Living in the Faculty Club, which was just practically across the street from the laboratory, you know, just about a block away. Hendricks, as I say, is older than I am. But it was run by the chemistry department. I imagine they wereit was a high frequency current, you know, that doesnt hurt you, but looks like something, and applicators and stuff. ), Nobel Laureates in Chemistry. I think originally it was more the fascination that a kid has for mechanical things. I must admit I dont remember much about it. And this one appealed to me. Carbon dioxide gas is emitted and carries out the radon, and then you bubble this through a tube full of something to absorb the carbon dioxide, then you pass this radonair containing radoninto an ionization chamber, with an electroscope, and you measure the rate of discharge. As I say, weat least Ispent on the order of a thousand dollars. In the 1930s when scientists, including Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrdinger, first discovered the phenomenon of entanglement, they were perplexed. But we had to figure quite close, and the tuition, as they had tuition there, was I think a real sacrifice for the family. This is essentially a constant in the nonrelativistic range; hence the repeated application of an alternating electric field of frequency 1/t between two D-shaped electrodes (dees) will give an incremental acceleration each time the particle comes around in its circular orbit in the proper phase. We built a lead box to do this in because you dont want the X-rays escaping into the room, you know. We learned glass blowing. College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4773-1. Edwin M. McMillan - National Science and Technology Medals Foundation I suppose there probably were some official signatures behind the scenes, but I was never aware of any problem. They were considerably earlier. I do remember that. It was the highest energy accelerator in the world, and the importance of Ernest Lawrences work in the field was recognised that same year, when he was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements. The 60-inch cyclotron and its 16-MeV deuterons offered new possibilities to McMillan's search for transuranium elements. And who was with me? I went down a couple of years ago and showed my youngest son this place. As I said, Id like to start at the beginning. The times were worse then than they are nowI dont remember that much agony about it. I think his recollection of this was the same but with another emphasis, and that is that you put the condition on him that he not interfere. All are unstable, decaying with half-lives ranging from a year to a few milliseconds. Authors: Lofgren, E J Publication Date: Fri Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 1994 The words are my own. It was a very, I guess, bloody business at that time. Then from that you calculate how much uranium was in the rock. It was much more that way then. Did anyone have any say on your application? I dont know, we were real tourists. Theyd swarm around you. Im glad I did. Moreover, quantum mechanics has now been proven to work, not only at very short distances but also at very great distances. There was certainly a chemistry club I was in, andwhat do we have here? You see, I cant publish that. Copyright 2023 The National Science and Technology Medals Foundation is a 501(c)3 public charity headquartered in the District of Columbia and is not affiliated with the U.S. Government. They had a lot of distinguished people. From there he was shipped overseas. Name some more. In this course in physics whichdamn it all, I cant remember who the teacher was. The next step in the investigations was the identification of the element with atomic number 94. Zahn left and Condon came in and I asked Condon to be my supervisor, thesis supervisor or advisor, whatever you want to call it, which he consented to do. In fact, something Ive been sort of wanting to do for a long time is to collect together stuff Ive got. What about Oppenheimer, when did he come down? You go down the list of people of that generation, youll find a large proportion of us were on that Fellowship. Category:Edwin McMillan - Wikimedia Commons Most of Dads papers seem to have disappeared. Edwin McMillan and Glenn Seaborg, Discoverers of New Elements and Thats something that would be good, to find out what textbook they used. And an old induction coilone of these things thats in a box so big, built like a piano, beautifully polished wood box, two big insulators coming up. The academic gowns descended from one person to another. It was while at Cal Tech that I got to know Professor Bowen, Ike Bowen, who was a great climber, and I went on two trips with him, while I was an undergraduate, to Mt. I remember that. In 1942, McMillan joined the Manhattan Project, the research effort to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. Interpretation here. The family was in agreement that I should do what I wanted to do, but they would have preferred that I be an M.D. I was detecting these molecules by freezing them out with a liquid air-cooled surface, and the vapors from the lubricant simply fogged that surface, and I was able to detect the central image of the undeflected beam coming through, at the same time that the wheel was turning, but not good enough to do the experiment, to see the deflected states. Did your father get involved with you in these experiments? Let me run through the list now: yourself, Charles Lash, George Harness, Albert Lombard, Joseph Schweinfest, Kenneth Solomon, and weve been talking about Pierce. We lived in several different places in Pasadena. This one I had the last year, and theres a particular room in the Graduate College that goes with that. It was several months [from June 8 to September 28]. Oral History Interviews | Edwin McMillan - Session I | American I stuck with physics, although I liked chemistry very much. I was three or four years old, and moved to a place on what was then called Center Street, now called Del Mar, 747 Center Street. I dropped it and went into the laboratory. Robley Evans you know about. Well, this was at the age of something like nine, and it was not terribly systematic, but at least I knew what I was trying to do. I admittedly was betting in favor of Einstein but did not actually know who was going to win. Were there science clubs in school, in high school? That as I say was not publishable because its just a repeating of some classical experiment. I was asking someone about him a while back and he apparently just dropped physics and, I dont mean hes dead but he just dropped the field for some reason. I have that. Actually the first time I presented a paper in public was before this. Perhaps you might say Ive always been very fond of nature and I like to go out in the forest, on water and so on. Thats why I went to Princeton. What I ended up doing was a molecular beam problem. We had a big storm on the Atlantic that year, and actually one of the big spars came down and broke a hatch cover, and there was water running around inside the ship. It was certainly available to anyone who wanted to look at it. I know we had this agreement, however it was stated. A new generation of big accelerators was also built in Russia and all over the United States, as well as in France, Italy, at the new European laboratory at CERN, in the United Kingdom, and in Australia. The other people on the physics faculty at the time were Bateman, Epstein. Mouzon I barely remember. Thats the beam spread out by the electric field in this direction, on this sensitive surface. But I had decided to go to Cal Tech well before Id finished high school. People were well behaved. My father had moved to California to practice medicine, and he had met somebody somewhere who told him that Redondo Beach was a good place to start. Well, I took a course from him and knew him personally very well. Ill tell you, I did get to know Carl, though, the last year, the masters year I took when I developed this radioactive measurement technique. Bell showed that quantum entanglement is, in fact, incompatible with EPR's notion of locality and causality. That was an interesting phenomenon. Then I took the entrance exams. It was, I think, Russell Raitt who was with me on that and one other guy. We took off in something like April and we came back in September. Additional contributions to it were subsequently offered by John Bell and Abner Shimony, so perhaps it is more properly called BellClauserHorneShimony Local Realism. The riddle was finally solved in late fall 1938, when Hahn and Strassmann's experiments led to a new totally unexpected conclusion: uranium bombarded with neutrons splits into fragments consisting of lighter elements, lying very far from uranium in the periodic table, rather than transforming into transuranium elements.The discovery of fission of uranium announced in early 1939 opened a new era in human history. He was at Princeton at the time. Did you take any specific courses with Pauling? He liked to talk. That always helps me when I meet the press, you know. They came in swarms and they settled in the ivy outside of Palmer Lab where I was working, at my little basement window. Dont ask me the timing on those things. That was done by teams. When you returned it was your senior year, and I think weve covered the courses, the research involved, and I think the next subject is the Princeton story, unless you have another suggestion. That is, its patterned after a monastery. For that, the wheel and the bearings were made in the shop. He was excited about the idea. I knew some people there. Evans went the following year. He already had quite a lot of crystal structure studies going on already, and this was a little anomaly which appeared in the published literature on what we call a constitution diagram of this system of lead and thallium, that had a shape that was unusual and unexpected and unexplained, and Pauling thought it would be worthwhile looking at the crystal structures for these various alloys of different compositions. Also, of course, there was this interest which I had, which was a real interest. But I took a course on relativity. So we built a lead box, and we built the rotating thing. He always gave the liquid air demonstration. Yes. A son of Dr. Speicher, Ernest Speicher of Los Angeles, and a son of Dr. Glotfelty, Webster Glotfelty of Pittsburgh, PA, were dentists. He was from New Yorkyou could ask Rabi. You couldnt be both. The whole thing rotates, and you get one, two, three, four, with different lengths of exposure, and then you set it on here and make a long run with the field on, and then you measure the brightnessmake traces with the microdensitometer across herethose are the intensity marks, and since these were known exposures, you know how much, how many molecules had to hit to make that, that, that and that. Now suppose one has two widely separated boxes, each containing stuff. I think I got that there. I somehow knew that wet things will conduct electricity. You know, using the principle of the doorbell, in which you have a magnet, and it attracts a piece of iron, and as soon as that moves it opens a contact and turns off the current and then it goes back again and makes the contact and so on, had the magnet of an old auto mobile horn and the thing that was attracted was the lid of a tin can. I think I give Morris a fair amount of credit for persuading Van de Graaff to go ahead with this development, because Van de Graaff got a little discouraged at times. Fascinating. Harness is now (CIT Alumni Directory 1972) Dean of the School of Engineering, San Fernando