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Norman Ramsey has faced real-life issues of scientists in times of war When Norman Ramsey delivered a recent Fermilab Colloquium presentation on "Scientists in Times of War," he spoke from first-hand knowledge. Before chairing the advisory committee that recommended establishing a national accelerator laboratory; before serving as the first president of www.ura-hq.org/ Universities Research Association, Inc., the consortium operating the laboratory; before having Ramsey Auditorium named for him at DOE's Fermilab; before winning the 1989 Nobel Prize in physics for developing the maser, used in atomic clocks ; before launching his decades-long search for an electric dipole moment in the neutron, Norman Ramsey had already played a significant role in history when the world was at war and scientists were needed to develop weapons and defenses. Ramsey headed the group developing three-centimeter radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. He joined the Manhattan Project in 1943, and served as head of the Delivery Group at Los Alamos when the first atomic bomb was built and tested.
"In World War II, it was clear who were the good guys and who were the bad guys," said Ramsey. "I think there's rarely been a war for which the distinctions were so clearwho started it, what aggressions preceded it. This is a moral help to scientists or anyone else in a war, because there are so many terrible aspects. It's worth spending a great deal of effort on that moral distinction." Ramsey was instrumental in founding Brookhaven National Laboratory. He headed the physics department at Harvard University, and in 1962 was tapped to chair a committee pondering the future of U.S. high-energy physics. The report of his group, and of a subsequent design committee from Berkeley Lab, pointed the way to establishing a national accelerator laboratory operated by a consortium of universities. The original group of 30 universities formed a small group to lead the search for a director. The group included Ramsey, who had been named president of the consortium (Universities Research Association, Inc.), and Robert Rathbun Wilson of Cornell University, destined to be the lab's founding director. "The board of trustees was mainly worried about the selection of a director, and was compiling a list during the site selection process," Ramsey recalled. "Bob Wilson was on the board, but he was regarded as ineligible. He was finishing up the Cornell accelerator lab, and the trustees felt that if he abandoned that project, he wasn't responsible enough to be a good director. Well, typical of Bob Wilson, he finished the Cornell project a year ahead of schedule. So he was available." The rest, as they say, is history. Ramsey continues to work at Harvard, on the goal he has pursued for more than four decades: finding an electric dipole moment in the neutron. "It's still a very open and fundamental question," he said. "I'm 87 years old, but I'm not giving up." Submitted by DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory |
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