History: SF Bay Area Physicist/Manhattan Project Veteran

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

The following was in the July 10, 1996 San Jose Mercury News
(byline New York Times):

>              Physicist Clyde E. Wiegand, 81
>
>  Clyde E. Wiegand, a physicist who helped to detonate the
>  first atomic bomb but suffered a crushing disappointment
>  a decade later when he missed out on a Nobel Prize for
>  helping discover a new atomic particle, died Friday at his
>  home in Oakland [California, USA].  He was 81.
>
>  Mr. Wiegand had suffered from prostate cancer, according to
>  Lynn Yarris, a representative at the Lawrence Berkeley
>  National Laboratory in Berkeley, where Mr. Wiegand worked
>  for 38 years.
>
>  In 1955, experiments conducted by Emilio Segre, Owen 
>  Chamberlain and Mr. Wiegand proved the existence of the 
>  antiproton, or negative proton, until then considered the 
>  missing link of the incredibly tiny world of the atom.  For 
>  a quarter-century, the world's top physicists had been haunted 
>  by this "nuclear ghost," whose existence had been postulated 
>  but never established.
>
>  While the discovery could be understood only by an elite
>  community of physicists, it was considered a giant step
>  toward understanding the very nature of matter and existence
>  and reaffirmed scientists' faith in the basic symmetry of
>  nature.
>
>  Segre and Chamberlain were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics
>  in 1959, and some scientists were surprised when Mr. Wiegand
>  was not honored with them.
>
>  ...
>
>  Mr. Wiegand was a member of the Manhattan Project and was a
>  designer of the detonators for the first atomic device.  When
>  the bomb lit up the sky, he recalled falling down, not from 
>  the force of the blast but because he simply could not believe
>  its power.
>
>  Born in Long Beach, Wash., Mr. Wiegand graduated from
>  Willamette University in Salem, Ore., in 1940.  He received his
>  doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950.
>
>  ...

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