Valley State College, California. My faculty at Columbia told me that testing quantum physics was going to destroy my career. They proved that element 93 could be produced in very small quantities by a uranium reaction with neutrons that did not involve fission, and that it behaved chemically like uranium, and not like rhenium, as initially had been predicted. I had met him, and as you mentioned earlier the nuclear field was coming on strong then, and I was very aware of that and I wanted to get into it. They are miles in circumference, have energies measured in TeV, and are used at the forefront of particle research. But by not succeeding in doing it either way, I suppose they delayed that development by some number of years. Radioactivity was covered in a course which I think was called modern physics, something like that. Ganga Library Inc - Edwin M. McMillan Id have to look at the yearbook. These clubs didnt do very much as far as I can remember. Countries I went towell, England, France, see if I can get this, I wont try to get the orderEngland, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Tangier in Africa for one day, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland. Continuous particle acceleration thus requires a synchronism (resonance) between the particle motion and changes in the accelerating field during each transit through the accelerating gap. Were they pretty much in agreement? I probably could have if Id had somebody to lead me into it, to get me started earlier. I know my last year I had thethere was what was considered one of the best ones which was I think called the Jacobus Fellowship, does that sound right? He was about the same level as Linus Pauling, who was a research fellow, and was teaching, a teaching fellow. For multiple citations, "AIP" is the preferred abbreviation for the location. Recipients of the National Medal of Science. Edwin M. McMillan was one of the great scientists of the middle years of this century. As a kid I had this reputation for taking things apart. As I understand it, it allows you to go off for a long period of time, and youre supposed to work very hard learning on your own? Now stop wasting money and go do some real physics." I didnt realize it at the time, but they diverged politically. Lennart-Bernadotte-Haus Lets We went to Europe. Francis Clauser was Clark Blanchard Millikan Professor of Engineering at Caltech (Distinguished Faculty Award '80) and chair of Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science. I assume they felt it would have some effect on broadening you and on maturing you. For example, was that paid for by the fellowship? See, we were very careful of money. Would you? Oh, very much so, yes. Now, they were very high minded people, my parents felt that that was a much better thing to be doing than just physical science. I have the record here. Also a daughter of Dr. Glotfelty, Helen, married Arthur Rinard, a dentist in Pittsburgh. Categories: 1907 births. She had two sisters and eight brothers. In 1969, while still a graduate student at Columbia University, Clauser, along with Michael Horne, Abner Shimony, and Richard Holt, transformed Bell's 1964 mathematical theorem into a very specific experimental prediction via what is now called the ClauserHorneShimonyHolt (CHSH) inequality (Their paper has been cited more than 8,500 times on Google Scholar.) I heard a lecture by Willie Wien. Freshman scholarship was full tuition, senior and junior scholarships were half tuition. I did get results. I went on alone at UC Berkeley to perform three more experimental tests of quantum mechanics. The AIP's interviews have generally been transcribed from tape, edited by the interviewer for clarity, and then further edited by the interviewee. He quoted the introduction to Sommerfelds book about the need for this and that kind of thing. Cassen died recently. The only reason I could think up for not applying is if you got an immediate job, you know, if you got your Ph.D. and somebody came and made you a big offer for a job and you took it, but otherwise, this was the natural thing to do. Life was cheaper then. I got to know his family. You submitted the thesis and it was accepted November 26. Mr. Howard, and I cant think of his full name now [Bailey W. Howard], was a very inspiring sort of teacher, and he gave us a general science course covering the whole range. Everybody has to take freshman chemistry. I wasnt at that level, and my one graduate year there was really not very high level either. Another thing, in the naturalistic type of observation the cicadathe 17year locust. Especially John Lawrence, the physician brother of Ernest Lawrence, soon demonstrated the isotope-making cyclotron's worth in disease research. No. I had always sworn that I would never be seasick. Hes the only person I put down. After winning a National Research Council fellowship for postdoctoral study, he accepted an invitation at Berkeley, where Ernest Lawrence was engaged in exploring the experimental potential of the first cyclotron. [1]My father, Edwin Harbaugh McMillan, was born in Accident, Maryland, on June 17, 1871. You have an X-ray tube and then you have a slit, youve got a beam of X-rays, and you have a crystal that rotates back and forth, and then a photographic film. He owned a house out on the point at Corona del Mar down near Balboa, big house on the hill, and hed invite us all down some times. Indeed, it was experimentally refuted even before it was fully formulated. If I can find that letter youll get his correct name. One element then which we dont have now was the speakeasy. I havent been very good at preserving stuff. Was there any formal course offered in it, that you know of, of any kind? But I knew I was going to be a physicist, try to be a physicist, but I did take a lot of chemistry