Oral history interview with Robert R. Wilson, 1977 May 19.

ArchivalResource

Oral history interview with Robert R. Wilson, 1977 May 19.

Career until departure from University of California at Berkeley in 1940, particularly youth on a Montana ranch; early interest in science and undergraduate education at Berkeley; graduate work under Ernest O. Lawrence on theory of cyclotron and proton-proton scattering; and social relations around the Radiation Laboratory and Berkeley physics department from 1933 to 1940. Also prominently mentioned are: Luis Walter Alvarez, Lawrence Emo, F. Exner, Victor Fritz Lenzen, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nellie Rathbun, Harry White, Milton Grandison White; and Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

Transcript, 57 p.

Information

SNAC Resource ID: 6862703

Related Entities

There are 8 Entities related to this resource.

Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904-1967

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6xb349g (person)

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Physicist (quantum theory and nuclear physics). On the physics faculty at California Institute of Technology and University of California, Berkeley in theoretical physics, 1929-1947; director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 1943-1945; chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, 1946-1952; director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, 1947-1966....

Exner, Franz Serafin, 1849-1926

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6k35vk0 (person)

Alvarez, Luis W., 1911-1988

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6wh2pnm (person)

Luis W. Alvarez (b. June 13, 1911, San Francisco, CA–d. September 1, 1988, Berkely, CA) was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, Alvarez went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley. Alvarez devised a set of experiments to observe K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, predicted by the beta decay ...

Lawrence Radiation Laboratory

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6711wz1 (corporateBody)

University of California (1868-1952)

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6m940p0 (corporateBody)

Administrative History During the mid-twentieth century, the American Labor Movement reached a pinnacle of power and influence within society. The Second World War required that labor be managed as a strategic resource; the high productivity of workers during the war carried over in the peace time economy, which experienced a sustained economic "boom." Unlike European labor relations, where unions play an "official" role in government, the Am...

Lawrence, Ernest Orlando, 1901-1958

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6ns0wbw (person)

Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Nobel prizewinning physicist, inventor of the cyclotron and the founder and first director of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, was born on August 8, 1901 in Canton, South Dakota. His parents Carl Gustavus and Gunda Jacobson Lawrence were the children of Norwegian immigrants. Ernest Lawrence attended St. Olaf College and later the University of South Dakota, where he received his A.B. degree in 1922. He had originally thought to become a medical doctor, ...

Wilson, Robert R., 1914-2000

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6vh5q44 (person)

Robert Rathbun Wilson was born in 1914 in Frontier Wyoming, received an A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley, 1936, and after studying with Prof. Ernest O. Lawrence, a Ph. D. in 1940. He participated in an early effort led by Enrico Fermi at Columbia University to build a nuclear reactor as part of a joint effort with Princeton University, where he was a lecturer and assistant professor, 1940-1942. He worked for Princeton University's reactor project, 1941-19...

Weart, Spencer R., 1942-....

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6222w7s (person)

Spencer R. Weart, born in 1942, received a B.A. in Physics at Cornell University in 1963 and a Ph. D. in Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1968. He then worked for three years at CalTech as a Fellow of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories, publishing papers in leading scientific journals. In 1971 Dr. Weart changed his field, enrolling as a graduate student in the History Department of the University of California, Berkeley. In 1974 he took up his present pos...