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Atom bomb physicist Robert Christy passes away

Atom bomb physicist Robert Christy passes away

THE physicist Robert F. Christy, who played an important part in the development of the atom bomb, has passed away. He was 96.

Born in Canada, Dr. Christy had been recruited to work on the Manhattan Project — the secret operation to develop the atom bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico during the Second World War.

The project was headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom Dr. Christy had studied under at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Although hundreds of scientists worked on the project, Dr. Christy’s contribution was to prove highly important. One of the problems facing the scientists was how to trigger the chain reaction which in turn would result in a nuclear explosion.

It was at first envisaged that a sphere of conventional explosives would be used to compress a central ball of nuclear fuel into a dense mass and thus trigger the reaction process. But this was found to be defective and Dr. Christy came up with an alternative process which involved using the blast to compress a solid core of plutonium metal.

His design — known as the Christy Gadget — was adopted as the explosive core of the first atom bomb, which was set off in the New Mexico desert in 1945, and on the device which was subsequently dropped on Nagasaki.

After the war, Dr. Christy joined Caltech to teach theoretical physics and was to remain at the university for the rest of his career. He went on to study the riddles of space including pulsations in the brightness of stars.

In later life he was to question if it was wise to further develop nuclear arms, but he never actively opposed such plans.

During his time at Caltech he served as a faculty chairman, vice president and provost. He took emeritus status in 1986

Dr. Christy was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and, in 1967, was awarded the Eddington Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society for his work in theoretical astrophysics.

 

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