-3, and F-4. Of which, Fermi has a part in all of the events. F-1 oversaw the thermonuclear bomb, F-2 contained the aqueous homogeneous research reactor, F-3 was Super Experimentation, and F-4 studied nuclear fission [3].

Post War

After the war and his work at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Fermi became a professor at the Institute for Nuclear Studies division of the University of Chicago. From this point on, in 1946, Fermi remained a professor until death in 1954. During his time there he focused on high-energy physics.

Citations

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1938/

[2] https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/chicago-pile-1

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi#Manhattan_Project

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle

[5] https://www.atomicheritage.org/article/manhattan-project-spotlight-enrico-fermi

[6] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1938/fermi-bio.html

 

 

Klaus Fuchs was born into a Lutheran family in 1911 and “had a very happy childhood”. One of the biggest take aways from his father “always did what he believed to be the right thing to do and always told us that we were to go our own way, even if he disagreed”. While studying Physics at the University of Leipzig, his political affiliations evolved, first the SPD (Social Democratic Party, a moderate social-democratic ideas and policies). During the rise of Hitler, Fuchs was expelled from the SPD for backing a communist candidate and joined the Communist party because he felt he “had to be in some organization”. Upon the burning of the Reichtstag (which was blamed on the Communists) Fuchs “was ready to accept the philosophy that the party was right and that in the coming struggle you could not permit your self any doubts after the Party made their decision”. Fuchs was sent out of Germany by the Communist Party because they said “technical knowledge” would be needed for a “Communist Germany”. He went first to France and then to England where he finished his doctorate in Physics from the University of Bristol and was invited to study at Edinburgh University. Fuchs became a UK citizen in 1942 based on a request of asylum from the Nazis. (Quotes taken from his confession^{[5 Appendix]}.)

After hostilities between Germany and Britain started, Prime Minister Churchill interned the approximate 20,000 German Nationals living in the British Isles. This included Fuchs who was sent to Canada (Similar to the USA interment of Japanese, German and Italian citizens during WW2). Fuchs “felt no bitterness by the internment, because [he] could understand that it was necessary”.

Fuchs was released from the internment camp to work on England’s Atomic bomb effort with Professor Peierls at Birmingham. When he learned of the true nature of the work he “decided to inform Russia” of what he was working on. During this time England and USA worked together sharing information and Peierls and Fuchs worked on a Uranium-237 device.

In August 1944 Professor Peierls and Fuchs were invited to join the Manhattan project in Los Alamos in the Theoretical Division where they were to focus on the Plutonium Fission device. It was during this time that he gave information to the Russians through a Russian agent whom he knew as Raymond (his actual name was Harry Gold). The information he provided included hard data collected on the materials, as well as the explosive lensing ideas and the difficulties they were having making it work. There is little doubt that this helped the Soviet scientists. While the Soviets had also decided upon using Plutonium, they were significantly farther behind regarding how to make Plutonium reliably explode. During this time, Gold offered Fuchs $1,500 for his information, but Fuchs refused to take the money.

Unbeknownst to Fuchs, he was not alone in thinking that the USA should share the bomb with Russia. Political efforts through the Supreme Court all the way to President Rosevelt implored him to share the bomb technology with Russia. Knowing that the Russians would come up with their own design within a few years, and that “not sharing would sow the seeds of future conflict”^{[5 p.78]}.

After the end of the WW2, Fuchs went back to England to lead the Theoretical Physics department at Englands Atomic Energy Research Establishment, August 1, 1946. He sent a letter to his father “I only hope that we can concentrate on the peacetime use of this tremendous force in the future”^{[5 p.95]}. During this time Fuchs provided information to the Russians 6 times over 2 years and accepted a small payment of 100 UK pounds to assure the Russians about his commitment and loyalty. The one large piece of information that Fuchs provided was that the UK was building their own atomic weapon before this was known to the UK people.

September 23, 1949, the White House and 10 Downing St said “We have evidence that in the recent weeks, an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR”. Few people has expected that the Soviets would be able to complete an atomic bomb so soon. The common expectation would that it would have been expected in several more years.

