Another Physicist Passes On...

["Michael P. Grissom" <mikeg@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

The following appeared in the 5/26/96 San Jose Mercury News
with a Reuters byline (please note that newspapers in the US
often use obit's of prominent individuals sometimes several
weeks after the actual date of death):

>  Alexander Langsdorf,
>  on atom bomb team
>
>  Physicist regretted
>  use of the weapon
>
>  CHICAGO--Alexander Langsdorf Jr., a noted American physicist
>  who worked on the team that developed the atom bomb but who
>  later spoke in opposition to the weapon has died, hospital
>  officials said Saturday.
>
>  Mr. Langsdorf, 83, died Friday in a hospital in the Chicago
>  suburb of Elmhurst, Illinois, of complications from hip
>  surgery.  He worked for many years at Argonne National
>  Laboratory outside Chicago.
>
>  In a 1982 ceremony in Chicago commemorating the 1945 atomic
>  bombing of Japan, Mr. Langsdorf said he regretted mankind's
>  use of the weapon developed by a team of physicists that he
>  was on that was known as the Manhattan Project.
>
>  "The bomb works in a chain reaction," the Chicago Tribune
>  recounted him as saying at the ceremony.  "I believe attitudes
>  of people are the result of a chain reaction also.  And I hope
>  that chain reaction carries the message we're making here
>  today to everyone.  That bomb must never be used again."
>
>  Early in his career while a student at Massachusetts Institute
>  of Technology, he invented a chamber for tracking cosmic rays,
>  and a type of oscillator that measures neutron cross sections.
>  The oscillator is on display at the Smithsonian Institution
>  in Washington.

-----------------------
Michael P. Grissom
Special Assistant, SLAC
mikeg@slac.stanford.edu
Phone:  (415) 926-2346
Fax:    (415) 926-3030