Project Alberta

Walter Goodman joined the Special Engineer Detachment at Los Alamos in 1943. Goodman worked as an electrical engineer on the implosion bomb with Manhattan Project scientists Luis Alvarez and Harold Agnew. He witnessed both the Trinity test and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. In July 1945, Goodman travelled to Tinian to help prepare the Fat […]

William Sterling “Deak” Parsons was a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1922 and the Naval Postgraduate School in 1929 with a concentration in ordnance. During World War II, he served at the Naval Proving Grounds in Dahlgren, Virginia and at the Applied Physics Laboratory […]

Frederick Ashworth (1912 – 2005) was a Vice Admiral in the US Navy. Ashworth’s work on the Manhattan Project began in 1944. Having already served in the Pacific theater, he was rotated back to the United States where he supervised the testing of bomb parts produced at Los Alamos. Shortly after, he became director of […]

Philip Morrison (1915-2005) was an American physicist. Morrison studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Ph.D. in 1940. In 1942, he joined the Chicago Met Lab as a research associate. He transferred to Los Alamos in 1944, where he worked in the critical assemblies group of the Weapon 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 […]

Robert Serber (1909-1997) was an American physicist. He was recruited by J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the Manhattan Project. Serber was tasked with explaining the basic principles and goals of the project to all incoming scientific staff. Moving to Los Alamos in 1943, he gave lectures to members of the Manhattan Project about the […]

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 […]

Harold Agnew (1921-2013) was an American physicist and director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1970-1979. Agnew saw the completion of the atomic bomb from start to finish.  As a member of Enrico Fermi’s research team at the University of Chicago in 1942, Agnew witnessed the first sustained nuclear chain reaction, Chicago Pile-1. He […]

Luis Alvarez (1911-1988) was an American experimental physicist and winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics.  In 1940, he went on leave from the University of California at Berkeley to join the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on radar systems. He joined the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical […]