Robert R. Wilson

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Robert Wilson ( Los Alamos ID card during World War II)
Norman Ramsey (left), Francis Perrin (center) and Robert R. Wilson (right), 1970

Robert Rathbun Wilson (born March 4, 1914 in Frontier , Wyoming , † January 16, 2000 in Ithaca , New York ) was an American physicist who was active in the development of particle accelerators and was the founding director of Fermilab .

Originally from Frontier, Wyoming , he lived with his grandmother near Chicago when he was eight years old . From 1932 to 1938 he first studied electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley , where he received his bachelor's degree cum laude in 1936 and his doctorate in 1940 with Ernest Orlando Lawrence . He published his first paper in Physical Review in 1932 when he was still in college. At Princeton University , New Jersey , where he worked as a physics lecturer, he met Albert Einstein .

Wilson developed between 1941 (still in Princeton) and 1943 an electromagnetic method of separating uranium - isotope ( Isotron called). The isotope separation was an important step on the way to the atomic bomb , but it was practically implemented in large gas diffusion plants in Oak Ridge. He became one of the youngest senior staff at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos , where he headed the department for experimental nuclear physics and initially installed a cyclotron from Harvard with colleagues , and was involved in the further development of the American atomic bomb. He was also active in local politics in Los Alamos as chairman of the city council. In 1946 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society ,

After the Second World War he was briefly at Harvard University (for which he designed a new cyclotron in Berkeley) and from 1947 at Cornell University . In the further course of his career he led the development of accelerators at Cornell University such as the 300 MeV electron synchrotron in the 1950s. He headed the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS) there until 1967, his successor being his close colleague Boyce McDaniel . The development there led to the electron-positron storage ring of Cornell University (CESR) (which was in operation from 1979), where the corresponding laboratory bears his name today (Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory).

He was the founding director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), which he headed from 1967 to 1978. Under his leadership, the 400 GeV ring accelerator, which was the world leader at the time, was completed on time and at the budgeted cost. Outwardly, it also shaped the face of the laboratory, which was formed by two twin towers in the style of French cathedrals ( Wilson Hall ) - for the artistically inclined Wilson the construction of particle accelerators was the cultural equivalent of cathedral construction in the Middle Ages - and a grazing bison herd, a throwback of its origins in the American Midwest.

After his time at Fermilab, he became Professor Emeritus at Cornell in 1980.

According to the memories of Richard Feynman in his autobiography, Wilson, who carried out the radiation measurements during the first atomic bomb test, was shocked by the effect. After the war he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and was a co-founder of the Federation of American Scientists , of which he was chairman in 1946.

He spent his old age in a retirement home in Ithaca, New York , where he died of pneumonia. He was active in sculpting in his spare time, some of his works are for example at the Fermilab. In 1973 he received the National Medal of Science and in 1984 the Enrico Fermi Prize . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society .

He was married to Jane Scheyer for almost sixty years and had three sons.

After him is Robert R. Wilson Prize of the American Physical Society named for accelerator physics.

literature

  • Josef Zens: The bomb makers' conscience. In: Berliner Zeitung . January 19, 2000, accessed June 22, 2015 .
  • Henry Petroski: Robert Wilson: Fermilab 'master physicist, sculptor, and engineer . American Scientist Vol. 103, No. 3 (May / June 2015), pp. 170–174.

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Wilson, Robert R.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wilson, Robert Rathbun (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Frontier , Wyoming
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 2000
Place of death Ithaca , New York