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WINTER 2013 - Volume 60, Number 4 the Air Force Historical Foundation Founded on May 27, 1953 by Gen Carl A
WINTER 2013 - Volume 60, Number 4 WWW.AFHISTORICALFOUNDATION.ORG The Air Force Historical Foundation Founded on May 27, 1953 by Gen Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS and other air power pioneers, the Air Force Historical All members receive our exciting and informative Foundation (AFHF) is a nonprofi t tax exempt organization. Air Power History Journal, either electronically or It is dedicated to the preservation, perpetuation and on paper, covering: all aspects of aerospace history appropriate publication of the history and traditions of American aviation, with emphasis on the U.S. Air Force, its • Chronicles the great campaigns and predecessor organizations, and the men and women whose the great leaders lives and dreams were devoted to fl ight. The Foundation • Eyewitness accounts and historical articles serves all components of the United States Air Force— Active, Reserve and Air National Guard. • In depth resources to museums and activities, to keep members connected to the latest and AFHF strives to make available to the public and greatest events. today’s government planners and decision makers information that is relevant and informative about Preserve the legacy, stay connected: all aspects of air and space power. By doing so, the • Membership helps preserve the legacy of current Foundation hopes to assure the nation profi ts from past and future US air force personnel. experiences as it helps keep the U.S. Air Force the most modern and effective military force in the world. • Provides reliable and accurate accounts of historical events. The Foundation’s four primary activities include a quarterly journal Air Power History, a book program, a • Establish connections between generations. -
The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952
Igniting The Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952 by Anne Fitzpatrick Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES Approved: Joseph C. Pitt, Chair Richard M. Burian Burton I. Kaufman Albert E. Moyer Richard Hirsh June 23, 1998 Blacksburg, Virginia Keywords: Nuclear Weapons, Computing, Physics, Los Alamos National Laboratory Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952 by Anne Fitzpatrick Committee Chairman: Joseph C. Pitt Science and Technology Studies (ABSTRACT) The American system of nuclear weapons research and development was conceived and developed not as a result of technological determinism, but by a number of individual architects who promoted the growth of this large technologically-based complex. While some of the technological artifacts of this system, such as the fission weapons used in World War II, have been the subject of many historical studies, their technical successors -- fusion (or hydrogen) devices -- are representative of the largely unstudied highly secret realms of nuclear weapons science and engineering. In the postwar period a small number of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory’s staff and affiliates were responsible for theoretical work on fusion weapons, yet the program was subject to both the provisions and constraints of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, of which Los Alamos was a part. The Commission leadership’s struggle to establish a mission for its network of laboratories, least of all to keep them operating, affected Los Alamos’s leaders’ decisions as to the course of weapons design and development projects. -
Revisiting the Los Alamos Primer B
Revisiting The Los Alamos Primer B. Cameron Reed Citation: Physics Today 70, 9, 42 (2017); View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3692 View Table of Contents: http://physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/70/9 Published by the American Institute of Physics Articles you may be interested in In the digital age, physics students and professors prefer paper textbooks Physics Today 70, 30 (2017); 10.1063/PT.3.3657 Clippers, yachts, and the false promise of the wave line Physics Today 70, 52 (2017); 10.1063/PT.3.3627 Interplanetary sand traps Physics Today 70, 78 (2017); 10.1063/PT.3.3672 The new Moon Physics Today 70, 38 (2017); 10.1063/PT.3.3593 Mobilizing US physics in World War I Physics Today 70, 44 (2017); 10.1063/PT.3.3660 A thermodynamic theory of granular material endures Physics Today 70, 20 (2017); 10.1063/PT.3.3682 Cameron Reed is a professor of physics at Alma College in Michigan. REVISITING B. Cameron Reed A concise packet of lecture notes offers a window into one of the turning points of 20th-century history. n April 1943, scientists began gathering at a top-secret new laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to design and build the world’s first atomic bombs. Most of them had been involved in nuclear fission research, but due to secrecy restrictions, few had any sense of the immensity of the project they were about to undertake. Their goal was to leverage the phenomenon of nuclear fission, discovered only four years earlier, to produce nuclear weapons in time to affect World War II. -
