Beschreibung:

SCHOLARLY ARCHIVE OF MANHATTAN PROJECT PHYSICIST, INCLUDING HIS LOS ALAMOS SCRAPBOOK, GRADUATE SCHOOL NOTEBOOKS, CORRESPONDENCE, AND FILES. A pioneering figure in 20th century American physics, Robert Serber is perhaps best known for having been J. Robert Oppenheimer's first pick to join the Manhattan Project, and for having composed and delivered "The Los Alamos Primer," a series of five lectures summarizing all that was known to that time about designing and building an atomic bomb (mostly his own work) to the incoming scientists on the project. Robert Serber earned a Ph.D. in the relatively new discipline of modern physics at University of Wisconsin in 1934; during that same summer, Serber ran into a charismatic young physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer at a summer school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Recognizing Oppenheimer's brilliance, Serber abandoned a National Research Fellowship at Princeton to follow Oppenheimer to Berkeley, where he became his principal research assistant for the next four years. Serber was admired during his years at Berkeley, not only for his own brilliant work, but for his ability to translate Oppenheimer's often inscrutable lectures to others. It was this last talent that made him so indispensable to the Manhattan Project. Serber was among the first to be tapped by Oppenheimer to join the Manhattan Project; once on board, it was he who developed the first good theory of bomb disassembly hydrodynamics. Most importantly, he wrote and delivered five lectures, a series dubbed "The Los Alamos Primer," classified by the government for 20 years after the war, and published to great acclaim in 1992 by the University of California Press. After the Trinity tests, Serber was sent as an advisor to the Tinian Island in the South Pacific where the bombs were being prepared. After the blasts he headed up a team of scientists that surveyed the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For five weeks he and other scientists measured radiation levels and recorded the damage, and Serber was eventually able to calculate how high the bomb had been at explosion and how large the fireball was. After the war, he left Los Alamos to join the University of California's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. At the beginning of the red scare in 1948 he was subjected to an Atomic energy Commission investigation into his "character, associations, and loyalty," most likely because members of his extended family, many of whom were writers and artists, had once been socialists. In 1951 Serber accepted a position at Columbia University, where he taught with distinction, eventually serving as department chair, until his retirement in 1978. During his career he was affiliated with nearly every major laboratory in the country, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. Following Oppenheimer's death and that of his wife Charlotte, Serber became the companion of Kitty Oppenheimer, helping her arrange an annual conference in memory of her late husband. This archive features over 60 years of material from the estate of Robert Serber, beginning with his graduate school notebooks which are a rich archive for scientific historians interested in the development of modern quantum mechanics, to his scrapbook album of his Los Alamos years, to the tremendous volume of work produced in the years after the war to his retirement in 1978 and beyond. Highlights include the following: Part I: Graduate School: 1. 16 Autograph Manuscripts, each approx. 80 pp, totaling nearly 1000 pages of script, 4to, [Madison, WI], [1931-1933], in bound volumes, being the graduate school notebooks of Robert Serber, many with loose leaves laid in, some wear and smudging, but overall in good condition. Serber attended the University of Wisconsin during a particularly dynamic period in the development of modern physics. He writ