Kenneth Bainbridge

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Kenneth Bainbridge

Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge (born July 27, 1904 in Cooperstown , New York , † July 14, 1996 in Lexington (Massachusetts) ) was an American physicist.

Life

Bainbridge studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1922 to 1926 and then physics at Princeton University , where he received his doctorate in 1929 under Henry DeWolf Smyth . He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1933/34 and worked on cyclotrons after completing his doctorate at Harvard University . In 1932 he developed a mass spectrometer with which he could take very precise measurements of the masses of isotopes, which at that time impressively confirmed the equivalence of mass and energy according to Albert Einstein . In 1934 he became an assistant professor at Harvard. During the Second World War, he was from 1940 at the MIT Radiation Laboratory in a leading position in radar development (department head and member of the management board) and from 1943 in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos . There he was in charge of instrument development and then, under George Kistiakowsky, the concrete construction of the plutonium bomb ( called gadget ), which was detonated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. After the war, he returned to Harvard University as a professor in 1946, where he initiated the construction of a synchro-cyclotron (which was developed with the participation of Robert R. Wilson in 1946/47) and headed the physics faculty from 1950 to 1954. He became a staunch opponent of nuclear testing in the 1950s, and he was a firm advocate of persecuted colleagues during the McCarthy era. In 1961 he became Leverett Professor of Physics and in 1975 he retired from Harvard. Edward Mills Purcell is one of his PhD students .

In 1932 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1937 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1946 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bainbridge The equivalence of mass and energy , Physical Review, Volume 44, 1933, pp.
  2. ↑ Richard Wilson on the history of the cyclotrons at Harvard
  3. ↑ He later took a critical stance on his involvement in the Trinity Test. Bainbridge A foul and awsome display , Bulletin Atomic Scientists, May 1975 (Memories of Los Alamos and the Trinity Test). Online . After the test, he congratulated Robert Oppenheimer and added Now we are all sons of bitches ( Now we are all sons of dogs). Bull. Atomic Scientists, May 1975, p. 46
  4. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved September 27, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Bainbridge, Kenneth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bainbridge, Kenneth Tompkins (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Cooperstown , New York
DATE OF DEATH July 14, 1996
Place of death Lexington, Massachusetts