Princeton

Harold Cherniss: Well, you see, I was married on January 1, 1929, in White Plains. When we went back to Berkeley, it was immediately after that that I met  [J. Robert] Oppenheimer. This is the time in which he had come to Berkeley the autumn before, just about this time. Taught one term in Berkeley, […]

Martin Sherwin: I think the opportunity to talk to somebody who served with him on the Harvard— Edward Purcell: Oh, Harvard, that was the thing. No, this episode I was remembering, which must have been the spring of 1953, when Oppie [J. Robert Oppenheimer] was on the Board of Overseers. At that time, we’d had […]

Freeman Dyson: I’m Freeman Dyson, F-R-E-E-M-A-N D-Y-S-O-N, retired professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Cynthia Kelly: Why don’t we start with your experience in World War II? Maybe you could tell us what your role was. Dyson:  In World War II, I was given the job of operations research, which […]

Val Fitch: My name is Val Logsdon Fitch. It’s V-A-L L-O-G-S-D-O-N F-I-T-C-H. And the Logsdon is my mother’s maiden name. Where Val comes from, I have no idea. Except it was a favorite name of my mother’s. Cindy Kelly: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you happened to end up at Los Alamos […]

Sir Hugh Taylor: I had been requested by the British Government to find out certain things. They wanted, for example, to know whether they could use this thing and the General Electric Company made it available to them on the condition that their affiliate in England was entrusted with the responsibility of supplying it. It […]

[Interviewed by S. L. Sanger, from Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford, Portland State University, 1995] I shouldn‘t boast but it is generally said, you see, I was in charge of the group which designed the reactors built at Hanford, and these reactors really worked. Fermi constructed the first nuclear reactor […]