History: Robert Wilson

["Mike Grissom" <mpg1@coastside.net>]

radsafe'rs,

The following appeared in the January 22, 2000 issue
of the San Jose Mercury News:

----------
Robert Wilson, 85, physicist

Manhattan Project
scientist designed,
directed Fermi lab [sic]

By Myrna Oliver
Los Angeles Times

Robert Rathbun Wilson, a nuclear physicist active in
the Manhattan Project who later designed and directed
the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago,
has died. He was 85.

Mr. Wilson, a University of California-Berkeley-trained
nuclear physicist who taught for much of his career at
Cornell University, died Sunday in Ithaca, N.Y., of
complications from a stroke he suffered last year.

Mr. Wilson was director of Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear
Study when he was called to Batavia, Ill., in 1967 to build
and run the four-mile-long facility. He stayed until 1978.

In an anecdote reported in the industry publication
Engineering News-Record, physicists at Berkeley had
proposed to build an atom smasher that would boost the
energy of speeding protons to 200 billion electron volts
before colliding them - estimating the cost in the early
1960s at $350 million. The Atomic Energy Commission
approved the project but limited the budget to $240
million. But the team at Berkeley, home of particle physics
in the United States, turned down the directorship,
contending that the lab could not be built for so little
money.

Mr. Wilson took the job and built an atom smasher
capable of accelerating protons to 400 billion electron
volts - twice Berkeley's proposed speed - for $235 million.

----------
Fermilab has established a Web site with more details
(thanks to our colleague Don Cossairt at Fermi for IDing
it) at:

  http://www.fnal.gov/pub/wilson/wilson.html


Michael P. Grissom
Email:  mpg1@coastside.net



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