A report on David Hawkins (philosopher), Stanislaw Ulam and Project Y

David Hawkins' Los Alamos ID badge
Stanisław Ulam
Robert Oppenheimer (left), Leslie Groves (center) and Robert Sproul (right) at the ceremony to present the Los Alamos Laboratory with the Army-Navy "E" Award at the Fuller Lodge on 16 October 1945
Stanisław Ulam
In nuclear fission, the atomic nucleus of a heavy element splits into two or more light ones when a neutron is captured. If more neutrons are emitted, a nuclear chain reaction becomes possible.
The Scottish Café's building now houses the Universal Bank in Lviv, Ukraine.
In nuclear fusion, the nuclei of light elements are fused to create a heavier element.
Ulam's ID badge photo from Los Alamos
Map of Los Alamos site, New Mexico, 1943–45
Stan Ulam holding the FERMIAC
Four-family apartment units at Los Alamos
Ivy Mike, the first full test of the Teller–Ulam design (a staged fusion bomb), with a yield of 10.4 megatons on 1 November 1952
The Technical Area at Los Alamos. There was a perimeter fence around the entire site, but also an inner fence shown here around the Technical Area.
The Sausage device of Mike nuclear test (yield 10.4 Mt) on Enewetak Atoll. The test was part of the Operation Ivy. The Sausage was the first true H-Bomb ever tested, meaning the first thermonuclear device built upon the Teller-Ulam principles of staged radiation implosion.
The main gate at Los Alamos
An artist's conception of the NASA reference design for the Project Orion spacecraft powered by nuclear propulsion
Passage between buildings A and B in the Technical Area
When the positive integers are arrayed along the Ulam spiral, prime numbers, represented by dots, tend to collect along diagonal lines.
Isidor Isaac Rabi, Dorothy McKibbin, Robert Oppenheimer and Victor Weisskopf at Oppenheimer's home in Los Alamos in 1944
An animation demonstrating the lucky number sieve. The numbers in red are lucky numbers
A row of Thin Man casings. Fat Man casings are visible in the background. The tow truck was used by the 216th Army Air Forces Base Unit to move them.
A ring of electrorefined plutonium. It has a purity of 99.96%, weighs 5.3 kg, and is about 11 cm in diameter. It is enough plutonium for one bomb core. The ring shape helps with criticality safety.
Plutonium has six allotropes at ambient pressure: alpha (α), beta (β), gamma (γ), delta (δ), delta prime (δ'), & epsilon (ε)
Explosive lenses are used to compress a fissile core inside an implosion-type nuclear weapon.
An implosion-type nuclear bomb. In the center is the neutron initiator (red). It is surrounded by the plutonium hemispheres. There is a small air gap (white, not in the original Fat Man design) and then the uranium tamper. Around that is the aluminium pusher (purple). This is encased in the explosive lenses (gold). Colors are the same as in the diagram opposite.
Norris Bradbury, group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled Gadget atop the Trinity test tower. Later, he became the director of Los Alamos vice Oppenheimer.
A Little Boy unit on Tinian connected to test equipment, possibly to test or charge components within the device
Water Boiler
The April 1946 colloquium on the Super. In the front row are (left to right) Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J. M. B. Kellogg. Robert Oppenheimer, in dark coat, is behind Manley; to Oppenheimer's left is Richard Feynman. The Army officer on the left is Colonel Oliver Haywood.
Herbert Lehr and Harry Daghlian loading the assembled tamper plug containing the plutonium pit and initiator into a sedan for transport from the McDonald Ranch House to the Trinity shot tower
The explosives of "the gadget" were raised to the top of the tower for the final assembly.
Deak Parsons (right) supervises loading the Little Boy bomb into the B-29 Enola Gay. Norman Ramsey is on his left, with his back to the camera.
Fat Man bomb, with liquid asphalt sealant sprayed on the casing's seams, is readied on Tinian.
Remote handling of a kilocurie source of radiolanthanum for a RaLa Experiment at Los Alamos
Bradbury (left) examines plans for new laboratory sites and permanent housing with Leslie Groves of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (center) and Eric Jette (right) in April 1947; Colonel Lyle E. Seeman stands behind Bradbury, second from the left.

He was also an administrative assistant at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory and later one of its official historians.

- David Hawkins (philosopher)

In October 1943, he received an invitation from Hans Bethe to join the Manhattan Project at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

- Stanislaw Ulam

Hawkins saw his role as that of a go-between, mediating between the civilian scientists and the military leadership at Los Alamos, but he also found a kindred spirit in the Polish mathematician Stan Ulam, who was working in Edward Teller's "Super" Group.

- David Hawkins (philosopher)

In November 1944, David Hawkins and Ulam addressed this problem in a report entitled "Theory of Multiplicative Processes".

