William R. Rarita

William Rarita was an American physicist. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley under J. Robert Oppenheimer, and was recruited to join the Manhattan Project. Physicist Roy Glauber remembered, “One of the people who was in the office that I was supposed to occupy, and I was supposed to be sharing, was a man named [William] Rarita from Brooklyn College. I noticed after a while that he was not sitting at the desk in the office that I was supposed to be in. I discovered later that he was actually occupying the office next door labeled ‘Edward Teller.’ What I learned presently, the first and most obvious thing was that Rarita was literally incensed by sharing an office by someone eighteen years old. He had moved out into a vacant office.”