Robert F. Christy

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Robert Frederick Christy (May 14, 1916 – October 3, 2012) was an American theoretical physicist and later astrophysicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.[1] He was also briefly president of California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Christy was born in 1916 in Vancouver, British Columbia.[2] He was named Robert Frederick Cohen at birth, but his father changed the family name to Christy when he was two years old.[3] He attended the University of British Columbia in the 1930s where he studied physics during the blossoming of quantum physics. Following the path blazed by George Volkoff who was a year ahead of him at UBC, Christy was accepted as a graduate student by Robert Oppenheimer at University of California, Berkeley, the leading theoretical physicist in the US at that time.

Christy received his Ph.D. in 1941 and joined the physics department faculty of Illinois Institute of Technology, however he also spent time at the University of Chicago where he was recruited by Enrico Fermi to join the effort to build the first reactor, having been recommended as a theory resource by Oppenheimer.

When Oppenheimer formed the Los Alamos Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project, Christy was one of the early recruits to join the Theory Group. Christy is generally credited with the insight that a solid sub-critical mass of plutonium could be explosively compressed into supercriticality, a great simplification of earlier concepts of implosion requiring hollow shells. For this insight the solid-core plutonium model is often referred to as the "Christy gadget".[4]

Christy joined the University of Chicago Physics department briefly after leaving Los Alamos before being recruited to join the Caltech faculty in 1946 when Oppenheimer decided it was not practical for him to resume his academic activities. He stayed at Caltech for his academic career, serving as Department Chair, Provost and Acting President.

In 1960 Christy turned his attention to astrophysics, creating some of the first practical computation models of stellar operation. For this work Christy was awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1967.

In the 1980s and 1990s Christy participated in the National Research Council's Committee on Dosimetry, an extended effort to better understand the actual radiation exposure due to the Japanese bombs, and on the basis of that learning, better understand the medical risks of radiation exposure.

Christy was one of the last surviving people to have worked firsthand on the Manhattan Project.

References

  1. ↑ "Caltech Mourns the Passing of Robert F. Christy (1916–­2012)". Caltech. October 3, 2012. 
  2. ↑ The Monthly supplement - Google Books. Books.google.ca. Retrieved 2012-10-04. 
  3. ↑ Christy, I.-Juliana (2013). Achieving the Rare: Robert F. Christy's Journey in Physics and Beyond. World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-4460-24-8. 
  4. ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9594189/Robert-Christy.html

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