because I liked it and I also wanted to know it. McMillan, Edwin (Mattison) (1907-91) physicist; born in Redondo Beach, Calif. Please bear in mind that: 1) This material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) An interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event. I gather you did very well in high school in all your subjects. If a voltage of the proper radio frequency is applied with such a phase that the voltage goes though zero as the particle crosses the accelerating gap, there will be no change in its speed, energy or mass. I remember there was a fence in the back yard and a school on the other side so I could watch the kids playing. (1993) Edwin McMillan (1907-1991). But when I was there it was Just a wooded area and there were a few farms, and this particular row of houses where we liveda clearing had been made for very small cottages, made for people at Camp Lewis, officers, you know. It was pretty crummy looking, but it could make sparks several inches long and do various things. Then, another person I got to know very well was also a climber, Sterling B. Hendricks. The principle of phase stability is one of the fundamentals on which the large accelerators of today are based. If you know this place, the Graduate College is on the edge of a golf course. Now, we have a start on this matter of what courses I took. Everybody was working towards high voltage at that time. Luther Wear, mathematics, I took a course from him. There may be, Birge would have that down better than I do. So it wasnt a question of pulling one off the shelf. About that time we bought a house at 387 South Los Robles [on November 17, 1920], which was the last of the family homes in Pasadena. Now, I think it makes an interesting story to know about the young men, going off, so Id like you to tell it from the beginning. What I want to do is get them typed up. I said, Seasickness, its all in your mind, you know. But this made a liar of me. Postwar career at Berkeley working on accelerators; Nobel Prize, 1951. Proving that Quantum Entanglement is Real - California Institute of McMillan is credited with being the first ever to produce a transuranium element, neptunium.For this, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg in 1951.. Edwin McMillan - Early Years. So they were pretty tattered and torn. Fax: +49 8382 277 3113, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4773_1.html. I had all the locks in the doors out and all that kind of thing. You know, I never had any pretensions of contributing original work in theoretical physics. Werent Bardeen and Seitz and Conyers Herring there at the same time? How about things that involved the faculty, either intellectual or social? But he doesnt go alone any more. John Bell's 1964 seminal work on Bell's theorem was originally published in the terminal issue of an obscure journal, Physics, and in an underground physics newspaper, Epistemological Letters. Pauling is one of those people who developed very young, had an absolutely mature attitude towards science, and he was a great teacher. You said this was a very competitive class, but Evans was certainly the most competitive one, and I think some of us in self-protection had to be a little competitive ourselves too. When a bunch of tourists would arrive, wed be the ragtag guys carrying our own stuff and fighting off the porters. An interesting phenomenon, if one wants to know about interesting phenomenaJapanese beetles came. I did, and my memory fails me. It's like going to the racetrack. I talked to them. He developed a deep understanding of the problems related to the energy attainable by cyclotrons and the acceleration of the beam. Then the American Institute of Physics had BartonHenry Barton had this bright guy named Mueller who came up to Princeton, I think a protg of Bartons, and he was supposed to Thats where Barton came from when he took the AIP job. That was an interesting association there. I walked from Switzerland down into France for instance, overthe pass we walked over was a two day trip fromIm trying to think of the names of places now. However, not with the velocity selector. But the sort of project you were talking about before, those papers should be preserved here. This is interesting. Im jumping the gun, excuse me. Occhialini, for example. I do not. The agreement between the experiments and quantum mechanics now firmly proves that nonlocal quantum entanglement is real. The Euclidian style of geometry never appealed to me. Nobody ever did. Walter Michels was a real character. He was there during the big flu epidemic. So I think it was proper that my name should be first. You need an earlier one. My dates are not that great. We found 12 records for Edwin McMillan in NC, AZ and 7 other states. That makes the timing about right. Wouldnt the reputation of the institution, the type of research problems being pursued play any role in determining your decision? Yes. I remember him making some sardonic remark. I have an awful memory for that. It was an interesting summer. This is at Cal Techbut were not there yet in one way, because its not clear to me, although everything seems to have led up to it, about your decision to go to Cal Tech. We had to do it all ourselves. I think he knew I wasnt understanding it. In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Edwin McMillan by Charles Weiner on 1972 June 1, Howard J. Lucas, organic chemistry. Glenn Theodore Seaborg (/ s i b r /; April 19, 1912 - February 25, 1999) was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. My mothers three brothers, one of them, Fitch Mattison, was very wealthy. Oh yes, and Ladenburg came in while I was there. The stability will hold for the phase such that just enough energy is gained during each revolution to keep step with the changing field or