Robert F. Christy
Robert Frederick Christy ( born May 14, 1916 in Vancouver, † October 3, 2012 in Pasadena ) was an American physicist.
Career
Christy studied at the University of British Columbia with a bachelor's degree (1935 ) and master's degree (1937) and in 1941 received his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, with Robert Oppenheimer. As a post - graduate student, he was instructor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and then employees in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos until 1946., Where he was part of the theory group, where he proposed a simplification of the Implosionsmechanismus the plutonium bomb ( compressing a sub-critical mass rather complicated shell arrangements put high demands on the symmetry of the implosion ). His brute force design from September 1944 was also called Christy gadget. He was also involved in the first experimental arrangements for critical mass, the kettle reactor (Water boiler ), a tank with dissolved uranyl sulfate in water, on which the correctness of the neutron cross sections used in the calculation of criticality could be tested. Just before the crucial Kettle - experiment in June 1944, Christy was able to specify the critical mass in advance to within a few grams correctly how the experiment showed.
From 1946 he was at Caltech, where he was Professor, 1969/70 Board of its faculty was, from 1970 to 1986 Vice President and Provost and 1977/78 Acting President. In 1986, he retired.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was involved in a committee of the National Research Council to assess the risks from radiation exposure, including through analysis of data from the atomic bombs on Japan.
From about 1960 he turned to astrophysics and developed early computer models of the processes inside the star, for which he received the 1967 Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
He should not be confused with physicist Robert Wentworth Christy (* 1922), a professor at Dartmouth College.