The Development of the Quantum-Mechanical Electron Theory of Metals: 1928---1933
The development of the quantum-mechanical electron theory of metals: 1S28—1933 Lillian Hoddeson and Gordon Bayrn Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, illinois 6180f Michael Eckert Deutsches Museum, Postfach 260102, 0-8000 Munich 26, Federal Republic of Germany We trace the fundamental developments and events, in their intellectual as well as institutional settings, of the emergence of the quantum-mechanical electron theory of metals from 1928 to 1933. This paper contin- ues an earlier study of the first phase of the development —from 1926 to 1928—devoted to finding the gen- eral quantum-mechanical framework. Solid state, by providing a large and ready number of concrete prob- lems, functioned during the period treated here as a target of application for the recently developed quan- tum mechanics; a rush of interrelated successes by numerous theoretical physicists, including Bethe, Bloch, Heisenberg, Peierls, Landau, Slater, and Wilson, established in these years the network of concepts that structure the modern quantum theory of solids. We focus on three examples: band theory, magnetism, and superconductivity, the former two immediate successes of the quantum theory, the latter a persistent failure in this period. The history revolves in large part around the theoretical physics institutes of the Universi- ties of Munich, under Sommerfeld, Leipzig under Heisenberg, and the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich under Pauli. The year 1933 marked both a climax and a transition; as the lay- ing of foundations reached a temporary conclusion, attention began to shift from general formulations to computation of the properties of particular solids. CONTENTS mechanics of electrons in a crystal lattice (Bloch, 1928); these were followed by the further development in Introduction 287 1928—1933 of the quantum-mechanical basis of the I. -
Who Invented the Trinity Nuclear Test's Christy Gadget?
Submission for ANS NT issue, LA-UR-20-27638 version 3 Who Invented the Trinity Nuclear Test’s Christy Gadget? Patents and Evidence from the Archives Thomas A. Chadwick* and M.B. Chadwick Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, NM 87545 Abstract: The Christy Gadget is the informal name for the plutonium device detonated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. In September 1944, Robert Christy, working in the theoretical implosion group, proposed a novel concept that altered the design of the nuclear core in Fat Man. While scientists originally intended to use a hollow sphere of plutonium, this design entailed substantial risk, due to the likelihood of asymmetries resulting from implosion. Christy proposed changing the design to a solid sphere of plutonium with a modulated neutron source, and the design was eventually adopted, tested at Trinity, and used in the attack on Nagasaki. While there is no question regarding the important role that Christy played in demonstrating its feasibility as a reliable design, there is a debate as to who initially proposed the idea; though most sources have attributed this invention to Christy, some historical sources have attributed credit to Christy’s group leader, Rudolf Peierls, or indeed other scientists. This paper seeks to outline and resolve this dispute. We present new unclassified evidence extracted from previously unavailable sources (to unclassified audiences) from the National Security Research Center archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This evidence consists of 1945–1946 patent documentation, oral history interview tapes of Christy and Peierls, and monthly 1944 progress reports from the Theoretical Division. -
Download Exhibit
Superconductivity - Moments of Discovery Moments of Discovery Home | Discovery of Fission | A Pulsar Discovery | Superconductivity | Site Map Introduction (Slichter) > Superconductivity: So simple, yet so hard to explain! For half a century the world’s most brilliant physics theorists tried scribbling equations, only to crumple the paper and hurl it at a wastebasket. Bend a metal wire into a circle, make it as cold as you possibly can, and set an electric current moving around it. The current can persist. Put the circle of wire above a magnet, and it will float there until the end of the world. In the decades after this strange discovery, physicists figured out the laws of relativity and quantum mechanics. They worked out equations to calculate all the colors and chemistry of the natural world, they cracked open the atomic nucleus, they uncovered the forces that light the stars... and still nobody had explained that little floating wire. This exhibit tells how three extraordinary minds worked together to finally solve the puzzle. You will see that getting to a new theory may take not just one "Moment of Discovery" but a string of dozens of such moments among many people. For a personal account, listen to Bob Schrieffer, the youngest of the team, tell what happened in his own words. To get the full background, you can read or listen to how a noted physicist saw the story from an outside perspective. You can also read a detailed account by a historian of physics, and explore other supplementary materials. Physics students and scientists -