Also in September 1949, the US Army Signals Corp (the former name of the NSA) under the highly classified VENONA project was able to decrypt a message from London to Moscow that has been sent in 1941 that described a meeting between Fuchs and the USSR GRU agent where Fuchs offers to help the Soviets. That message was important because it used Fuchs name directly instead of a pseudonym which was a significant operational mistake. Other messages from February and June 1944 were also decrypted discussing the organization of the atomic bomb project and passing a document “Fluctuations and the Efficiency of a Diffusion Plant” to the Russians^{[1 p. 227-229]}. Determining the source of the leaker of the subsequent documents was difficult because of the proper use of pseudonyms. In October 1949 the FBI pieced together that one of the pseudonyms was probably Fuchs.

This information was passed to UK MI5 and an agent was dispatched to talk to Fuchs in December 1949. At this point, Fuchs was suspected of providing one or two documents. The interview was continued on and off over several weeks until on January 23, 1950 Fuchs felt compelled to confess. Fuchs said “I started in 1942 and had my last meeting last year”. The extent of the spying came as a significant surprise!

Fuchs dictated his confession, was arrested, was tried and found guilty. Before sentencing, Fuchs admitted he had “committed certain crimes” and expected to be sentenced. He also said he believed he had been given “a fair trial”. Given that the majority of time that Fuchs was spying for the Russians, the Russians were allies of the UK, the Judge sentenced him to the maximum penalty of 14 years (instead of the death penalty which Fuchs thought was a real possibility). While in prison Fuchs cooperated with the UK authorities to determine what he provided and he also identified Harry Gold as his intermediary. Harry Gold was also arrested and led US agents to other Atomic spies. Fuchs served his sentence and with good behavior was released after 9 years.

Fuchs immediately emigrated to East Germany where he resumed his work. Fuchs was elected to the GDR’s Academy of Science, the Communist Party Central Committee, awarded the Order of Merit of the Fatherland, the Order of Karl Marx and received a letter from the GDR’s Communist leader celebrating his 70th birthday saying “you can look back on a successful career as a Communist, scientist and university teacher”.

Fuchs passed away in 1988.

Footnotes

1. H. Rommerstein, E. Breindel. The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and Americas Traitor’s, 2001, Regnery Publishing
2. AtomicArchive biography of Klaus Fuchs, accessed Dec 27, 2017
3. Wikipedia page for Klaus Fuchs, accessed Dec 27, 2017
4. Williams, Robert Chadwell, Klaus Fuchs: Atom Spy, 1987, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-50540-9
5. Moss, Norman, Klaus Fuchs: the man who stole the atom bomb, 1987, Grafton

 

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. There are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on.” – Richard Feynman

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it” – Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman was a legendary theoretical physicist, educator, and writer.  He is most famous for winning the Nobel Prize for Physics as part of the team that discovered Quantum Electrodynamics, developing the eponymous Feynman Diagrams that are commonly used to show the interactions of subatomic particles, and his role in the Challenger Investigation. But he is most beloved for his writing, his self depreciating manner, his impish and idiosyncratic sense of humor — during his time at Los Alamos he would figure out the combinations of his peers lockers and leave them notes inside —, his love of drums, and his voice as a lucid educator of the public — most famously during the aforementioned Challenger investigation. Science might eventually get over it’s massive crush on Feynman but don’t expect it to happen any time soon.

Youth

He was born in Far Rockaway a town in Queens on May 11, 1918 to Russian and Polish Jewish Immigrants. He kept the thick New York accent for the rest of his life. During his youth he would teach himself a wide verity of advanced mathematics, and would invent his own symbols for log, sin, cos, as well as the inverse trig functions because he didn’t like how they looked like three variables multiplied together. He also built a variety of rudimentary electronics including a homemade burglar alarm that freaked his parents when they set it off out one night. Using this knowledge he became the neighborhood handy-boy fixing friends and relatives radios. When he was 9 years old, his mother gave birth to a younger sister Joan. While their mother would discourage Joan from pursuing science because she believed that women didn’t have the “cranial capacity”. Richard however encouraged her and she is now a mostly retired but highly respected astrophysicist.

Manhatten Project

During the lead up to WW2 he worked on building mechanical computers used in calculating ballistics problems, until the problem became how to time a shell when the fuse wouldn’t burn. After leaving he was brought onto the Manhattan Project by Bob Wilson. Members of his team were told not to buy train tickets for Albuquerque because all the physicists going to the middle of nowhere would raise suspicions. Feynman reasoned that if everyone else bought tickets going elsewhere he could buy a ticket there without it raising eyebrows. Consequently he and his wife were some of the first to arrive. His wife Arline was slowly dying from tuberculosis, and Feynman’s regular visits to town to go see her inspired Klaus Fuchs, whose car Feynman was using, to say that he thought Feynman was the most likely person at Los Alamos to be a traitor. Funnily enough Klaus was the one who was later discovered as a spy. While at Los Alamos Feynman worked on a variety of projects. These included developing the formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb alongside Hans Bethe, and helping supervise the computers, both human and digital. He lead the team working the big IBM machines doing the heavy calculations.

