Albert Wattenberg

Albert Wattenberg

Albert "Al" Wattenberg (* 13. April 1917 in New York City ; † 27. June 2007 in Urbana (Illinois) ) was an American physicist who in the construction of the first nuclear reactor ( Chicago Pile ) in Chicago by Enrico Fermi involved was.

Wattenberg studied at the City College of New York with a bachelor's degree in 1938, at Columbia University with a master's degree in 1939 and he was 1939 to 1941 spectroscopist at the Schenley company in New York. From 1942 to 1946 he worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project (he did not follow Fermi to Los Alamos, but stayed in Chicago as an employee of Leo Szilard ). He was a member of the team that got the first nuclear reactor up and running in 1942. In 1947 he experimented under Fermi at the Argonne National Laboratory and received his doctorate under Fermi. Together with Harold Lichtenberger , he oversaw the design, testing and construction of the first heavy water reactor with enriched uranium, Chicago Pile 3 in the former location of the Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont, Illinois. In 1949/50 he was the head of nuclear physics at the Argonne National Laboratory, but he was drawn to experimental elementary particle physics. He was also politically active in left-wing student circles in the 1930s and feared the McCarthy committees would influence his career if he stayed at a state laboratory. In 1950 he went to the University of Illinois as Visiting Assistant Professor for a year , then was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1958 until his retirement in 1986 professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . He was involved in various experiments, for example on meson decays at Fermilab and other accelerators.

In 1962/63 he was visiting professor in Rome and in 1973 and 1980/81 at Stanford.

In 1977 he received the Nuclear Pioneer Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine. Around 90 essays in Physical Review are from him.

In 1945 he signed the Szilard petition against the use of the atomic bomb and was a founding member of the Federation of Atomic Scientists. In the 1950s he visited Japan as the official representative of the Atoms for Peace program.

In retirement he was editor of the History of Physics newsletter.

From 1943 until her death in 1989 he was married to Shirley Hier, with whom he had three daughters, and from 1992 to Alice von Neuman. He was a passionate fisherman.

Fonts

• Nuclear reactions at high energies, Handbuch der Physik 1957

Web links

• Vineyard Gazette, July 5, 2007
• Literature by and about Albert Wattenberg in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004