For Slow Neutrons, Slow Pay: Enrico Fermi's Patent and the US Atomic
This is a repository copy of For Slow Neutrons, Slow Pay: Enrico Fermi’s Patent and the US Atomic Energy Program, 1938-1953. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/4609/ Article: Turchetti, Simone (2006) For Slow Neutrons, Slow Pay: Enrico Fermi’s Patent and the US Atomic Energy Program, 1938-1953. Isis, 97 (1). pp. 1-28. ISSN 0021-1753 https://doi.org/10.1086/501097 Reuse See Attached Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ “For Slow Neutrons, Slow Pay” Enrico Fermi’s Patent and the U.S. Atomic Energy Program, 1938–1953 By Simone Turchetti* ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the history of one of the “atomic patents.” The patent, which de- scribed a process to slow down neutrons in nuclear reactions, was the result of experimental research conducted in the 1930s by Enrico Fermi and his group at the Institute of Physics, University of Rome. The value of the patented process became clear during World War II, as it was involved in most of the military and industrial applications of atomic energy. This ignited a controversy between Fermi and U.S. government representatives over roy- alties to be paid for use of the process during and after the war. The controversy sheds new light on the role that the management of patents played in the context of the Man- hattan Project and in the postwar U.S. -
From Robert R. Wilson's Frontier to Leon Lederman's Fermilab
FERMILAB-PUB-03-486-DO Vision to Reality: From Robert R. Wilson's Frontier to Leon Lederman's Fermilab Lillian Hoddeson and Adrienne Kolb* Abstract This paper examines the roles of vision and leadership in creating and directing Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from the late 1960s through the 1980s. The story divides into two administrations having different problems and accomplishments, that of Robert R. Wilson (1967-1978), which saw the transformation from cornfield to frontier physics facility, and that of Leon Max Lederman (1979-1989), in which the laboratory evolved into one of the world's major high-energy facilities. Lederman's pragmatic vision of a user-based experimental community helped him to convert the pioneering facility that Wilson had built frugally into a laboratory with a stable scientific, cultural, and funding environment. Keywords: Fermilab, high-energy physics, laboratory, particle accelerator, big science, Robert R. Wilson, Leon Max Lederman. Introduction In the fall of 1978, when Leon Max Lederman stepped into Robert Rathbun Wilson's shoes to become the second director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, he found them rather large. He could not think of walking in them comfortably. “I'm a good physicist," Lederman conceded, “but Bob is a great man."1 In 1967, Wilson had set out to design and build a facility of unprecedented scope and cost on the Illinois prairie. Its site was in Batavia, about thirty miles west of Chicago.2 By 1972, he had completed the accelerator known as the Main Ring, with an energy of 500 BeV (billion electron volts), more than double the agreed upon 200 BeV. -
Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer? Charisma and Complex Organization Charles Thorpe and Steven Shapin
ABSTRACT Charismatic authority flourishes in places where some social scientists evidently do not expect to find it - in late modernity and in highly complex and instrumentally orientated technoscientific organizations. This paper documents and interprets participants' testimony about the workings of wartime Los Alamos in relation to the charisma of its Scientific Director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. We treat charisma as an interactional accomplishment, and examine its r61e in technoscientific organizations. Los Alamos was a hybrid place, positioned at the intersection of military, industrial and academic forms. Everyday life there was marked by a high degree of normative uncertainty. Structures of authority, communication and the division of labour were contested and unclear. The interactional constitution of Oppenheimer as charismatic enabled him to articulate, vouch for and, finally, come to embody a conception of legitimate organizational order as collegial, egalitarian and communicatively open. We offer concluding speculations about the continuing importance of charismatic authority in contemporary technoscientific organizations. Just as normative uncertainty is endemic in late modernity, so too, we argue, is charisma. Keywords charismatic authority, leadership, military, science, technoscientific Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer? Charisma and Complex Organization Charles Thorpe and Steven Shapin A Magic Mountain Late in 1942 there began to grow up in the New Mexico high desert a site whose like the world had never seen before. It was the size of a small town, encompassing many of the institutions and mundane relations of similar small towns, yet its small-town neighbours miles away were not supposed to know it even existed. Officially, at least, some of the most illustrious people coming to live there changed their names and, supposedly, their public identities, upon entry. -
