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Manhattan Project Who's Who
Neils
Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1885. He went to the
University of Copenhagen where he studied physics and other scientific
subjects. While he was at the university he won the Gold medal of the
Royal Danish Academy of sciences. In 1911 he received his Ph.D. in
physics, and a year later he married Margaret Norland. Shortly after
he developed the theory of the electron envelope, which explained the
dimensions of an atom. This was important because he showed that the
(nucleus) of an atom was actually 1/10,000 of the size that scientists
had previously thought it was. He met Albert Einstein for the first
time in 1920. One year later he founded and directed the Institute of
Theoretic Physics. Bohr won the Nobel prize for physics in 1922 for
his work at uncovering the mysteries of the atom. In 1933, as Adolph
Hitler began to gain power, Bohr joined the "Danish Committee for The
Support of Intellectual Refugees" so as to be protected from the Nazi
regime. It was shortly after this that he made his first physics
lecture in Russia. In 1939 he presented his famous Bohr-Wheeler
theory of fission, he also explained that a fission chain reaction
needed the rare U-235 isotope to be successful, which would be a
valuable finding later during the Manhattan project.
In 1943 rejected an offer to work on the German atomic bomb and
escaped to Sweden and then London eventually ending up in the United
States to work on the Manhattan project. He was considered by many of
his fellow scientists to be the sage of the Manhattan project. Bohr
was not only concerned with creating the atomic bomb, he was also
concerned with making people aware of the power and destruction that
it could unleash. He published a "letter" to the United Nations in
1950 which asked them to help get rid of nuclear weapons on an
international scale. He received the order of the Elephant, the
highest Danish award. And in 1955, he helped create a Danish
establishment for the constructive application of nuclear energy and
power. He dedicated his remaining years to showing people that
nuclear energy must be used in a positive and productive way, and in
November 1962 he died.
Joseph C. Carter
Joseph Coleman Carter III, Nick Heinle's grandfather, was born in
Versailles, Kentucky, on September 28, 1910. Son of a gentleman
farmer, he spent his childhood hunting and fishing, where he learned
to appreciate nature. He went to the United States Naval Academy at
the age of 18, then went on to Columbia University were he received a
Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering. He was asked to join the
Manhattan project while at Columbia, where he worked under the
direction of General Leslie Groves. During this time he and other
engineers built a pilot version of the atomic bomb. One year later he
and his new wife, Mary Leaphart, moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where
he worked on refining isotopes of uranium, and started work on
designing nuclear submarines for the government. After leaving Oak
Ridge, he went on to work for Argonne, a government lab, there he
worked on development of the nuclear breeder reactor, which was
designed to reuse spent fuel. In 1976, he returned to his old
Kentucky home, in Versailles, where he managed a farm and taught
nuclear physics at the University of Kentucky. On June 26, 1992, he
passed away after having a stroke.
Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi was born September 29, 1901, in Rome, Italy. In 1915 his
brother died, and he was pushed to pursue a career in science. He
entered the Scuola Normale Superone at the University of Pisa, where
received his Ph.D. magna cum laude in 1922. He taught math to
students of chemistry and biology at the university of Rome in 1924.
Two years later he got a special chair in modern physics and
established a world renowned department. Later in 1928, he married
Laura Capone. Then in 1930 he was invited to give a lecture at the
university of Michigan (USA). He then split a uranium atom, for the
first time, in Rome, 1934. For his work in physics he was awarded the
Nobel prize in 1938. One of the most important things he did took
place in an unused squash court at the University of Chicago: On
December 2, 1942 he created a sustained a nuclear fission chain
reaction, which was critical to creating an atomic bomb. Then in
1944, he joined the Manhattan Project where he acted as a consultant
and overseer to the other scientists. In 1946 he was asked to teach
at the University of Chicago's new Institute of Nuclear Studies and he
took the job and left Los Alamos with his family. He passed away in
November, 1954.
