Hydrogen Bomb

Frederick Reines (1918-1998) was an American physicist. Reines received his Ph.D. in physics in 1944 from New York University. Richard Feynman recruited Reines to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He worked in Feynman’s T-4 (Diffusion Problems) Group, in Hans Bethe‘s Theoretical Division. He stayed on at Los Alamos National Laboratory after the end […]

Marshall Holloway was an American physicist. He received his PhD in physics from Cornell University. In 1942, he directed a secret Manhattan Project assignment at Purdue University. The physicists at Purdue operated the university’s cyclotron to determine cross sections for several molecules, which would prove key to developing the hydrogen bomb. In 1943, Holloway and […]

Marshall Rosenbluth was an American physicist who worked on the hydrogen bomb project at Los Alamos during the Cold War. He was recruited by Edward Teller to come to Los Alamos in 1950. He witnessed some nuclear tests in the South Pacific. He helped develop the Metropolis algorithm. He received many awards and prizes for […]

J. Carson Mark was a Canadian-American mathematician. Mark was born in 1913 in Lindsay, Ontario. He received a B.S from the University of Western Toronto and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Toronto. He went on to teach at the University of Manitoba and to work for the Canadian National Research Council in […]

Alvin Graves (1909-1965) was an American physicist. Graves was invited to join the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory and in 1942 he accepted the position and became a member of the Manhattan Project. Graves helped to construct Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor, and was one of the three scientists on the emergency team that […]

Darol Froman (1906-1997) was an American-born, Canadian physicist. In 1939, Darol Froman studied waveguides and radar as part of a McGill group dedicated to helping the Canadian war effort. Three years later, Froman joined the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago and observed the start of Pile-1, the first nuclear […]

Ted Taylor was born in 1925 in Mexico City, Mexico. During WWII, from 1943-1946, he served on active duty in the United States Navy. He then received a bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1945, pursued a master’s degree from the University of California Berkeley, and later received a Ph.D. in theoretical […]

Milton Burton was the Chief of Radiation Chemistry in the Metallurgical Laboratory (“Met Lab”) at the University of Chicago and later at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project.  Burton was born in Stapleton, New York. He earned both his bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees from New York University (NYU). He taught chemistry at both NYU and the University […]

Nicholas Constantine Metropolis was born on June 11th, 1915, in Chicago. In 1936 he received his bachelor’s degree, and in 1941, his doctorate, both from the University of Chicago, and both in experimental physics. While at Chicago, Metropolis worked at the Met Lab as an assistant to Enrico Fermi.  In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer recruited […]

George Cowan joined the Manhattan Project in 1942 at the Met Lab as a chemist for Enrico Fermi’s group, and also worked for Columbia University. He was also involved in Operation Crossroads after the war.