frequency. Oh, no. Not staff, not local people. Lets finish this list while were at it. I think some of them had deviated and came back other ways, but at least most usyoull see in my diarywe came back on the Transylvania. Pauling we talked about. Now again, as I explained in the beginning, my memory for dates is very poor. Schweinfest and Solomon died young, Schweinfest of leukemia and Solomon in the crash of a small plane, while he was teaching his younger brother to fly. Quantum mechanics, for example. Then I got a fellowship. I graduated in the class of 24. Oppenheimer certainly was. Who did I know? But it wasn't a great contribution. You expressed the simplicity of working with a molecular beam. But he died very soon. Clauser enjoys sailboat racing in his spare time. During that time I had a good offer to go to Princeton. And I actually started and worked for around a year on this, and the result was obtained by someone else. I certainly saw him. Fermi designed and constructed the world's first nuclear reactor in Chicago and in December 1942 produced the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. It has a short history of the Institute, written by me with a byline, which I guess is my first publishedno, its not my first because my paper with Pauling was earlier. All elements with atomic numbers higher than that of uranium are radioactive with a half-life much shorter than the age of the Earth, so any atoms of these elements, if they ever were present at the Earth's formation, have long since decayed, but trace amounts form in some uranium-rich rocks. Pauling had the idea that undergraduates could just as well start research, as undergraduates, and in this section which he taught there were several research projects that he suggested. They dont so much now, but in those days, in a place like Spain or Italy as soon as you come in youre surroundedlittle kids begging and wanting to carry our bags. It is essentially a cyclotron in which either the magnetic field or the frequency is varied during the acceleration, and in which the phase of the particles with respect to the high energy electric field automatically adjusts itself to the proper value for acceleration.. k 9 1 OiSlRBUTtON OF THIS DOCUMENT IS UNLIMITED Edwin McMillan was born Thats the theory of this fancy field I was telling you about. A gold leaf electroscope. Smyth, one chemist, one physicist. But I didnt see any particular problem that I wanted to work on in that field. I wrote this history and they put my name in. I caught this cicada and dissected him, and observed the rather marvelous complicated sound-producing mechanism which those things have. I think its remarkable if anyone can do it after so many years. He made notable contributions to nuclear, and particle physics, the chemis- try of transuranic elements, and accelerator physics. Hed been outdoors and the air was very cold and his teeth got cooled off, and he took a spoonful of hot soup and cracked it thermally. That was the closest to the things that I had been interested in. Thats when I was at Cal Tech. The title was The X-ray Study of Alloys of Lead and Thallium.. Yes. I dont have exact records with me, but it would have to be 1918. It was named neptunium. He shared it with Alain Aspect of the Institut d' Optique and Ecole Polytechnique and Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences "for an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell's inequalities, or extensions thereof, using entangled quantum states," according to the award citation. I went to his shop and he showed me how they make it, and I got a little piece of it and made my own electroscope. As far as I remember, I just said, Im going to apply for a National Research Fellowship and Id like to work with you, is that OK? and he said, Fine. Thats about how deep it was. There were some few I barely remember. Walter Michels got his degree In physics and became a teacher. They were more careful of their speech and so on. The 1969 CHSH inequality's derivation had required several minor supplementary assumptions, sometimes called "loopholes." Sorry, I forgot that. John Clauser standing with his second quantum entanglement experiment at UC Berkeley in 1976. Credit: University of California Graphic Arts / Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. That was my first successful experiment. That is right. It was more of a gentlemanly atmosphere, which I suppose one learns something from. They had done this with the nonhomogeneous electric field, the analog of the Stern-Gerlach experiment. After the war, McMillan became director of the University of California Radiation Laboratory and he remained at the university until his retirement in 1974. He took a large number of courses in chemistry, which proved to be instrumental in his later work and was greatly influenced by Linus Pauling, future Nobel laureate in Chemistry for his research into the nature of the chemical bond. There was James Brown, Horner Kuper, and many others. The fission fragments came from a thin layer of uranium oxide spread on a sheet of paper, and exposed to neutrons from a beryllium target bombarded by 8 MeV deuterons in the 37-inch cyclotron. But you learn how. Edwin Thomas McMillan - Marion Nelson Funeral Homes & Crematory McMillan immediately moved to implement his ideas; the original plans for the 184-inch cyclotron at Berkeley were modified, turning it into a synchro-cyclotron, which produced its first beam of deuterons at 195 MeV on November 1, 1946. I believe Schrodinger lectured once. We can get the yearbook of my year. He would tell these long stories about how these things had started. Its sort of a corollary. I didnt pay for that. File:Mcmillan postcard.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
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