From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4@msn.com)
Date: Thu May 16 2002 - 08:22:24 PDT
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From: cunews@cornell.edu
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2002 3:11 PM
To: CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L@cornell.edu; CUNEWS-CAMPUS-L@cornell.edu; CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L@cornell.edu
Subject: Cornell News: Boyce McDaniel Obituary
Boyce D. McDaniel, Cornell physicist who gave first atomic bomb final
check before test at Trinity site in 1945, dies at 84
FOR RELEASE: May 15, 2002
Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Office: 607-255-3290
E-mail: bpf2@cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Boyce D. McDaniel, the Cornell University physicist
and Manhattan Project scientist who gave the atomic bomb its final
check before the first test at Trinity site in July 1945, died of a
heart attack May 8 in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 84.
McDaniel's faculty career at Cornell spanned 56 years. But his
professional start was sudden and dramatic. In 1943, as a newly
fledged Ph.D., McDaniel was hired, at $250 a month working 10- to
15-hour days at a secret facility in Los Alamos, N.M., to conduct
nuclear physics research on a device nicknamed "the gadget." The
device was the atomic bomb, and McDaniel had been hired as a
protégé of Robert Bacher, one of several Cornell
physicists assigned to the Manhattan Project. The young McDaniel
would play a critical role on physicist Robert Wilson's cyclotron
research team, which helped identify the amount of the isotope
uranium-235 (U-235) needed to create the atomic fission to detonate
the world's first nuclear weapon.
McDaniel had earned his doctorate at Cornell in the early years of
World War II, researching the absorption rates of neutrons in the
element indium. While his thesis was not considered classified
information by the U.S. government, McDaniel and Bacher understood
its implications for weapons research. They marked each page "secret"
and locked two copies away in the university's library.
Physicists on the Manhattan Project worked simultaneously on
different materials to power the bomb. McDaniel's group, however,
needed to know if the U-235 chain reaction occurred fast enough to
create an explosive device. By the summer of 1945, enough U-235 (an
isotope, comprising only .7 percent of the atoms of naturally
occurring uranium) and sufficient plutonium-239 had been processed.
On July 15, 1945, the plutonium bomb was ready for its test at
Trinity site on the U.S. Army's Alamogordo Bombing Range at the
Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) desert. The test was scheduled
for the next day at 4 a.m.
One of McDaniel's tasks was to check the bomb's radiation levels
every few hours. The gadget had been hoisted atop a 100-foot metal
tower, and as McDaniel climbed the tower at 1 a.m., a strong
thunderstorm developed over the site. McDaniel later wrote, "During
the evening a misting rain had been falling, and by the time I
started up [the tower], there were thunderstorms playing around the
site with frequent flashes of lightning followed by rolling thunder.
With considerable fear and trepidation, I made the trip to the top
and returned safely, heaving a sigh of relief."
McDaniel would be the last man to check and even touch the bomb at
the Trinity site before it was detonated at 5:29:45 a.m., Mountain
War Time, July 16, 1945. The young McDaniel was surrounded his
friends, mentors and colleagues, physicists Bacher, Isadore Isaac
Rabi and Enrico Fermi. McDaniel recalled them "staring intently into
the darkness. Then came the last-minute countdown with the switch to
automatic time out. Finally, the brilliant flash of an ever-growing
sphere was followed by the billowing flame of an orange ball rising
above the plain."
In 1946, McDaniel joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant
professor and became a full professor in 1955. With Cornell
physicist Robert Walker he invented the pair spectrometer, an
important tool used to measure gamma ray energies.
He was a leader in establishing the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear
Studies (LNS), and had a major role in designing and building the 300
megavolt (MeV) electron synchrotron, one of the first such
accelerators in the world. He and Wilson built three more electron
synchrotrons of successively higher energies, each of which enabled
physicists to study phenomena in a new energy range. "Each of these
accelerators was a masterpiece of technology, built rapidly and
economically by a small team of physicists," said Peter C. Stein,
Cornell professor of physics. "Mac played a leading role in the
construction of all of these accelerators, and brilliantly completed
the construction of the last of these accelerators, the 10 GeV
[gigavolt] synchrotron."
McDaniel became director of the LNS in 1967, and remained in that
position until he became an emeritus professor in 1985. He pioneered
the technique of tagged gamma rays, and performed important
measurements, including a long series of work in K-meson and
lambda-meson photo production and measurements of the neutron
electromagnetic form factors.
In 1972, McDaniel took a year's leave from Cornell to become acting
head of the accelerator section at the Enrico Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill. "This was a very
difficult time for Fermilab and the entire particle physics
community," Wilson, Fermilab's first director, who died in 2000,
wrote. "Though the accelerator had operated at a near-design energy,
component failure was frequent and operation intermittent. Mac threw
himself into the fray with his usual enthusiasm." Because of
McDaniel's leadership, the Fermilab accelerator was working as it
should by the end of the year.Back at Cornell in 1974, McDaniel
proposed upgrading the existing 10 GeV synchrotron into an 8 GeV
electron-positron storage ring. "This radical but risky proposal, if
it worked, would reduce the cost and construction time by a large
factor," said Stein. "This would be just enough to make its funding
possible. Mac convinced the National Science Foundation to support
the project, and threw himself heart and soul into the job of making
it work. That it worked at all was miraculous, but not even Mac dared
hope for the rich treasure trove of science that it would uncover."
The storage ring, known as CESR, became the world's leading source of
information about the b-quark, one of the fundamental building blocks
of matter.
Boyce Dawkins McDaniel was born on June 11, 1917, in Brevard, N.C.
He graduated from Chesterville High School, Chesterville, Ohio, in
1933. He earned his bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University
in 1938, his master's degree from the Case School of Applied Science
(now Case Western Reserve University) in 1940 and his doctoral degree
in physics from Cornell in 1943.
McDaniel was a Fulbright Research Fellow in 1953 at the Australian
National University, Canberra, and a Fulbright Research Fellow and a
Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Rome and the National
Laboratory, Frascati, Italy, in 1959.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a trustee of the
Associated Universities, a member of the governing board of
Brookhaven National Laboratory and of the Department of Energy High
Energy Advisory Panel, a trustee of the Universities Research
Association, a governing board member of Fermilab and chair of the
Superconducting Supercollider Board of Overseers.
McDaniel is survived by Jane, his wife of 61 years; a son, James of
Victoria, British Columbia, and a daughter, Gail, of New York City.
-30-
The web version of this release, with accompanying photos, may be
found at
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/May02/Obit.McDaniel.bpf.html
Cornell University News Service
Surge 3
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-255-4206
cunews@cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu
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