Val Fitch (1923-2015) was a Nobel-Prize-winning American physicist.
Fitch was drafted into the Special Engineer Detachment in 1943. He was sent to Los Alamos, where he worked with Ernest Titterton on signals for the detonation of the “Gadget” in the Trinity test. He was also sent to Wendover to observe the dummy bomb tests.
Fitch won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 “for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons.”
1923 Mar 10th Born on a cattle ranch in Nebraska.
1940 Graduated from high school.
1943 Mar Drafted into US Army.
1944 Dec Sent to Los Alamos as part of the Special Engineer Detachment.
1945 Apr Sent to Wendover, UT to observe dummy bomb testing.
1945 Jul 16th Witnessed the Trinity test.
1946 Discharged from the Army.
1954 Received his PhD in Physics from Columbia University.
19701973 Served on President Nixon’s Science Advisory Committee.
1980 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
2015 Feb 5th Died in Princeton, NJ.
