Oral history interview with Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim, 1977 July 24.

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Oral history interview with Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim, 1977 July 24.

Interview covers Nordheim's life and career up to 1976. Family background, education at Hamburg, München, and Göttingen; graduated 1923; position, 1928-1933; recollections of development of physical theories, 1920s, and of schools and physicists; trips to Cambridge, U.S., Russia, Paris, and Holland, late 1920s and 1930s; positions at Purdue University, 1935-1937, and Duke University, 1937-1956; war work and postwar work at Oak Ridge Laboratory, 1943-1947; secrecy and scientists' political involvements; work on H-bomb at Los Alamos, 1950-1952; opinions on postwar physics, J. R. Oppenheimer and President Carter's Energy Program; discussions of Germany culture, politics, and economy, 1920s through 1940s. Also prominently mentioned: Felix Bloch, Lèon Brillouin, Louis de Broglie, Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, James Franck, Victor Frenkel, Werner Heisenberg, David Hilbert, Adolf Hitler, Lev Landau, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Arnold Sommerfeld, Edward Teller, Wilhelm Wien, Eugene Wigner, Herbert York; Compton Effect, Federation of American Scientists, Manhattan Project, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory.

Transcript, 56 pp.

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SNAC Resource ID: 8285071

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