Stanislaw Ulam and Related Topics

John von Neumann

12 links

Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath.

Von Neumann's birthplace, at 16 Báthory Street, Budapest. Since 1968, it has housed the John von Neumann Computer Society.

Excerpt from the university calendars for 1928 and 1928/29 of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin announcing Neumann's lectures on the theory of functions II, axiomatic set theory and mathematical logic, the mathematical colloquium, review of recent work in quantum mechanics, special functions of mathematical physics and Hilbert's proof theory. He also lectured on the theory of relativity, set theory, integral equations and analysis of infinitely many variables.

History of approaches that led to NBG set theory

Flow chart from von Neumann's "Planning and coding of problems for an electronic computing instrument," published in 1947.

The first implementation of von Neumann's self-reproducing universal constructor. Three generations of machine are shown: the second has nearly finished constructing the third. The lines running to the right are the tapes of genetic instructions, which are copied along with the body of the machines.

A simple configuration in von Neumann's cellular automaton. A binary signal is passed repeatedly around the blue wire loop, using excited and quiescent ordinary transmission states. A confluent cell duplicates the signal onto a length of red wire consisting of special transmission states. The signal passes down this wire and constructs a new cell at the end. This particular signal (1011) codes for an east-directed special transmission state, thus extending the red wire by one cell each time. During construction, the new cell passes through several sensitised states, directed by the binary sequence.

Von Neumann's wartime Los Alamos ID badge photo

Operation Redwing nuclear test in July 1956

The von Neumann crater, on the far side of the Moon.

During World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project with theoretical physicist Edward Teller, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and others, problem-solving key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb.

Edward Teller

10 links

Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for the title, considering it to be in poor taste.

Physicists at a Manhattan District-sponsored colloquium at Los Alamos on the Super in April 1946. 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.

The Teller–Ulam design kept the fission and fusion fuel physically separated from one another, and used X-rays from the primary device "reflected" off the surrounding casing to compress the secondary.

The 10.4 Mt "Ivy Mike" shot of 1952 appeared to vindicate Teller's long-time advocacy for the hydrogen bomb.

Teller testified about J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1954.

One of the Chariot schemes involved chaining five thermonuclear devices to create the artificial harbor.

Teller became a major lobbying force of the Strategic Defense Initiative to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Appearing on British television discussion After Dark in 1987

It included Stanislaw Ulam, Jane Roberg, Geoffrey Chew, Harold and Mary Argo, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.

Manhattan Project

9 links

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The first nuclear explosive devices, cumbersome and inefficient, provided the basic design building blocks of all future weapons. Pictured is the Gadget device being prepared for the first nuclear test, Trinity.

Nuclear weapon design

6 links

A fourth type, pure fusion weapons, are a theoretical possibility.

Flash X-Ray images of the converging shock waves formed during a test of the high explosive lens system.

Ivy Mike, the first two-stage thermonuclear detonation, 10.4 megatons, November 1, 1952.

Bassoon, the prototype for a 9.3-megaton clean bomb or a 25-megaton dirty bomb. Dirty version shown here, before its 1956 test. The two attachments on the left are light pipes; see below for elaboration.

Subsidence Craters at Yucca Flat, Nevada Test Site.

A diagram of the Green Grass warhead's steel ball safety device, shown left, filled (safe) and right, empty (live). The steel balls were emptied into a hopper underneath the aircraft before flight, and could be re-inserted using a funnel by rotating the bomb on its trolley and raising the hopper.

The design breakthrough came in January 1951, when Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam invented radiation implosion – for nearly three decades known publicly only as the Teller-Ulam H-bomb secret.

Thermonuclear weapon

6 links

[[File:Teller-ulam-multilang.svg|right|thumb|200px|A basic diagram of a thermonuclear weapon.Note: some designs use spherical secondaries.

One possible version of the Teller–Ulam configuration

Operation Castle thermonuclear test, Castle Romeo shot

Operation Grapple on Christmas Island was the first British hydrogen bomb test.

One of France's Triomphant-class nuclear-armed submarines, the Téméraire (S617)

Photographs of warhead casings, such as this one of the W80 nuclear warhead, allow for some speculation as to the relative size and shapes of the primaries and secondaries in U.S. thermonuclear weapons.

The design of all modern thermonuclear weapons in the United States is known as the Teller–Ulam configuration for its two chief contributors, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, who developed it in 1951 for the United States, with certain concepts developed with the contribution of physicist John von Neumann.

Monte Carlo method

4 links

Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results.

Monte-Carlo integration works by comparing random points with the value of the function

In the late 1940s, Stanislaw Ulam invented the modern version of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method while he was working on nuclear weapons projects at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Enrico Fermi

8 links

Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1.

A light cone is a three-dimensional surface of all possible light rays arriving at and departing from a point in spacetime. Here, it is depicted with one spatial dimension suppressed. The timeline is the vertical axis.

Fermi and his research group (the Via Panisperna boys) in the courtyard of Rome University's Physics Institute in Via Panisperna, c. undefined 1934. From left to right: Oscar D'Agostino, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti and Fermi

Enrico Fermi between Franco Rasetti (left) and Emilio Segrè in academic dress

$Beta decay. A neutron decays into a proton, and an electron is emitted. In order for the total energy in the system to remain the same, Pauli and Fermi postulated that a neutrino (\bar{\nu}_e) was also emitted.$

Diagram of Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor to achieve a self-sustaining chain reaction. Designed by Fermi, it consisted of uranium and uranium oxide in a cubic lattice embedded in graphite.

Ernest O. Lawrence, Fermi, and Isidor Isaac Rabi

The FERMIAC, an analog computer invented by Fermi to study neutron transport

Laura and Enrico Fermi at the Institute for Nuclear Studies, Los Alamos, 1954

Memorial plaque in the Basilica Santa Croce, Florence. Italy

Along with Stanislaw Ulam, he calculated that not only would the amount of tritium needed for Teller's model of a thermonuclear weapon be prohibitive, but a fusion reaction could still not be assured to propagate even with this large quantity of tritium.

Hugo Steinhaus

6 links

Polish mathematician and educator.

The Scottish Book from the Lwów School of Mathematics, which Steinhaus contributed to and probably saved during World War II.

While in Lwów, Steinhaus co-founded the Lwów School of Mathematics and was active in the circle of mathematicians associated with the Scottish cafe, although, according to Stanislaw Ulam, for the circle's gatherings, Steinhaus would have generally preferred a more upscale tea shop down the street.

Kazimierz Kuratowski

4 links

Polish mathematician and logician.

While Kuratowski associated with many of the scholars of the Lwów School of Mathematics, such as Stefan Banach and Stanislaw Ulam, and the circle of mathematicians based around the Scottish Café he kept close connections with Warsaw.