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Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer (born Julius Robert Oppenheimer ; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist who served as the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. He is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in overseeing the development of the first nuclear weapons. Born in New York City, Oppenheimer obtained a degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1925 and a Dr. rer. nat., doctorate in physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1927, studying under Max Born. After research at other institutions, he joined the physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was made a full professor in 1936. Oppenheimer made significant contributions to physics in the fields of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, including the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions; work on the theory of Positron, positrons, quantum electrodynamics, and quan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Born–Oppenheimer Approximation
In quantum chemistry and molecular physics, the Born–Oppenheimer (BO) approximation is the assumption that the wave functions of atomic nuclei and electrons in a molecule can be treated separately, based on the fact that the nuclei are much heavier than the electrons. Due to the larger relative mass of a nucleus compared to an electron, the coordinates of the nuclei in a system are approximated as fixed, while the coordinates of the electrons are dynamic. The approach is named after Max Born and his 23-year-old graduate student J. Robert Oppenheimer, the latter of whom proposed it in 1927 during a period of intense ferment in the development of quantum mechanics. The approximation is widely used in quantum chemistry to speed up the computation of molecular wavefunctions and other properties for large molecules. There are cases where the assumption of separable motion no longer holds, which make the approximation lose validity (it is said to "break down"), but even then the ap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Princeton, New Jersey
The Municipality of Princeton is a Borough (New Jersey), borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton, New Jersey, Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, New Jersey, Princeton Township, both of which are now defunct. As of the 2020 United States census, the borough's population was 30,681, an increase of 2,109 (+7.4%) from the 2010 United States census, 2010 census combined count of 28,572. In the 2000 United States census, 2000 census, the two communities had a total population of 30,230, with 14,203 residents in the borough and 16,027 in the township. Princeton was founded before the American Revolutionary War. The borough is the home of Princeton University, one of the world's most acclaimed research universities, which bears its name and moved to the community in 1756 from the educational institution's previous location in Newark, New Jersey, Newark. Although its associ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
California Institute Of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States that are devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences. The institution was founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891 and began attracting influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century. The vocational and preparatory schools were disbanded and spun off in 1910, and the college assumed its present name in 1920. In 1934, Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán. Caltech has six academic divisi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bernard Peters
Bernard Peters (born Bernhard Pietrowski in 1910 in Posen, Germany - February 2, 1993 in Copenhagen) was a nuclear physicist, with a specialty in cosmic radiation. He was a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, the third highest Indian civilian award. Life Towards the end of the First World War, his father, pharmacology researcher and physician, sent him to the Black Forest to a farmer so he could obtain food in exchange for manual labor. In 1942, under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer, Peters completed his doctorate in physics. During his time at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory Peters was active in the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians, a labor union affiliated to the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In J Robert Oppenheimer's 1949 House Un-American Activities Committee hearing, Peters was accused of being a communist sympathizer, a "crazy person" and "quite a red" by Oppenheimer. The Rochester Times-Union broke the story a few days later, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arnold Nordsieck
Arnold Theodore Nordsieck (January 5, 1911 – January 18, 1971) was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work with Felix Bloch on the infrared problem in quantum electrodynamics. He developed the inertial electrostatic gyroscope (ESG) used as part of the inertial navigation system of nuclear submarines that allows them to remain underwater without having to surface to ascertain their location. Biography Arnold Theodore Nordsieck was born in Marysville, Ohio, on January 5, 1911. He entered Ohio State University, where he earned a M.S. degree in physics in 1932. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he wrote his 1935 doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Robert Oppenheimer on the "Scattering of Radiation by an Electric Field". A National Research Council fellowship allowed Nordsieck to travel to Germany in 1935 as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg. With Felix Bloch he solved th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Morrison
Philip Morrison (November 7, 1915 – April 22, 2005) was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics, high energy astrophysics, and SETI. A graduate of Carnegie Tech, Morrison became interested in physics, which he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He also joined the Communist Party. During World War II he joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Eugene Wigner on the design of nuclear reactors. In 1944 he moved to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where he worked with George Kistiakowsky on the development of explosive lenses required to detonate the implosion-type nuclear weapon. Morrison transported the core of the Trinity test device to the test site in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harold Lewis
Harold ("Hal") Warren Lewis (born October 1, 1923 at the Center for History of Physics, – May 26, 2011) was an American Professor of and former department chairman at the (UCSB). He was chairman o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Willis Lamb
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (; July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp Kusch "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb was able to precisely determine a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom (see Lamb shift). Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences. Biography Lamb was born in Los Angeles, California, United States and attended Los Angeles High School. First admitted in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Mössbauer. He worked on nuclear theory, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanley Frankel
Stanley Phillips Frankel (1919 – May, 1978) was an American computer scientist. He worked in the Manhattan Project and developed various computers as a consultant. Early life He was born in Los Angeles, attended graduate school at the University of Rochester, received his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and began his career as a post-doctoral student under J. Robert Oppenheimer at University of California, Berkeley in 1942. Career Frankel helped develop computational techniques used in the nuclear research taking place at the time, notably making some of the early calculations relating to the diffusion of neutrons in a critical assembly of uranium with Eldred Nelson. He joined the T (Theoretical) Division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1943. His wife Mary Frankel was also hired to work as a human computer in the T Division. While at Los Alamos, Frankel and Nelson organized a group of scientists' wives, including Mary, to perfo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leslie Foldy
Leslie Lawrance Foldy (1919–2001) was a theoretical physicist, who made contributions to condensed matter physics and quantum mechanics. Early life Foldy was born László Földi in kisszeben, Hungary (today's town of Sabinov, Slovakia), on October 26, 1919. In 1920, his family moved to the USA due to the invasion of Hungary around that time, and there he was known as Leslie Foldy. Education His high school education was in Cleveland, Ohio, and at that time he called his middle name "Lawrance", upon noticing he hadn't a middle name while the other students had. While at high school, he picked up an interest in physics. In 1941, Foldy graduated with a B.S. degree in physics from the Case School of Applied Science (now renamed to the ''Case Western Reserve University''), his senior thesis was on crystal lattice vibrations. Research He started his PHD in 1945 at the University of California in Berkeley, in J. Robert Oppenheimer's group, and with Luis Alvarez and David Bohm, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sidney Dancoff
Sidney Michael Dancoff (September 27, 1913 in Philadelphia – August 15, 1951 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American theoretical physicist best known for the Tamm–Dancoff approximation method and for nearly developing a renormalization method for solving quantum electrodynamics (QED). Early life Dancoff was raised in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He attended Carnegie Tech on a private scholarship and received his B.S. in physics in 1934, followed by a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1936. He then went to the University of California at Berkeley where he earned his PhD in 1939 under Robert Oppenheimer. Career While Dancoff was at Berkeley, Oppenheimer suggested that he work on the calculation of the scattering of a relativistic electron by an electric field. Such QED calculations typically gave infinite answers. Following earlier perturbation-theory work by Oppenheimer and Felix Bloch, he found that he could deal in various ways with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Christy
Robert Frederick Christy (May 14, 1916 – October 3, 2012) was a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and later astrophysicist who was one of the last surviving people to have worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He briefly served as acting president of California Institute of Technology (Caltech). A graduate of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the 1930s where he studied physics, he followed George Volkoff, who was a year ahead of him, to the University of California, Berkeley, where he was accepted as a graduate student by Robert Oppenheimer, the leading theoretical physicist in the United States at that time. Christy received his doctorate in 1941 and joined the physics department of Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1942 he joined the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago, where he was recruited by Enrico Fermi to join the effort to build the first nuclear reactor, having been recommended as a theory resource by Oppenheimer. When ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
