Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr. (1915-2011) was an American physicist and winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1940 Ramsey began work at the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he led the group researching radar with a 3-centimeter wavelength. He left for Los Alamos in 1943, where he served under William “Deak” Parsons in Project Alberta to plan how the atomic bomb could be delivered to its target. He served as Parsons’s Scientific and Technical Deputy. In 1945, he went, along with other Project Alberta members, to Tinian Island in the Pacific to assemble the bombs.
He determined that the B-29 was the only United States aircraft that would be feasible to carry the bomb, and even so would require extensive modification to do so (via a program known as Silverplate). Ramsey also planned atomic bomb test drops that used replicas of the Fat Man plutonium bomb known as “pumpkin bombs” for their orange color.
Scientific Contributions
Ramsey received the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks.” For more on Ramsey’s scientific work, please see the Nobel Prize website.