Robert F. Christy

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Robert F. Christy

Robert Frederick Christy (born May 14, 1916 in Vancouver , Canada , † October 3, 2012 in Pasadena , California , United States ) was an American physicist .

Career

Christy studied at the University of British Columbia with a bachelor's degree (1935) and master's degree (1937) and received his doctorate in 1941 at the University of California, Berkeley , with Robert Oppenheimer . As a postdoctoral fellow he was an instructor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and then a collaborator in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos until 1946. There he was part of the theory group, where he proposed a simplification of the implosion mechanism of the plutonium bomb (compression of a subcritical mass instead of more complicated shell arrangements placed high demands on the symmetry of the implosion). His brute force design from September 1944 was also called the Christy gadget. He was also involved in the first experimental arrangements for critical masses, the kettle reactor (water boiler), a tank with uranyl sulphate dissolved in water, on which the correctness of the neutron cross-sections used in the calculation of criticality could be tested. Shortly before the decisive kettle experiment in June 1944, Christy was able to correctly specify the critical mass in advance to within a few grams, as the experiment showed.

From 1946 he was at Caltech , where he became professor, 1969/70 head of his faculty, 1970 to 1986 Vice President and Provost and 1977/78 Acting President. In 1986 he retired.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He was involved in a committee of the National Research Council to assess the dangers of radiation exposure, including by evaluating the data from the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

From around 1960 he turned to astrophysics and developed early computer models of the processes inside the stars, for which he received the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1967 .

In 1969 Christy was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He should not be confused with the physicist Robert Wentworth Christy (* 1922), professor at Dartmouth College.

literature

  • Lippincott: A conversation with Robert Christy, 2 parts, Physics in Perspective, Volume 8, 2006, 282-317, 408-450

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Obituary
  3. ↑ Lillian Hoddeson et al. a. Critical Assembly , Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 161
  4. ↑ Hoddeson, pp. 293, 307
  5. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 15, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Christy, Robert F.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Christy, Robert Frederick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Vancouver
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 2012
Place of death Pasadena