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Article: Victor Weisskopf, a Manhattan Project Physicist, Dies at 93
I saw this and thought some would be interested.
-- John
-----Original Message-----
From: Jacobus, John (OD/ORS)
Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 11:56 AM
To: Jacobus, John (OD/ORS)
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Victor Weisskopf, a Manhattan Project
Physicist, Dies at 93
\----------------------------------------------------------/
Victor Weisskopf, a Manhattan Project Physicist, Dies at 93
April 25, 2002
By KENNETH CHANG
Victor F. Weisskopf, a nuclear physicist who worked on the
Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb in World
War II and later became an ardent advocate of arms control,
died on Monday at his home in Newton, Mass. He was 93.
Dr. Weisskopf was one of the first physicists to warn of
the possible dangers of atomic research. In 1939, he and
Leo Szilard, another atomic physicist, recommended that
physicists keep secret their findings on nuclear fission
instead of publishing them in academic journals, out of
fear that the information could help Nazi scientists build
atomic weapons.
In 1943, Dr. Weisskopf joined the Manhattan Project as
associate head of the theory division. In a lecture at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, he recounted
the rationale for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima in August
1945, that the destruction needed to have a strong
psychological effect on Japan.
The second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki three days later, was
more troubling to him.
"The second bomb I don't hesitate to call a crime," Dr.
Weisskopf told the audience at M.I.T. He also called the
cold war "a collective mental disease of mankind."
Early in his career, Dr. Weisskopf laid the groundwork for
fixing a fundamental flaw in applying quantum mechanics to
electromagnetism. After World War II, he furthered
understanding of how the nuclei of atoms behave.
"He really made so many contributions that it's hard to
identify any single one," said Dr. Robert L. Jaffe,
director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at M.I.T.
Dr. Weisskopf also lent his name and voice to political
issues. In letters and opinion pieces in newspapers, he
repeatedly warned of the dangers of nuclear war. Although
he was of Jewish descent, he was appointed by Pope Paul VI
to the 70-member Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1975,
and in 1981 he led a team of four scientists sent by Pope
John Paul II to talk to President Ronald Reagan about the
need to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons.
Victor Frederick Weisskopf was born Sept. 19, 1908, in
Vienna. He earned his doctorate in physics at the
University of Göttingen in Germany in 1931.
In postdoctoral studies at the University of Berlin,
University of Copenhagen, Cambridge University and the
Institute of Technology in Zurich, Dr. Weisskopf
apprenticed with many great founding physicists of quantum
mechanics: Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr
and Wolfgang Pauli.
In 1937, shortly before Germany absorbed Austria, Dr.
Weisskopf immigrated to the United States, landing a
position at the University of Rochester.
After the war, he became a professor at M.I.T. From 1961 to
1965, he served as director-general of the CERN particle
accelerator in Switzerland before returning to M.I.T. He
retired in 1974.
In the 1930's, he and Pauli wrote a paper applying quantum
mechanics to "spinless" particles, which they regarded as a
mathematical obscurity, because at that time all known
particles like protons, electrons and neutrons carried
spin, or angular momentum, like a spinning top. Only a few
years later, such spinless particles appeared in the
high-energy collisions at particle accelerators.
In the 1930's, Dr. Weisskopf tackled the application of
quantum mechanics to electromagnetic fields. At the time,
physicists' calculations were producing absurd answers:
electrons were infinitely massive and produced infinitely
powerful electric fields.
Dr. Weisskopf was among the first scientists to suggest a
mathematical technique to rein in the unruly equations,
essentially imagining that an infinitely large charge would
induce a cloud of "virtual particles" fluttering in and out
of existence around it that would nearly offset infinite
charge.
"He was the first person to make significant progress in
taming the infinities of field theory," Dr. Jaffe said.
A decade later, the theory was completed by three
physicists, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger and
Richard Feynman. It won them a Nobel Prize in 1965.
"He had done work at the frontiers of theoretical physics
in the 1930's that perhaps was only partly successful
because it was so far ahead of its time," said Dr. Steven
Weinberg, a professor of physics at the University of
Texas.
Dr. Weisskopf was a member of the National Academy of
Sciences. He was president of the American Physical Society
in 1960-61 and president of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences from 1976 to 1979.
His 1952 textbook, "Theoretical Nuclear Physics," written
with John M. Blatt, was the basic reference for the new
field. He also wrote essays for a public audience,
including his memoir, "The Joy of Insight: Passions of
Physicist" (Basic Books, 1991).
His honors included the Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize in
Physics and the Enrico Fermi Award.
His first wife, Ellen, died in 1989.
He is survived by
his second wife, Duscha; a son, Thomas E., of Ann Arbor,
Mich.; a daughter, Karen Worth of Newton; and five
grandchildren.
In the often competitive field of theoretical physics, Dr.
Weisskopf stood out as unusually generous and modest. Dr.
Jaffe recalled how in the mid-1970's, when he was a new
faculty member at M.I.T., he and his collaborators would
talk to Dr. Weisskopf about the theory they were developing
to describing the behavior of quarks, the constituent
particles of protons and neutrons.
Dr. Jaffe said Dr. Weisskopf did not understand all the
complexities in the theory, but "he listened patiently" and
provided a crucial insight that helped them solve the
problem. The researchers added Dr. Weisskopf as an author
to acknowledge his contribution.
"He tried to get us to take it off the paper," Dr. Jaffe
said. "He said, `The only thing I contributed to this paper
was the `don't-know-how.' "
Dr. Weisskopf's name remained on the
paper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/25/obituaries/25WEIS.html?ex=1020836584&ei=1&;
en=e63cd3cdfc5fde99
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company