- Stanislaw Ulam

In his history of the Los Alamos project, David Hawkins wrote: "RaLa became the most important single experiment affecting the final bomb design".

- Project Y

Nonetheless, in February 1944, Teller added Stanislaw Ulam, Jane Roberg, Geoffrey Chew, and Harold and Mary Argo to his T-1 Group.

- Project Y
David Hawkins' Los Alamos ID badge

1 related topic with Alpha

Overall
The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project on 16 July 1945 was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.

Manhattan Project

0 links

Research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons.

Research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons.

The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project on 16 July 1945 was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
Enrico Fermi, John R. Dunning, and Dana P. Mitchell in front of the cyclotron in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University
March 1940 meeting at Berkeley, California: Ernest O. Lawrence, Arthur H. Compton, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Karl T. Compton, and Alfred L. Loomis
Different fission bomb assembly methods explored during the July 1942 conference
Manhattan Project Organization Chart, 1 May 1946
Oppenheimer and Groves at the remains of the Trinity test in September 1945, two months after the test blast and just after the end of World War II. The white overshoes prevented fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes.
Groves confers with James Chadwick, the head of the British Mission.
Shift change at the Y-12 uranium enrichment facility at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on 11 August 1945. By May 1945, 82,000 people were employed at the Clinton Engineer Works. Photograph by the Manhattan District photographer Ed Westcott.
Physicists at a Manhattan District-sponsored colloquium at the Los Alamos Laboratory on the Super in April 1946. In the front row are Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J. (Jerome) M. B. Kellogg (1905-1981). Robert Oppenheimer, in dark coat, is behind Manley; to Oppenheimer's left is Richard Feynman. The Army officer on the left is Colonel Oliver Haywood.
Map of Los Alamos site, New Mexico, 1943–45
Hanford workers collect their paychecks at the Western Union office.
The majority of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project came from the Shinkolobwe mine in Belgian Congo.
Oak Ridge hosted several uranium separation technologies. The Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant is in the upper right. The K-25 and K-27 gaseous diffusion plants are in the lower left, near the S-50 thermal diffusion plant. The X-10 was for plutonium production.
Alpha I racetrack at Y-12
Calutron Girls were young women who monitored calutron control panels at Y-12. Gladys Owens, seated in the foreground, was unaware of what she had been involved in.
Oak Ridge K-25 plant
The S-50 plant is the dark building to the upper left behind the Oak Ridge powerhouse (with smoke stacks).
Workers load uranium slugs into the X-10 Graphite Reactor.
Aerial view of Hanford B-Reactor site, June 1944
Map of the Hanford Site. Railroads flank the plants to the north and south. Reactors are the three northernmost red squares, along the Columbia River. The separation plants are the lower two red squares from the grouping south of the reactors. The bottom red square is the 300 area.
A row of Thin Man casings. Fat Man casings are visible in the background.
An implosion-type nuclear bomb
Remote handling of a kilocurie source of radiolanthanum for a RaLa Experiment at Los Alamos
The explosives of "the gadget" were raised to the top of the tower for the final assembly.
The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., speaks to service personnel Oak Ridge Tennessee in August 1945.
A billboard encouraging secrecy among Oak Ridge workers
Security poster, warning office workers to close drawers and put documents in safes when not being used
Allied soldiers dismantle the German experimental nuclear reactor at Haigerloch.
Silverplate B-29 Straight Flush. The tail code of the 444th Bombardment Group is painted on for security reasons.
Little Boy explodes over Hiroshima, Japan, 6 August 1945 (left); Fat Man explodes over Nagasaki, Japan, 9 August 1945 (right).
Presentation of the Army–Navy "E" Award at Los Alamos on 16 October 1945. Standing, left to right: J. Robert Oppenheimer, unidentified, unidentified, Kenneth Nichols, Leslie Groves, Robert Gordon Sproul, William Sterling Parsons.
President Harry S. Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, establishing the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
The Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW) near Niagara Falls became a principal repository for Manhattan Project waste for the Eastern United States. All of the radioactive materials stored at the LOOW site—including thorium, uranium, and the world's largest concentration of radium-226—were buried in an "Interim Waste Containment Structure" (in the foreground) in 1991.
A "bomb" (pressure vessel) containing uranium halide and sacrificial metal, probably magnesium, being lowered into a furnace
After the reaction, the interior of a bomb coated with remnant slag
A uranium metal "biscuit" from the reduction reaction

Nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the actual bombs.

In his history of the Los Alamos project, David Hawkins wrote: "RaLa became the most important single experiment affecting the final bomb design".

At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Stanislaw Ulam gave one of his students, Joan Hinton, an exam early, so she could leave to do war work.