Manhattan Project Scientists: Robert Serber

Robert Serber pictured in his Los Alamos Laboratory ID photo.

LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

Quick Facts

Significance:

Serber gave introductory lectures for scientific staff on the principles and goals of the project at Los Alamos; they were printed as “The Los Alamos Primer.”

Place of Birth:

Philadelphia, PA

Date of Birth:

March 14, 1909

Place of Death:

New York, NY

Date of Death:

June 1, 1997

Knowing the material thoroughly, Robert Serber (1909-1997) literally wrote the book on everything that incoming scientific staff at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory needed to know about the lab’s program to build the atomic bombs. He had received his BS in engineering physics from LeHigh University in 1930 and his PhD in physics from the University of Madison-Wisconsin in 1934. He went to Berkeley to work with Robert Oppenheimer and traveled back and forth with him between Berkeley and CalTech each year. For a time Serber and his wife Charlotte lived in the garage apartment at Oppenheimer’s house and visited his ranch in New Mexico in the summers. In 1938 Serber became a professor at the University of Illinois – Urbana.

In 1943 Oppenheimer recruited him for the new laboratory at Los Alamos. His first duty was to give a series of five lectures on the basic principles and goals of the project. The lectures were mimeographed as the “Los Alamos Primer;” and given to new incoming scientific staff. The information was declassified in 1965 and printed as a book; it is now considered a fundamental document in the history of nuclear weapons. Serber named the Thin Man, Little Boy, and Fat Man bomb types based on characters in popular detective novels. Oppenheimer recruited Charlotte Serber to be the head of the lab’s technical library, and she was the only wartime female group leader. Robert Serber was at Trinity, and then went to Tinian to assist with bomb assembly. In September of 1945 he was part of the first American team to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spending five weeks assessing the effects of the bombs and collecting debris for testing.

After the war, Serber briefly taught at Berkeley, and then moved to Columbia as a professor of physics; he was department chair beginning in 1975. He became the president of the American Physical Society and was a consultant to numerous laboratories and commissions.