Milton S. Plesset

Milton Spinoza Plesset ( born February 7, 1908 in Pittsburgh, † 19 February 1991) was an American physicist and engineer.

Biography

Plesset studied at the University of Pittsburgh ( Bachelor 1929) and in 1932 received his doctorate from Yale University with John Archibald Wheeler (The Relativity Electron in Simple Fields and The Thermionic Properties of Cesium Coated nickel). After that he went to Caltech, where he worked with Robert Oppenheimer on early quantum electrodynamics: shortly after the discovery of the positron, they investigated theoretically the formation of electron-positron pairs. 1933/34, he was in Copenhagen, where he worked with Christian Møller, Wheeler and EJ Williams at the Niels Bohr Institute. From 1935 he taught at the University of Rochester in 1940 and went to Caltech. From 1942 he was during World War II at Douglas Aircraft Corporation in aircraft development. In 1948 he became Associate Professor in 1951 and Professor at Caltech (since 1963 as Professor of Engineering Science), where he was Professor Emeritus in 1978. At the same time, he was from 1977 to 1988 Adjunct Professor of Nuclear Engineering at UCLA.

In 1934 he worked with Christian Møller on a quantum mechanical perturbation theory method, which was named after them, and found, for example in quantum chemistry application. He primarily worked on hydrodynamics, especially the dynamics of bubbles ( the Rayleigh -Plesset equation is there named after him and Lord Rayleigh ), with applications to the physics of nuclear reactors ( multi-phase hydrodynamics, security issues of nuclear reactors ). 1975 to 1982 he was a member of the Advisory Board of the U.S. regulatory authority for Nuclear Safety ( U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ).

His PhD, Norman Zabusky.

Since 1979 he was a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1986 he received the Award of the ASME fluid engineering. He was a Fellow of the ASME and the American Physical Society. In 1980 he was Thurston Lecturer of ASME and stood 1971/72 prior to their hydrodynamics department.

He was married twice, his first marriage with the writer Isabel Rosanoff (died in 1985) he had four children.