Elsie McMillan's Lecture
[For Edwin McMillan's lecture, which preceded Elsie's, please click here.]
[For Edwin McMillan's lecture, which preceded Elsie's, please click here.]
Philip Abelson: My name is Philip Abelson. I was the son of two Norwegian immigrants. My father was born north of the Arctic Circle, and my mother was born in middle Norway. I visited the birthplaces of both of them. They were very wonderful parents. I couldn’t have had better parents.
Charles Critchfield was a mathematical physicist assigned to work on the development of gun-type fission weapons, and eventually implosion-type weapons, at Los Alamos. He returned to Los Alamos in 1952 to work on the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Rosen: Well, my name is Louis Rosen. I was born in New York City, not the best part of the city. I’m now almost eighty-five years old. My parents were immigrants from Poland. They were escaping from the pogroms, which were taking place with the Russian Cossacks coming in and raiding villages, especially where Jews where plentiful. My father came over here in about 1909. My mother—they were girl and boyfriends in the old country—came over two years later.
Louis Rosen, a native New Yorker and the son of Polish immigrants, was personally selected to work on the Manhattan project in Los Alamos while a graduate student in physics. Once in Los Alamos, Rosen was assigned to Edwin McMillan’s group, where he worked on implosion technology. Rosen remained in Los Alamos after the war ended and was considered the father of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.
Cindy Kelly: I'm Cindy Kelly, Atomic Heritage Foundation, and I'm in Ithaca, New York. It is Wednesday, June 11, 2014. And I have with me Rose Bethe. And I'm going to start by asking Rose to tell us her name and spell it.
Rose Bethe: My name is Rose Bethe. It's spelled B as in boy, E, T as in Tom, H, E.