Emil Konopinski
Emil Konopinski ( Emil John (Jan ) Konopinski ) ( born December 25, 1911 in Michigan City (Indiana ), † 26 May 1990 in Bloomington ( Indiana)) was an American physicist.
Konopinski was of Polish descent and son of Joseph and Sophia Konopinski Sniegowska. He received in 1934 a PhD in Physics at the University of Michigan and later became a professor of physics at Indiana University. During the Second World War, he worked with Enrico Fermi on the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago.
To appraised his research and the general theory of fission reactions, Robert Oppenheimer held in June 1942 at the University of California at Berkeley, a research summer. Participants Hans Bethe, John H. van Vleck, Edward Teller, Felix Bloch, Richard C. Tolman and Emil Konopinski came here to the conclusion that a bomb based on nuclear fission was possible and suggested that to start the chain reaction, a critical mass must be present. Konopinski was thus already involved at the beginning of the Manhattan Project.
Konopinski showed together with C. Marin and Edward Teller that a thermonuclear explosion would not ignite the Earth's atmosphere and thus destroy the earth.
From 1946 to 1968 Konopinski consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission.