Nuclear Museum Logo
Nuclear Museum Logo

National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Spencer Weart is a historian of science. Born in Larchmont, New York in 1942, Weart grew up in an age of excitement toward space and science fiction. Since he enjoyed science in high school, Weart initially decided to become a physicist. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell in 1963 before getting his PhD in Physics and Astrophysics in 1968 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. After his academic work in physics, Weart decided to pursue a career as a historian of science. He was the long-running director of the Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in College Park, Maryland from 1971 until his retirement in 2009. 

Related Profiles

Alexander Klementiev

Hanford, WA

Alexander Klementiev was born in Moscow in 1942 and grew up in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As a student, he attended the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where he studied radio physics and earned his Ph.

Tomoko Watanabe

Japan

Tomoko Watanabe was born eight years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both of her parents survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Ronald Mickens

Ronald Mickens is a physicist who currently teaches at Clark Atlanta University. He is a prominent voice in the African American scientific community, and has written several works documenting the feats of previous black physicists, including The African American Presence in Physics, and Edward Bouchet: The First African-American Doctorate.

James L. Smith

Los Alamos, NM

James L. Smith is an American physicist who worked for forty years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.