Serber, Robert

The other luminaries enlisted for the summer study were Van Vleck, the Swiss-bom Stanford theoretician Felix Bloch, Oppenheimer s former student and close collaborator Robert Serber, a young Indiana theoretician named Emil Konopinski and two postdoctoral assistants. Konopinski and Teller had arrived at the Met Lab at about the same time earlier that year. We were newcomers in the bustling laboratory, Teller writes in a memoir, and for a few days we were given no specific jobs. Teller proposed that he and Konopinski review his calculations that seemed to prove the impossibility of using an atomic bomb to ignite a thermonuclear reaction in deuterium ... 

The Japanese physics colloquium in Tokyo had decided in March 1943 that an atomic bomb was possible but not practically attainable by any of the belligerents in time to be of use in the present war. Robert Serber s lectures at Los Alamos in early April asserted to the contrary that for the United States an atomic bomb was both possible and probably attainable within two years. The Japanese assessment was essentially technological. Like Bohr s assessment in 1939, it overestimated the difficulty of isotope separation and underestimated U.S. industrial capacity. It also, as the Japanese government had before Pearl Harbor, underestimated American dedication. Collective dedication was a pattern of Japanese culture more than of American. But Americans could summon it when challenged, and couple it with resources of talent and capital unmatched anywhere else in the world. 

Fermi s point—of the outcome of its debut. Oppenheimer had assigned Edward Teller the deliciously Tellerian task of trying to think of any imaginable trick or turn by which the explosion might escape its apparent bounds. Teller at Los Alamos that evening raised the same question Fermi had, but questioned Robert Serber, no mere uninformed GI ... 

While each of the four processes fought to demonstrate its workability during summer and fall 1942 equally important theoretical studies were being conducted that greatly influenced the decisions made in November. Robert Oppenheimer headed the work of a group of theoretic physicists he called the luminaries, wWch included Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Robert Serber, while John H. Manley assisted him by coordinating nationwide fission research and instrument and measurement studies from the Metallurgical... 

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