And researchers had developed the idea that maybe they might be evidence of the fissioning of uranium. He found all sorts of funny particles flying out, which he could not analyze, and which were found to have strange chemical properties. All during the middle ‘30s, Fermi had been subjecting many elements to irradiation by neutrons… By 1938, he was doing it with uranium. Glauber: That was a matter of security, of course.īut I quickly got a general impression of what might be in the air, because the story of fission had been really big just a few years earlier, in 1939. I met Feynman in the year 1943, when I arrived there.ĭrollette: And how old were you when you went to Los Alamos?ĭrollette: From the description you gave for an oral history about the Manhattan Project, it sounded like they didn’t tell you much about what you were getting into. He happened also to be possibly the brightest young mathematician in the place. He really made quite an entertainer of himself. You would often find that wherever people gathered for lunch, there would always be a little knot of about half-a-dozen women all in the corner, laughing-and in the center would be Feynman, telling stories. Glauber: Well, for all intents and purposes, he was the resident clown. (See below.) World War II security badge photo of Richard Feynman at the Manhattan Project. ( Laughs.) īut there was not much on simply recording the way people lived, and where we hung out.ĭrollette: I like that smirk on Feynman’s ID photo. So, there was very, very little photography devoted to the individuals.Īlthough there was a large photographic division, which photographed all the experiments-including all the failures, and there were vast numbers of those. You know, there was very little sense at Los Alamos at the time that any history was being enacted which would be of interest after the war was over. Īnd there’s a very young Richard Feynman. (Looks through array of photos on screen.) As you can see, each one has a name, an ID number, and a kind of small black-and-white photo-but at least they each show the individual faces of the people who worked there at the time. (Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.)ĭan Drollette Jr: To start things off, I thought we might look at these photos on my laptop of 1940s security ID badges from Los Alamos. Glauber describes what it felt like to be working there as a young physicist experience the overwhelming need for secrecy-and witness the test explosion of the first atomic bomb. In this interview, one of the last surviving eyewitnesses from the effort to build the first atomic bomb gives his impressions of that project’s driving force-the director of the Los Alamos lab, J. Sadly, he died a year-and-a-half later, in 2018. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics some years later, the 91-year-old Glauber attended the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, where he agreed to an interview with me. (It’s become a tradition for members of the audience to throw paper airplanes at the stage to celebrate the end of the night’s proceedings.) In addition to his research, Glauber was known for his sense of humor, such as being the official “keeper of the broom” at an annual mock scientific conference sponsored by what has been called the MAD magazine of science, where his role was to sweep the stage clean of paper airplanes. His work focused on a wide variety of topics, including quantum dynamics, the collisions of high-energy particles such as hadrons, and the behavior of light particles, especially in clarifying how light had the characteristics of a wave and a particle simultaneously. Glauber was one of the youngest scientists in the 1,400-person Los Alamos staff, and afterward he went on to a distinguished career in physics, earning a doctorate-and later becoming a professor-at Harvard University. His destination turned out to be a laboratory at Los Alamos, a part of the Manhattan Project, where he was assigned to work under groundbreaking theoretical physicist Hans Bethe to help calculate the smallest amount of fissionable material-the critical mass-needed to set off a sustained nuclear reaction. During the middle of World War II, teenage physics major Roy Glauber found himself plucked out of college on the East Coast and assigned to work at a mysterious new government research center in the far-off deserts of New Mexico.
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