Throughout his time at Los Alamos he was a strong proponent of explaining to people how things actually worked because it allowed them to be way better at their jobs. He also tried to raise awareness of the shabby state of physical security in the Lab by breaking into locked filing cabinets, desk drawers, and even safes. It was during this time that he gained his reputation as a prankster (he would leave notes in people’s cabinets letting them know that he’d borrowed their classified files) and as a skilled safecracker. When one of Feynman’s friends, Frederic de Hoffman, was working declassifying files Feynman broke into his filing cabinets that contained all the knowledge required to develop a functioning bomb and nearly gave the poor man a heart attack. The combination to all of these cases had been the first 6 digits of e.

A month before the Trinity Test Arliene died. During the Trinity Test Feynman choose not to wear the heavy glasses provided to observe the explosion. Instead relying on the windshield to filter out the blast of UV radiation. This didn’t work as well as he’d hoped and the flash was so bright that even after he ducked he saw a purple splotch of an after image on the floor of the car. According to Feynman he was probably the only one who “saw it with the human eye” because everyone else was wearing dark glasses and/or lying on the floor.

Teaching

After the war Feynman left Los Alamos to teach at Cornell. On his first night there all the hotels were full. He thought about sleeping in some leaves outside but decided against it because he was trying to act dignified. He ended up sleeping on a couch in the lounge of one of the buildings. During this time he briefly lost his mojo before re-approaching physics from the direction of play. He was inspired by the wobbling of a plate that a student was tossing in the air to go back and play with the stuff that would eventually become Quantum Electrodynamics.

A few years later Caltech asked Feynman to come teach there setting off a frankly ridiculous bidding war between Cornell and Caltech which Caltech won when they offered to let him have a Sabbatical year before he even started working. He spent that Sabbatical in Brazil teaching physics and learning how to play the frigideira which is a frying pan that is used as a percussion instrument in Samba music. He got good enough at it that he became part of a local samba band and played during Carnival. While in Brazil he also proposed to his second wife. Upon returning he did professoring things for a while. Among other thing he learned to draw and paint, did his grading in strip clubs, asked female students if they would do nude modelling for him (different times I guess? Though honestly still pretty blech), and did the work that would eventually win him his Nobel prize.

My Grandfather went to Caltech on the GI bill after working as a radar technician in Britain after WW2. While there he had the great privilege of taking one of his upper div physics classes from Feynman. Apparently he was a masterful lecturer but a poor giver of tests. During the course Feynman assigned no homework, and for the final put just a few big problems on the board that he thought up off the top of his head. They were exceptionally hard and my Grandfather spent the whole time working on one of them. Very few people managed to solve even one. He did managed to solve one and got a C in the class.

He was reluctant to accept the Prize. He cancelled the big reception party that he was supposed to throw, had serious anxiety over writing his speech, and resented the notoriety he gained from winning. He would later bill himself as Professor Henry Warren from the University of Washington at events at UC Irvine so that only students actually interested in the science would show up.

Challenger

The last great story of Feynman’s career was his role in the Challenger Investigation. In 1986 the Challenger space shuttle blew up in flight in one of the most famous disasters in aerospace history. Feynman was invited to join the investigation which he reluctantly did despite bad experience with other Washington boards and doubts that he would contribute much. However he became even more famous for his display in one of the early hearings. He took a piece of the rubber used in the seal dipped it in ice water and then showed how it lost its flexibility. This was later concluded to be one of the leading factors in the rupture of the O-ring seal which caused the accident.

Conclusion

Feynman is and always will be a legend. He was a giant of his age. Much of modern physics can trace a direct line to his work. He was a consummate adventurer, a brilliant and inspiring writer, a great wit, and a clear and enthusiastic educator. He wasn’t one of the top dogs at Los Alamos, but he did play an important role. His words and work are still easily accessible and if you find yourself looking for joy in understanding the world around you I’d recommend taking a look. Or if you just want some good belly laughs take a look read through his book of hysterical personal anecdotes “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynmann”.

