David R. Inglis

David Rittenhouse Inglis (born October 10, 1905 in Detroit , Michigan , † December 3, 1995 in Amherst , Massachusetts ) was an American physicist .

David Inglis was a descendant of David Rittenhouse . He graduated from Amherst College with a bachelor's degree in 1928 and received his doctorate in physics from the University of Michigan in 1931 . In 1932 he spent a year in Heidelberg and, after returning to the USA in 1933, went to Ohio State University , the University of Pittsburgh and Princeton University . From 1938 he was Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University and worked during World War II first at the Aberdeen Proving Ground , the ballistics center of the US Army , and then from 1943 to 1946 in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. After the war he was group leader at the Argonne National Laboratory , which he joined as a senior scientist in 1949 and where he was again engaged in theoretical nuclear physics.

Concerned about the rise in nuclear armament, he began to campaign publicly for nuclear disarmament in the 1950s and was founding chairman of the Federation of American Scientists . He lobbied for nuclear arms restriction and cessation of nuclear tests both before Congress and among the general public (publications in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , Saturday Review and The New Republic ) and participated in the Pugwash in the 1950s and 1960s -Conferences .

In 1969 he left the Argonne Lab and became a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst . In 1975 he retired.

From the 1930s he dealt with theoretical nuclear physics, where he also developed an experimental program at Johns Hopkins. He succeeded in one of the first microscopic descriptions of an excited nuclear state, whereby he found the spin-orbit coupling in the nucleus of the isotope 7 lithium. He later dealt with alternative energy sources and especially wind energy.

In 1974 he was the first recipient of the American Physical Society's Leo Szilard Award . He received honorary degrees from Amherst College and the University of Illinois.

Fonts

• Nuclear Energy: Its Physics and Its Social Challenge, Addison-Wesley 1973
• Wind Power and Other Energy Options, University of Michigan Press 1978

literature

• Stanley S. Hanna, Dieter Kurath, Gerald A. Peterson: David Rittenhouse Inglis, Physics Today, Volume 50, 1997, Issue 6, pp. 109-110.

Web links

• David R. Inglis, 90; Worked on A-Bomb (Obituary, New York Times, Dec. 8, 1995)
• Inglis Papers, University of Massachusetts Library