Oral history interview with Harold F. Weaver, 1991 September 3-13.

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Oral history interview with Harold F. Weaver, 1991 September 3-13.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/83659798

This oral history provides a broad overview of the career of Harold Francis Weaver, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley. Weaver is a native of California, and received his A.B. and Ph.D. at Berkeley. Weaver's dissertation was officially supervised by Robert J. Trumpler, and utilized observations obtained at Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories in cooperation with Walter Baade. Weaver was briefly a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Yerkes Observatory, and subsequently became involved in war-related work, intially in optics acquisition with the National Defense Research Committee, and later in isotope separation at the Berkeley Radional Lab as part of the Manhattan Project. Weaver was a staff member at Lick Observatory from 1945-1951, during which time he participated in a major eclipse expedition to Brazil. In 1951 he joined the faculty at Berkeley, where he has spent the remainder of his career. Weaver's early research focused on peculiar stars, star clusters, and stellar statistics. In 1958 he became the founding director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at Berkeley, and his subsequent research is concered with the interstellar medium. His contributions to this field include discovery of the first interstellar maser, and completion of large-scale surveys of interstellar hydrogen. Weaver has been involved in numerous committees at Berkeley, including Campus Planning and the Los Alamos-Lawrence Livermore Advisory Committees, and he has also made significant contributions to the leadership and financial management of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the American Astronomical Society. The oral history includes biographical information on his family, including his wife Cecile, who is the daughter of Robert J. Trumpler. Introduction to the volume are provided by Weaver's Berkeley coleagues Hyron Spinrad and Carl Heiles. Weaver's Curriculum Vitae an Doctoral Examination Program are included as apendices, along with the illustrated text of a talk presented by weaver in 1993 describing the history of the Berekely Radio Astronomy Lab and its 85-foot telescope at Hat Creek Observatory.

Transcript: 128 p.

American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library

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SNAC Resource ID: 8305555

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