Reflections on a nuclear mission
After the U.S. entered World War II, things changed on Harvard’s campus. All but two of the Houses filled with military personnel, and faculty members left to take up posts supporting the war effort. That pushed undergraduate physics student Roy Glauber into a teaching role. Glauber noticed something else, too: Harvard’s cyclotron — a kind of particle accelerator — was gone, dismantled by men wearing St. Louis Medical Depot uniforms and shipped west. Glauber, who had entered Harvard in the fall of 1941 at the age of 16, would soon follow. He was something of a physics prodigy. By the time he had been on campus two years, he had already taken many of the graduate physics courses the University had to offer. When he turned 18, he began to think about how he could help the war effort. He knew scientists were in short supply, so he filled out the National Roster of...