| Robert Serber |
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| 1909 births | |
| serber, robert | |
| 1997 deaths | |
| manhattan project people | |
| lehigh university alumni | |
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Robert Serber ( 1909 - June 1 , 1997 ) was a physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project . He earned his PhD from the University Of Wisconsin in 1934, after which he went to work with Robert Oppenheimer at the University Of California, Berkeley . He later became a Professor and Chair of the physics department at Columbia University . He was recruited for Manhattan Project, 1941. When the Los Alamos lab was first being organised a decision was made by Oppenheimer to not compartmentalize the technical information among different departments. This had the effect of increasing effectiveness in problem solving and also increasing the urgency of the project in the minds of the technical workers, now they knew what they were working on. So it fell to Serber to give a series of lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project. These lectures were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became know as '') Serber developed the first good theory of bomb disassembly hydrodynamics. He also was with the first American team to enter Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess the damage that the atomic bomb had done. In 1948, he had to defend himself against anonymous accusations of disloyality, mostly due to the fact that his wife's family were Jewish intellectuals with Socialist leanings, and also because he tried to remove politics from discussions of the feasibility of the fusion bomb, leading to arguments with Edward Teller . (This was the start of a period of political paranoia in the US.) Serber went on to be consultant to numerous labs, businesses and commissions. REFERENCES
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