Rubby Sherr (1913-2013) was an American physicist.
Shortly after finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton University, Sherr was performing groundbreaking radar research at the MIT Radiation Lab. From there he was recruited to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. While at Los Alamos, he worked with Klaus Fuchs to develop the Fuchs-Sherr polonium-beryllium neutron initiator, a device that was instrumental to the proper detonation of the atomic weapons created during the Manhattan Project.
Sherr was present for the world’s first detonation of an atomic bomb, at the Trinity test site in July of 1945. Upon seeing the bomb successfully explode, he recalled think that, “This is the greatest scientific experiment of all time–at least, it was certainly the biggest. Then the horror sank in that the thing had actually worked.”
After the war, Sherr and his wife, Pat, returned to the east coast. He was a professor of physics at Princeton from 1946 until 1982. He also performed research on low energy nuclear physics for the Atomic Energy Commission.