History: Serber and Latter

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

The following physicists passed away during
the May/June period this year:

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San Jose Mercury News, 6/2/97, New York Times
byline:

Robert Serber, physicist, helped develop A-bomb

NEW YORK--Dr. Robert Serber, a theoretical physicist
who was the intellectual midwife at the birth of the
atomic bomb and helped shape particle physics research
for decades, died Sunday at his home on the Upper West
Side in Manhattan.  He was 88.

The cause was complications after surgery for brain
cancer...

Mr. Serber was a protege of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the
director of the Los Alamos project, which developed
the bomb during World War II.  From the summer of 1942
until March 1943, "Oppy and I were the Los Alamos
project so far as theory was concerned," Mr. Serber once
said.

At crucial moments, he pointed the way for experimental
physicists.  In April 1943, when scientists were
gathering at Los Alamos, in New Mexico, he told them
what they needed to know about fission to build an atomic
bomb.

His notes for those introductory sessions became the
"Los Alamos Primer," the laboratory's first report.
After the war, he gave a well-known series of lectures
at the University of California-Berkeley, later
distributed in mimeographed form as "Serber Says," to
bring experimental physicists up to speed on nuclear
theory so they could branch out in new directions in
research.

And he performed much the same service in subsequent
years, pulling the many threads of theory together for
experimentalists at leading particle physics centers
nationwide so their work could be more fruitful.

"He was an almost ideal bridge between the theoretical
and experimental communities," Wolfgang Panofsky, the
retired director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center, said in an interview.  "Other theorists may
have made more fundamental contributions, but they
simply did not interact with the experimentalists as
he did."

His talent was being able to comprehend a theory at its
widest and narrowest points and to communicate that
information to others, Panofsky said.

That practicality meant that Mr. Serber's role in the
atomic bomb project did not end when the weapon was
successfully tested on July 16, 1945.

By the end of that month, he was crossing the Pacific
to advise the military on using the bombs and to
reassure the air crews that would drop them.  Later,
he was with the first American team to enter Hiroshima
and Nagasaki to assess the damage from the atomic bombs.

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San Jose Mercury News, 6/28/97, New York Times byline:

Nuclear physicist Albert Latter, 76

Albert Latter, a nuclear physicist and expert on nuclear
weapons systems' abilities and vulnerabilities, died
June 8 at his home in the Pacific Palisades section of
Los Angeles.  He was 76.

His death was announced on Wednesday by Rand Corp., the
research concern based in Santa Monica, where Latter
worked from 1951 to 1971.  Rand's public information
director, Jess Cook, said Latter had had a long illness.

While Mr. Latter was at Rand, he was the co-author, with
the physicist Edward Teller, of a widely noted 1958
book, "Our Nuclear Future:  Facts, Dangers and
Opportunities."  The two men had worked together on the
Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board.

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