Hydrogen Bomb

Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984) was a Polish-American mathematician. Ulam was born in 1909 in Lvov, Austria-Hungary (present-day Ukraine). He received a masters and a Ph.D. from the Lvov Polytechnic Institute. Beginning in 1935, Ulam spent his academic years at Harvard University as a member of the Society of Fellows while returning to Poland for the summers. […]

Tom Scolman arrived in Los Alamos shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Minnesota under renowned physicist Alfred Nier. At Los Alamos, Scolman worked in the Weapons Division with a team of physicists to help assemble and test explosives that would be used in nuclear devices. After the war, Scolman worked for the Los Alamos […]

Edward Teller (1908-2003) was a Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist. He is considered one of the fathers of the hydrogen bomb. Teller, along with Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, helped urge President Roosevelt to develop an atomic bomb program in the United States. Teller joined the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1943 as group leader in the Theoretical Physics […]

Raemer E. Schreiber (1910-1998) was an American physicist. Schreiber joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in November 1943 along with his wife, Marguerite Schreiber. He worked on the Water Boiler, an aqueous homogeneous reactor used to test critical mass. In 1945, Schreiber was transferred to the Gadget Division and was a member of the […]

Charles Critchfield (1910-1994) was an American mathematical physicist.  In December 1942, he was approached by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, but respectfully declined until he was involuntarily assigned there the following April.  Critchfield used his ordnance knowledge and skills as a mathematical physicist to head the […]

Norris Bradbury (1909-1997) was an American physicist and director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1945-1970.  Norris Bradbury was born in Southern California on May 30th, 1909. He graduated from high school at the age of 16 and graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College with his B.A. in chemistry at the age of […]

Hans Bethe (1906-2005) was a German-American nuclear physicist and winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics.  After becoming an American citizen and gaining his security clearance, war work took him to the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, working on microwave radar. After spending the summer of 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley working on […]