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman was born May 11, 1918 in Queens New York, where he and
his family lived in a modest middle-class neighborhood. By the age of
fifteen, Feynman had already learned and mastered differential and
integral calculus. He was accepted into MIT in 1936 and there he
acceled in physics and other scientific subjects. He went on to
Princeton as a Graduate but when the Manhattan project began he was
asked, at the age of 24, to join the Los Alamos theoretical division.
But before going he married his high school sweetheart, Arlene
Greenbaum, who was sick with tuberculosis. When Feynman joined the
project, the head of the theoretical division, Hans Bethe
(pronounced bay-tah) became somewhat of a mentor to Feynman,
and the two developed a long lasting friendship. Feynman and Bethe
were a good team; Feynman was fast, but made mistakes, and Bethe was
slower because he double checked everything. One of Feynman's talents
was his speed in solving equations in his head, and finding ways to
take large and complex equations and split them into smaller and more
manageable pieces. This was very useful with many of the massive
formulas used in the project, but even the split up equations were
time consuming. Another one of Feynman's tasks was to find the amount
of fissionable
material it would take for the bomb to explode. Feynman was not
just a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos, he was also the life of
the party at many of the social events, where he joked and made many
friends.
When his wife died (of tuberculosis) and the project ended in 1945,
Feynman experienced a depression, but he quickly got his mind working
on other things. He went to work on his thesis with Hans Bethe, to
solve the mysteries of Quantum Electro Dynamics. To help solve the
incredibly complex equations, which took weeks for a computer to
solve, Feynman invented "Feynman Diagrams" for theoretical physics,
for which he won a Nobel prize in 1965.
A Feynman Diagram
In 1950, Feynman began teaching at the California Institute of
Technology and in 1952 he remarried. He took up painting soon after,
which never made a lot of money for him, but he didn't care because it
was just a hobby. He stayed out the public eye for many years until
in 1985 when he was asked to help find out why the challenger
spaceship had exploded. He surprised NASA and the nation when he
explained the it was the faulty O- rings on the ship that caused the
problem. In 1988 he died from a long bout with cancer.
Robert J. Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born April 22, 1904 to a well-to-do Jewish
family in an upper-class Manhattan apartment. His father had built up
a prosperous garment business and his mother was a painter. He
thrived on studying and he had few friends in high school, other than
his little brother, 8 years younger than he. Oppenheimer went to
Harvard where he completed a four year chemistry program in 3 years
and graduated summa cum laude in 1925. He went on to the subatomic
physics at the prestigious Cambridge University Cavendish Laboratory,
but he didn't last long there because he was clumsy at the lab and he
experienced a mental breakdown. He went on to better things at the
German Gottigen University where theoretical physics dominated, and
that was great for Oppy' (a nickname he picked up there). He got his
Ph.D. in 1927 and his next goal was to bring what was then called
"new physics" back to the United States.
Back in the states he taught at two schools; University of California at Berkeley and at the California Institute of Technology. He attracted many of the smartest students, who all adored him, they went so far as to follow him when he took his summer retreat. Then, on November 1, 1940 he married Kitty Harrison and started a family. As the United States began to get involved with W.W.II. in 1941, General Leslie Groves, chose Oppenheimer to direct the Manhattan project, and so it began.
Oppy' was involved with all parts of the project, from recruiting many of the scientists to helping engineers purify uranium. He had predicted that it would take four years to complete the bomb, but 27 months after the project began, it had produced a successful atomic bomb. He was at first very optimistic about the bomb, but when Edward Teller (his scientific rival) began work on the more powerful Hydrogen bomb, he decided that the UN should gain control of further nuclear development. He spoke out for this cause but the government didn't agree, so they took away his security access to the secrets of the atomic bomb and accused him of being sympathetic to the communists.
He continued to do interviews and give speeches, but the accusations
had really hurt him. In 1963 he received the Fermi award. All the
years of smoking finally got to Oppenheimer and in 1967, at 62 years
of age, he died of throat cancer.
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