Bernard Field

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bernard Taub Feld (born December 21, 1919 in Brooklyn , † February 19, 1993 ibid) was an American physicist.

Field studied at City College of New York with a bachelor's degree in 1939. The continuation of the study at Columbia University (with Enrico Fermi , whose teaching assistant he was, and II Rabi ) was through work in the Manhattan Project during World War II under Enrico Fermi interrupted. He assisted Fermi and Leo Szilard in the construction of the first reactor in Chicago and was from 1943 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (reactors and separation systems for plutonium production) and then in Los Alamos, where he was involved in the plutonium bomb. After the war he continued his studies and received his doctorate in 1945 from Columbia University with Willis Lamb .

From 1946 he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), first as an instructor, then from 1948 assistant professor, from 1952 associate professor. Feld was a professor at MIT from 1955 until his retirement in 1990. From 1975 to 1980 he was director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Science there.

He campaigned for nuclear disarmament as early as 1946 (lobbying in Washington which led to the establishment of the civil Atomic Energy Agency), was President of the Albert Einstein Peace Foundation, publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and headed the American Committee for Pugwash from 1963 to 1973 -Conferences and 1973 to 1978 the international committee. In his own words, his involvement in the development of the bomb was an original sin that he wanted to work against for the rest of his life ( Having been involved in the original sin, I've spent the rest of my life trying to atone for it ).

He worked on experimental high-energy physics and on the development of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator (operated by MIT and Harvard). In the 1940s and early 1950s he published results from the Manhattan Project on neutron physics and, in the 1950s, among other things, on the photodesintegration of the deuteron and meson production with photons as well as experiments on parity violation.

He was visiting scholar at CERN , the University of Rome, the École Polytechnique , the Nuclear Research Center in Saclay and the Imperial College London .

In 1975 he received the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award . He was a Guggenheim Fellow . Feld was vice president of the Federation of American Scientists .

He was one of the editors of the Annals of Physics and advised the Blaisdell publishing house on physics. He was co-director of the Science and Technology for International Security program at MIT. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1956), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

Fonts

  • Neutron Physics, Experimental Nuclear Physics II, Wiley 1954
  • Models of Elementary Particles, Blaisdell 1969
  • Editor with T. Greenwood, GW Rathjens, S. Weinberg: Impact of New Technologies on the Arms Race, Proc. 10. Pughwash Conf., MIT Press 1971
  • Editor with Kosta Tsipis , AH Cahn: The Future of the Sea-Based. Deterrent, MIT Press 1973
  • A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Essays on Science and World Affairs, Pergamon Press 1979

Some essays:

  • On the inelastic scattering of fast neutrons Physical Review, Volume 75, 1949, pp. 1115-1123
  • Mesons and the structure of nucleons. Part II. The nucleon isobar and pion dynamics, Annals of Physics, Volume 4, 1958, pp. 189-232.
  • with G. Costa: Mesons and the structure of nucleons. Part III. Pion-nucleon scattering, Annals of Physics, Vol. 9, 1960, pp. 354-372.
  • with G. Costa: Mesons and the structure of nucleons. Part IV. The nucleon-nucleon potential, Annals of Physics, Volume 18, 1962, pp. 47-64.
  • Photon interactions in the BeV energy range, Physics Today, September 1963
  • Nuclear proliferation - thirty years after Hiroshima, Physics Today, Volume 28, July 1975, pp. 23-29.
  • with G. Bekefi, J. Parmentola, K. Tsipis: Particle beam weapons. A technical assessment, Nature, Volume 284, 1980, pp. 219-225.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from the 1993 MIT News obituary for Feld
  2. ↑ For example with HH Goldsmith, HW Ibser: Neutron cross sections of the elements A compilation, Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 1947, pp. 259-297
  3. ^ Feld, Kinematics of β decay and parity nonconservation in weak interactions, Physical Review, Volume 107, 1957, pp. 797-804
personal data
SURNAME Field, Bernard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Feld, Bernard Taub (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 1993
Place of death Brooklyn