Nobel pursuits
Book looks at the 18 laureates who worked on the Manhattan Project
The main figure in the new film “Oppenheimer” is J. Robert Oppenheimer, called the “father of the atomic bomb” because he was the director of the Manhattan Project, which built the bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II.
A few months ago, with little fanfare, the large-format book “Nobel Laureates of Los Alamos: The Manhattan Project Era” was published. The editors are Rizwan Ali and Brye Steeves.
It salutes 18 LANL physicists under Oppenheimer’s leadership who received the prestigious Nobel Prize unrelated to their work at LANL. Of the total, 16 received the prize for physics, one for chemistry and, ironically, one for peace.
Oppenheimer, himself a physicist, was not among this cadre. But more than halfway through the book, he’s the focus of the chapter “Why Not Oppie?” (The chapter borrows content from a June 9, 2022, online LANL article “Why Didn’t Oppenheimer ever win a Nobel Prize?”)
In the chapter is a brief discussion of whether Oppenheimer deserved a Nobel. Was the Nobel Committee hesitant to award him a prize because he was intricately linked to the atomic bomb? (The Nobel Prize is named for the man who invented dynamite.)
Was it because Oppenheimer may not have done research on any one subject long enough? Nor made a major scientific discovery? Nor prove a significant theory to warrant the prize? Questions without answers.
Oppenheimer came close. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1946, 1951 and 1967.
These are some of those 18 Nobel-winners:
■ Born in San Francisco, Luis Alvarez worked on the lab’s explosive team. His suggestion of “a symmetrical implosion” led to the success of the plutonium implosion-type weapon tested at Trinity Site in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and detonated on Nagasaki, Japan on Aug. 9, 1945. A uranium gun-type weapon was dropped on the city of Hiroshima three days before, on Aug. 6. Alvarez won a Nobel in 1968 for repurposing the bubble chamber.
■ Hans Bethe fled his native Germany and served as head of the lab’s Theoretical Division. He proved theoretically the feasibility of the two types of atom bombs and the hydrogen bomb, the book says. He won the 1967 Nobel for the discovery of the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle.
■ Niels Bohr escaped Nazi-occupied Denmark. Though not on the LANL staff, he contributed to the design of the “implosion weapon’s initiator, a neutron-generating component designed to help start the nuclear chain reaction,” according to the book. He had received a Nobel Prize in 1922.
■ Enrico Fermi received the Nobel Prize in 1938. Leaving Fascist Italy to collect his prize in Stockholm, Fermi, with his family in tow, did not return to his homeland.
■ Richard Feynman. A New York City native, he conducted and monitored the water boiler reactor at LANL. He shared a Nobel in 1965 for work in quantum electrodynamics.
■ Maria Goeppert Mayer was hired as a consultant to LANL, though most of her wartime work was at another of the Manhattan Project’s labs, focusing on aspects of uranium that would affect weapons development. Her 1963 Nobel was for helping develop the nuclear shell structure.
■ Isador Rabi received the prize in 1944, while at Los Alamos. Rabi’s award was “for his work in developing a magnetic resonance method that … enables scientists to measure the magnetic properties of atoms, atomic nuclei and molecules.”
Rabi’s duties at LANL were not research-oriented. He was a personal advisor to Oppenheimer, a consultant to the Manhattan Project, and influenced changing the lab’s “organizational concept from a military-led coalition to one led by civilian scientists.”
■ Born in Poland, Sir Joseph Rotblat came to LANL in 1944 but remained on staff less than a year. He had qualms about developing the atomic bomb. “After World War II Rotblat believed he had contributed to the misuse of science and devoted the rest of his life to campaigning against nuclear weapons and war,” according to the text of a photo caption in the book.
Rotblat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for having developed the nuclear magnetic resonance technique in the study of the composition of materials.
Besides the 18 physicists in the book, an estimated 13 additional scientists did wartime research at different Manhattan Project labs and received Nobels.
The book’s archival photographs, illustrations, maps and graphs enhance biographical sketches of the physicists’ work at LANL and the reasons for their Nobel Prize.
Ali, the book’s editor-in-chief, is the former director of LANL’s National Security Research Center. Steeves, the book’s managing editor, is the current director of the center.
Ali wrote in the acknowledgements that many LANL staff had a hand in creating the book, among them Paul Ziomek, who conceptualized and implemented the book’s aesthetics. Texas A&M University Press published the book for LANL.