Robert R. Wilson

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Robert R. Wilson bigraphy, stories - American physicist

Robert R. Wilson : biography

March 4, 1914 – January 16, 2000

Robert Rathbun Wilson (March 4, 1914 – January 16, 2000) was an American physicist who was a group leader of the Manhattan Project, a sculptor, and an architect of Fermi National Laboratory (Fermilab), where he was also the director from 1967–1978.

Death

After a prolonged illness, Robert Wilson died on January 16, 2000, at the age of 85, at his home in Ithaca, New York. He is buried at the 19th-century Pioneer Cemetery on the Fermilab site.

Early life

Wilson was born in Frontier, Wyoming in 1914.

In 1932 he arrived at Ernest O. Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, which was at that time blossoming into the top American site for both experimental and theoretical physics due to the efforts of Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

But Wilson ran into friction with Lawrence’s harsh frugality while working on his cyclotron and was fired twice from the Rad Lab. The first time, for losing a rubber seal in the 37-inch cyclotron which prevented its use in a demonstration to a potential donor; he was later rehired at Luis Alvarez’s urging. However he soon melted a pair of pliers during a welding job, and was again fired. Though offered his job back, he decided instead to go to Princeton to work with Henry DeWolf Smyth.

At Princeton, Wilson eventually took over Smyth’s project: an alternative approach to electromagnetic separation from Lawrence’s Calutrons, for the purpose of separating the valuable light isotope of uranium from the immensely more common heavy one (a key step to producing an atomic bomb). By 1941 the project had produced a device called the "Isotron," which, unlike the Calutron, used an electrical field to separate the uranium instead of a magnetic one.

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Post-World War II

After the war Wilson also helped form the Federation of American Scientists and served as its chairman in 1946. During the same period he accepted a short appointment at Harvard (most of which was spent at Berkeley). During this short stay at Harvard Wilson published a seminal paper, "Radiological Use of Fast Protons", which essentially founded the field of proton therapy."Radiological Use of Fast Protons" (Radiology 1946:47:487-91) Then in 1947 he went to Cornell University where he worked at the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear Studies. There his achievements led to the construction of a particle accelerator, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), now located at the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory.

In 1967 he took a leave of absence from Cornell to assume directorship of the not-yet-created National Accelerator Laboratory which was to create the largest particle accelerator of its day at Batavia, Illinois. In 1969, Wilson was called to justify the multimillion-dollar machine to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Bucking the trend of the day, Wilson emphasized it had nothing at all to do with national security, rather:

Thanks to Wilson’s leadership—in a full-steam ahead style very much adopted from Lawrence, despite his firings—the facility was completed on time and under budget. Originally named the National Accelerator Laboratory, it was renamed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab for short) in 1974, after famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi; the facility centered around a four-mile circumference, 400 GeV accelerator. Unlike most government facilities, Fermilab was designed to be aesthetically pleasing. Wilson wanted Fermilab to be an appealing place to work, believing that external harmony would encourage internal harmony as well, and labored personally to keep it from looking like a stereotypical "government lab", playing a key role in its design and architecture. It had a restored prairie which served as a home to a herd of American Bisons, ponds, and a main building purposely reminiscent of a cathedral in Beauvais, France. Fermilab’s Central Laboratory building was later named Robert Rathbun Wilson Hall in his honor.