Sources:
Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman
Wikipedia: Richard Feynman
Encyclopedia Brittanica

Background:

Hans Albrecht Bethe was born in 1906 in Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine. Which was then part of Germany. He attended the University of Frankfurt for two years and Munich for two and a half years. Eventually receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical physics with a thesis on electron diffraction in crystals.

Bethe then became a physics teacher in Frankfurt and Stuttgart. He worked at the University of Munich from 29 to fall ’33 becoming a Privatdozent (equivalent to a lecturer at UCSC) in May 1930. When the Nazi party rose to power he was dismissed from his position as acting assistant professor at the University of Tubingen. He first immigrated to England in the fall of 1933 to fill a temporary position at the University of Manchester and in 1935 immigrated to the United States to become an Assistant professor at Cornell. Later becoming a full professor in 1937.

He participated in the Washington conferences on Theoretical physics in 1935 and 1937. In the 1938 conference on stellar energy generation he participated in the development of proton-proton cycle. Inadequacies with the proton-proton cycle led him to pursue a model that would account for elements heavier than helium. Bethe was later awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967 for his 1939 paper on energy generation in stars which described the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle.

World War 2 and the Manhattan Project:

At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 Bethe wished to contribute to the war effort but could not work on anything that required a security clearance. Initially he worked with George Winter, an Austrian engineer specializing in the elasticity of steel, to write a paper on armor plate deformation. This was never published as it was marked as potentially significant to the war effort and therefore classified. Around the same time he wrote a paper with Edward Teller (see the Edward Teller entry) concerning how gases restore equilibrium in the wake of a shockwave.

Bethe became a US citizen in early 1941 and by the end of the year had received clearance to work on classified projects. He spent a year at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT working on radar technology. In 1943 he became the head of the Los Alamos Laboratory’s theoretical division. In this role he oversaw assessing the theoretical behavior of the evolving bomb designs. Including preliminary calculations to determine whether or not a bomb would ignite the atmosphere, calculation of critical mass, formulas for a bomb’s yield, and hydrodynamic aspects of an implosion device.

Postwar:

After the development of uranium and plutonium fission weapons he was involved with the development of the Teller-Ulam design. Outside of nuclear research went to do work in both quantum mechanics and astrophysics. Performing the calculation that verified the existence of Lamb Shift in August 1947. Even into his nineties he was still doing work pertaining to the properties of neutrinos emitted by the sun and with Gerald Brown researched why massive stars turn into supernovas.

Politically Bethe became a proponent of nuclear arms control and safe applications of nuclear power. He served on the President’s Science Advisory committee and helped to persuade President Eisenhower to support the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. In the 1970’s and 1980’s he was an opponent of proposed anti-ICBM systems and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (The “star wars” program).

References:

Brown, Gerald E.; Lee, Sabine (2009). Hans Albrecht Bethe. Biographical Memoirs. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/bethe-hans.pdf [Accessed 1/2/2018]

Nobelprize.org. “Hans Bethe – Biographical”. [online] Available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1967/bethe-bio.html [Accessed 1/2/2018]

Encyclopedia Britannica. (2018). Hans Bethe. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hans-Bethe [Accessed 1/4/2018]

Wikipedia.[2018]. Hans Bethe.[online]Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bethe [Accessed 1/2/2018]

Stanislaw Ulam was a Polish mathematician, known for a number of mathematical ideas (most notably the Monte Carlo method) as well as his significant contributions to the U.S. nuclear program.

Pre-war:
Stanisław Marcin Ulam was born in Galicia (now part of Poland) in 1909. An early interest in mathematics led him to study at the Lwów Polytechnic National University. He achieved some successes, which led him to travels to the United States; this eventually led to study at Harvard, and a friendship with John von Neumann. Ulam returned to the United States after a summer in Poland in August 1939, days before the German invasion of Poland.

The Manhattan Project:
In 1943, Ulam was invited by John von Neumann to join the Manhattan Project. His early work in the project focused on studying the hydrodynamic properties of implosions, which allowed the creation of the plutonium-based “Fat Man” bomb; without calculations like his, a plutonium weapon would not have been possible, and large amounts of uranium would have to be produced for a second bomb.

