Robert Serber | |
|---|---|
 Serber in February 1948 | |
| Born | (1909-03-14)March 14, 1909 Philadelphia,Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | June 1, 1997(1997-06-01) (aged 88) New York City, U.S. |
| Education | Lehigh University (BS) University of Wisconsin, Madison (MS,PhD) |
| Known for | Vacuum polarization |
| Spouses | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Nuclear physics |
| Institutions | Columbia University |
| Doctoral advisor | John Hasbrouck Van Vleck |
| Doctoral students | Keith Brueckner Leon Cooper H. Pierre Noyes Donald H. Weingarten Peter A. Wolff[1] |
Robert Serber (March 14, 1909 – June 1, 1997) was an Americanphysicist who participated in theManhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known asThe Los Alamos Primer. TheNew York Times called him "the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb."[2]
He was born inPhiladelphia, the eldest son of Rose (Frankel) and David Serber. His family was Jewish.[3] His mother died in 1922 and his father marriedFrances Leof in 1928. Robert Serber earned hisBS inengineering physics fromLehigh University in 1930 and earned hisPhD inphysics from theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison withJohn Van Vleck in 1934. He marriedCharlotte Leof (26 Jul 1911 – 1967), the daughter of his stepmother's uncle, in 1933.[4]
Shortly before receiving his doctorate, Serber was selected for aNational Research Councilpostdoctoral fellowship and planned on conducting research atPrinceton University withEugene Wigner. However, after spontaneously enrolling at theUniversity of Michigan's physics summer school, he changed his plans and went to work withJ. Robert Oppenheimer at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. For the next four years, he shuttled with Oppenheimer between Berkeley and theCalifornia Institute of Technology, where Oppenheimer held a secondary faculty appointment. In 1938, he took one of the era's few tenure-track professorships in physics at theUniversity of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he stayed until he was recruited for theManhattan Project.
He was recruited for the Manhattan Project in 1941, and was inProject Alberta on the dropping of the bomb. When theLos Alamos National Laboratory was first organized, Oppenheimer decided not to compartmentalize the technical information among different departments. This boosted the technical workers' effectiveness in problem-solving and underscored the project's urgency, as they now understood its significance. Consequently, Serber was tasked with delivering a series of lectures to explain the basic principles and objectives of the project. These lectures were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known asThe Los Alamos Primer, LA-1. It was declassified in 1965. Serber developed the first good theory of bomb assembly hydrodynamics.
Serber's wifeCharlotte Serber was appointed by Oppenheimer to head the technical library at Los Alamos, where she was the only wartime female section leader.[5]
Serber created the code-names for all three design projects, the "Little Boy" (uranium gun), "Thin Man" (plutonium gun), and "Fat Man" (plutonium implosion), according to his reminiscences (1998). The names were based on their design shapes; the "Thin Man" would be a very long device, and the name came from theDashiell Hammettdetective novel andseries of movies of the same name; the "Fat Man" bomb would be round and fat and was named afterSydney Greenstreet's character inThe Maltese Falcon (fromHammett's novel). "Little Boy" would come last and be named only to contrast to the "Thin Man" bomb. This differs from the unsupported, abandoned theory that "Fat Man" was named after Churchill and "Thin Man" after Roosevelt.
After receiving an identification card noting that his civilian noncombatant duties were commensurate in profile to theArmy of the United States rank ofcolonel (an administrative designation only ostensibly valid if he were captured as aprisoner of war under the 1929Geneva Convention, although he was frequently afforded salutations and other perquisites of the rank in practice by military personnel while traveling),[6] Serber was to go onBig Stink, the camera plane for the Nagasaki mission, as a technical advisor; however, it left without him when group operations officer Major James I. Hopkins ordered him off the plane because he had forgotten his parachute, reportedly after the B-29 had already taxied onto the runway. Since Serber was the only crew member who knew how to operate the high-speed camera, Hopkins had to be instructed by radio fromTinian on its use. Serber was with the first American team to enterHiroshima andNagasaki to assess the results of the atomic bombing of the two cities.
Although Oppenheimer sought an appointment for Serber in the Berkeley physics department following the end of the war, this was soon forestalled, possibly because of theanti-Semitism of department chairRaymond Thayer Birge. Birge had previously refused to offer a tenure-track appointment to Serber after he received his University of Illinois offer, opining that "one Jew in the department is enough." Oppenheimer prevailed in placing him as head of the theoretical division of theBerkeley Radiation Laboratory underErnest Lawrence; however, as his mentor segued into policy consultancies and the presidency of theInstitute for Advanced Study in 1947, Serber frequently took over his courses, ultimately resulting in his appointment to the Berkeley faculty.[7]
In 1948, Serber had to defend himself against anonymous accusations of disloyalty, mostly because his wife Charlotte's family were Jewish intellectuals withsocialist leanings, and also because he tried to remove politics from discussions of the feasibility of the fusion bomb, leading to arguments withEdward Teller.[8] There was some speculation that Serber was a member of the Communist Party. Oppenheimer said it was possible he was member, but did not know,[9] whereas the FBI concluded that "no definite evidence is known" for his membership.[10] Although he had been cleared of any potential wrongdoing at a subsequent hearing that year, he was denied a prerequisite security clearance for a Japanese physics conference in 1952, precipitating his refusal to join a Teller-chairedDepartment of Defense advisory group.[11]
While he reluctantly signed the loyalty oath stipulated by theLevering Act for Berkeley personnel in 1950, growing antagonism between Oppenheimer and the more conservative Lawrence eventually spurred his departure. In 1951, he became a professor of physics atColumbia University at the behest of Manhattan Project colleagueI. I. Rabi. He served as chair of the department from 1975 until his retirement asprofessor emeritus in 1978.
At Columbia, Serber served as doctoral advisor to future NobelistLeon Cooper. He also collaborated withAbraham Pais onmeson studies and developed the Serber-Dancoff method, a refined technique for analyzing strong coupling. He also consulted numerous labs, businesses, and commissions, includingBrookhaven National Laboratory (where he worked one day a week during the academic year and occasional summers for twenty years) andFermilab, as a specialist in theproton–proton chain reaction and the focusing properties ofparticle accelerators. Although largely bereft of any ideology, he refused to join the Defense Department-affiliatedJASON consulting group because of his previous clearance issues and opposition to theVietnam War.
After being diagnosed withParkinson's disease, Charlotte Serber suffered fromdepression and took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills on May 22, 1967. Serber then entered a relationship withKitty Oppenheimer, who had been widowed in February 1967. She talked him into buying a 52-foot (16 m)yawl, which they sailed from New York toGrenada. In 1972, they purchased a 52-foot (16 m)ketch, with the intention of sailing through thePanama Canal and to Japan via theGalapagos Islands andTahiti during Serber's sabbatical. They set out, but Kitty became ill, and was taken toGorgas Hospital, where she died of anembolism on October 27, 1972. Serber and Toni Oppenheimer scattered hercremains near the Oppenheimers' longtime vacation home inSaint John, U.S. Virgin Islands, which he continued to use.
Following his retirement, he married Fiona St. Clair, a fabric designer fromSaint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, in 1979. He adopted her son Zachariah, and they had another son, William, in November 1980.
He served as president of theAmerican Physical Society in 1971. A year later, Serber was awarded theJ. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize.[12][13]
Serber appears in the Oscar-nominated documentaryThe Day After Trinity (1980).
Serber died June 1, 1997, at his home inManhattan from complications of surgery forbrain cancer.[2]
He was portrayed by Peter Whiteman in the 1980 BBC seriesOppenheimer and byMichael Angarano inChristopher Nolan's 2023 filmOppenheimer.