Materials Science
Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 27 September 2019 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Martin, Joseph D. (2015) 'What's in a name change?', Physics in perspective., 17 (1). pp. 3-32. Further information on publisher's website: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-014-0151-7 Publisher's copyright statement: This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Physics in Perspective. The nal authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-014-0151-7 Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk What’s in a Name Change? Solid State Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, and Materials Science Joseph D. Martin* Abstract: When solid state physics emerged in the 1940s its name was controversial. By the 1970s, some physicists came to prefer “condensed matter” as a way to identify the discipline of physics examining complex matter. -
Trinity B–29 Operations Three Weeks Before Hiroshima
THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB MISSION: TRINITY B–29 OPERATIONS THREE WEEKS BEFORE HIROSHIMA 4 AIR POWER History / WINTER 2013 Darrell F. Dvorak AIR POWER History / WINTER 2013 5 (Overleaf) The Silverplate n July 16, 1945, the world changed forever, Jun 42 Oppenheimer appointed Scientific Direc - first drop-test B–29 aircraft, at Muroc Army Air Field, but the moment was witnessed by little more tor of the Development of Substitute Materials February 1944. (Photo than 400 observers. Before dawn at a remote Project, forerunner of Manhattan. courtesy of Keith Shields.) Odesert test site in New Mexico, history’s first atomic Sep 42 Groves assumes command of Manhattan. bomb was exploded, culminating a top secret project Oct 42 Groves decides to centralize atomic bomb codenamed Trinity. It was 50 percent more powerful research at a single location and selects than the bomb that soon would be dropped on Oppenheimer to lead it. Hiroshima and almost equal to the one dropped on Nov 42 LAL site chosen in New Mexico. Nagasaki a few days later. As events unfolded, Apr 43 Initial research staffs move to LAL. Trinity’s success meant an end to World War II without an Allied invasion of Japan, saving untold Manhattan’s goal was to produce several numbers of lives. But even though this epic event atomic bombs in order to credibly threaten the Axis has been the subject of many scholarly works for powers with repeated atomic attacks as necessary more than sixty years, one important chapter of the to force their surrender. Later events validated that Trinity story is still incomplete. -
Biographical, Curriculu
15/13/57 Liberal Arts and Sciences History Department Lillian E. Hoddeson Papers, 1900-2001, 2010 Box 1: Biographical, Curriculum Vitae, 2010 Conferences Annual Meeting of History of Science Society/ History of Technology Society Atlanta, Georgia, 1975 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1976 (2 folders) Dallas, Texas, 1977 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1978 Toronto, Canada, 1980 Chicago, Illinois, 1984 Big Science Workshop, Stanford University, 1988-90 Illinois Colloquium, ca. 1974 International Congress of History of Science, Berkeley, California, 1985 International Congress of History of Science, Munich, Germany, 1989 Correspondence Beckman Institute Appointment, University of Illinois, 2006 Bell Labs publication in Physics Today, 1975-77 Duckworth, Eleanor, 1966-68 Heilbron, John and Bruce Wheaton, 1976 Karplus, Betty, 1971 Karplus, Robert, 1971 Kohler, Robert, 1984-85 Kranzberg, Melvin, 1972-80 Krieger, Martin, 1982 Spring Green Multimedia, 1975 University Centers for Rational Alternatives, Inc, 1969 Vosniadou, Stella, 1988-89 Course Teaching Syllabi, 1994-2006 Grants and Fellowships General, 1989-99 Guggenheim, 2000 National Science Foundation, 1982-99 Research Council, Rutgers, 1973-75 Rockefeller, 1976 Lectures and talks General, 1988-99 Interview in film “Superbomb,” 1987-89 Physics for Poets Technology Studies Seminar Series, M.I.T., 1975 15/13/57 2 Manuscripts General, ca. 1999 “Evolution of the American Physics Community,” book review of Daniel Kevles’ The Physicists. The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America. Alfred Knopf: New York, 1978. “The Evolution of Bell Laboratories’ Program in Basic Solid-State Physics Culminating in the Discovery of the Transistor, 1977-80 “Exact Solutions of the Integral Equations for the Anomalous Skin Effect and Cyclotron Resonance in Metals,”ca.