Post-war:
Ulam then teamed up with Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi to design a “Super” bomb — a device based on nuclear fusion rather than fission, and boasting far higher theoretical yields than fission-based weapons. This culminated in the Teller-Ulam design, in which multiple fission or fusion stages transfer energy to trigger a more powerful stage (most modern thermonuclear weapons use this design with a fission first stage that triggers a secondary hydrogen fusion stage). This work lead to the world’s first hydrogen bomb, tested by the United States in 1952.

Ulam wrote in his autobiography that he felt no “political, moral, or sociological” concerns about his work on the H-bomb: it was clear that “A-bombs of enormous size could be made” and the H-bomb was not qualitatively different in terms of destructive potential. At the very least, he felt that it would be better to examine the possibility himself rather than wait for “Russians or others” to do it.

Ulam left the field of nuclear research and continued to perform mathematical research until his death in 1984.

References:

Wikipedia: Stanislaw Ulam

Wikipedia: History of the Teller-Ulam Design

Ulam, Stanisław (1983). Adventures of a Mathematician. (autobiography).

PHYSICIST LUIS ALVAREZ IS SEEN IS HIS LABORATORY PREPARING TO EVACUATE A GEIGER COUNTER. IMAGE © BETTMANN/CORBIS

Luis Alvarez and his life as “an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968” was fascinating to research. He had published 22 patents, gotten involved with the Manhattan project during WWII as well as some of the technology helping the allies during the war. Listening to Alvarez’s life story gave me inspiration in many different ways.

Luis Alvarez was born on June 13th, 1911. His parents were Walter C. Alvarez and Harriet Smyth Alvarez. His father was a physician who conducted research. He became known as the American family doctor pretty soon on the newspaper, and had a great deal of influence on Alvarez. In Alvarez’s own words, he noted that “My father advised me to sit every few months in my reading chair for an entire evening, close my eyes, and try to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously and have been glad ever since I did.”

After attending University of Chicago for three years, Alvarez decided that chemistry did not suit him well enough for his declared major. He decided to switch over to physics after encountering the class “Advanced Experimental Physics Light”, and had to take twelve physics classes in five quarters. He then graduated with a BS in physics in 1932, MS in 1934, and a PhD in 1936. However, Alvarez concluded that his academics did not prepare him well enough for what was to come.

Alvarez achieved major discoveries, especially with cosmic rays and minuscule particles. He co-discovered the East-West effect in cosmic rays, which allowed scientists to conclude that the cosmic rays were charged with positive particles when the popular opinion at the time was quite the opposite. Alvarez also gave the first practical demonstration of k-capture in 1937, showing that atoms could decay when they absorb an electron from the lowest electron layer called the k-layer. This idea was theorized before, but Alvarez was the first one to prove it by demonstration.

To prepare for WWII wars, Alvarez left California to head towards Cambridge in November 11, 1940. While staying in MIT, he developed the radar technology that was used to track down German U-boats. When the Germans also installed some radar technology on their boats, Alvarez came up with an enhanced Vixen system which let the ally planes fool their radar technology. The Vixen system made the planes seem like they were moving away from the boats on radar, which in reality was the opposite. Alvarez, using similar methods, also created a safer system for the allies to guide their planes in during harsh weather. After a long trial and error stage, the system was able to let the crew on ground measure the exact angle the planes were in with the ground, and give instructions to bring them down securely.

In 1943,  Alvarez left MIT and joined the Manhattan project. Before joining the Los Alamos Lab to work on the steering committee for the nuclear bombs, he worked in Chicago with some others to develop a chain reaction that has to set off in nuclear bombs. Most of Alvarez’s work in the Los Alamos lab was on the plutonium bombs, although he did test both the uranium and plutonium bombs. His main job was to create a detonator for the bombs. The first bomb, created for testing purpose, that they worked on was named “The Gadget”. It was an implosion-design plutonium bomb. The Gadget was set off in what is now known as Trinity Site. Once the test was finished, Alvarez and other scientists moved to the islands of Tinian, where they prepared the bombs and the bombers for their eventual missions. 

On August 6, 1945, Alvarez rode on B-29 aircraft with the bombers.  Unlike others, Alvarez did not wear a parachute. He, in his self-written biography, stated that if the plane was to be shot down, he did not want to be captured alive. Alvarez witnessed the Little Boy being dropped on Hiroshima, and felt that he had to write a letter to his four year old son. These are his exact words.

