Life in the Secret Cities

Cindy Kelly: Okay. I am Cindy Kelly. I’m here in Albuquerque. It is Wednesday, October 12. Hal Behl: Okay. I’m Harold Behl. B as in boy, e-h-l. Known as Hal. Kelly: Okay. I just want to have you tell us when and where you were born and a little about your childhood. Behl: Well, I […]

[For Edwin McMillan’s lecture, which preceded Elsie’s, please click here.] Elsie McMillan: You know, I will tell you a secret. This is the very first time I have shared a platform, let alone shared it with my best beau and a Nobel Prize winner [Edwin McMillan]. I think my greatest difficulty this afternoon is going […]

Edwin McMillan: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start with two remarks. First, this is going to be a personal story, so if I use the first person singular, this is not pure egotism, it is simply the fact that that’s the part that I know best. Second remark is, the difficulty of establishing […]

Cindy Kelly: Okay, I am Cindy Kelly. This is Tuesday, August 9, 2016 in Berkeley, California. I have with me Dr. Geoffrey Chew. My first question to him is to say and spell his name. Geoffrey Chew: Geoffrey Chew, G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y C-H-E-W. Kelly: Very good, so now we will move on to some harder stuff. If […]

Owen Gingerich: This is an interview between Owen Gingerich and Robert Wilson. You use your middle initial. It’s Robert R.? Robert Wilson: Yes, usually. Gingerich: Robert R. Wilson, who is a builder of high energy accelerators and who was one of the physicists at Los Alamos. We are speaking today in Philadelphia, where we both happen […]

Owen Gingerich: Professor Roy Glauber is a physicist, a physicist who had an early start in physics because when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard, it was during World War II. A mysterious caller knocked on his dormitory door, and asked him if he would want to participate in some unspecified kind of scientific […]

Martin Sherwin: Okay, this is the middle of an interview with Norris Bradbury. Norris Bradbury: The fact that I wasn’t particularly involved in these discussions, of the type which the Federation of Atomic Scientists started—they started here, of course. I suppose I was committed to running a laboratory and trying to get people to stay […]

Louis Hempelmann: He [J. Robert Oppenheimer] just told me what the situation was. He did not ask me, which is the same thing when he got sick because I was in the radiology department here and I knew something about it. He would call me up, tell me what he had done, and then say […]

Jean Bacher: Ruth Valentine said, “I shall take Ruth [Tolman]’s desk.” She always saved letters. She had marvelous long letters from Robert, you know, especially at the time of the hearings. I knew they were just terribly close and shared a great deal. On the drawer of the desk, she’d said, “Destroy these.” Martin Sherwin: […]

Martin Sherwin: How much were the dues [to the Communist Party]? David Hawkins: God, I don’t remember. Not very much, or I wouldn’t have been able to afford them. Sherwin: Two bucks, five bucks? Hawkins: Yeah, something like that. Sherwin: A month? Hawkins: A month, yeah. I really honestly don’t remember. Maybe five bucks a […]