“What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming  thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars. Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of high explosives would have that effect by making wars too terrible. But unfortunately it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many times worse that it may realize Nobel’s dream.”

The Fat Man was dropped on August 9, 1945. Alvarez boarded not on the bomber plane this time, but on a small plane next to the B-29 Bockscar with many other physicists. Right before the bomb was dropped, Alvarez and others sent down a canister holding telemetry devices and a letter. In the letter,  addressed to Japanese nuclear physicist Ryokichi Sagane—a man Alvarez had worked with before in Berkeley, Alvarez and the others pleaded Sagane to use his influence to reach his leaders and generals to stop the war. They had noted how strong the nuclear weapon was, and that Japanese cities would be totally annihilated if the war continued this way.

After the peace treaty was signed, Alvarez, like many other scientists who worked on the nuclear bomb, was horrified of the results. There were many controversial talks of if the Fat Man was really necessary, and Alvarez believed it indeed was, rather than the more popular contrary belief. He believed that because it did not take long for them to use the second weapon, it scared other countries enough to surrender into making peace. He also believed that Nagasaki and Hiroshima would have been depleted by other measures, if not by nuclear bombs. 

In his later years, Alvarez focused his efforts on high energy atomic research. He met with Donald Glaser, the founder of the Bubble Chamber, to study the device. Bubble Chamber was a device that allowed the scientists to track the movements of the particles inside a glass tube by the bubbles they created while moving around. When Alvarez was starting out with his studies for particles, he started with a Bubble Chamber about an inch wide. Later, he was working with glass tubes that measured seventy-two inches. He also switched the fluid inside the tube to hydrogen. Since hydrogen is 2500 degrees below Celsius, as the particles moved around, they boiled hydrogen to make bubbles. Using this technology, Alvarez discovered a lot of elementary particles, including the short-lived resonant state particles. Alvarez won a Nobel Prize for his discoveries of elementary particles, and will be remembered most for making a lot of particle physics possible.

While Alvarez was truly a genius man, death had taken him on September 1, 1988 by cancer. Alvarez had left many discoveries and advancements in technology for us to develop more, and he shall be admired for all his hard work.

I believe that the legacy that Alvarez left is not only his amazing work, but his respect towards science is honorable as well. Richard Muller, who was a PhD student working under Alvarez, wrote a book named Nemesis, the Death Star, which had a chapter and short references in the beginning and throughout the book about his experiences with Alvarez. Muller and Alvarez seemed to have an argument on whose opinion on an academic paper was right. During the heated discussion, Muller argued that there could be a model to disapprove Alvarez’s argument, to which Alvarez described the thought process “no-think,” only because it was purely hypothetical to his eyes. When Muller did come up with a model that was built on half-sincerity, Alvarez quickly retracted his arguments and took it seriously enough to examine if there are any flaws. He later admitted that he would have had an answer had Muller proposed another model, but the model that Muller came up with surprised him and that he hadn’t been considering the chance at all. The air in the room seemed to chill, and they started to think seriously about the chances of the model being a reality. Alvarez was quick to retract his words and give his honest opinions on what he thought; he was willing to lose a debate if it meant for the correctness of science.

Aside from his many accomplishments and other thoughts about Alvarez, I think this quote of him talking about one of his high school stories displays his character the best:

“In Rochester, a friend and I used to climb the buildings under construction, usually by sneaking past the guards in the middle of the night. We climbed the three hundred foot clinic tower when it was only a skeleton of steel beams. We explored the power house and scaled the inside of its 200 foot brake smokestack. I mentioned these escapades not to brag about being a scofflaw, but only because I’m convinced that it controlled disrespect for society is essential to a scientist. All the good experimental physicist I have known have had an intense curiosity that no keep-out sign could mute. “

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Bibliography

Wilson, T. V., & Frey, H. (2013, September 23). Luis W. Alvarez, Pt. 1 [Audio blog post]. Retrieved December 23, 2017, from https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/luis-w-alvarez-pt-1.html

Wilson, T. V., & Frey, H. (2013, September 23). Luis W. Alvarez, Pt. 2 [Audio blog post]. Retrieved December 23, 2017, from https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/luis-w-alvarez-pt-2.html

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. (2017, April 10). Luis Alvarez. Retrieved December 23, 2017, from http://www.britannica.com/biography/Luis-Alvarez

Muller, R. (1998). Nemesis, the death star. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

 

Written by Romeo.