- Robert Christy
Robert F. Christy (born 1916 in Vancouver) is an American
theoretical physicist and laterastrophysicist who worked on theManhattan Project . He is a Professor Emeritus atCaltech .Christy was raised in British Columbia and attended the University of British Columbia in the 1930's studying 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 byRobert Oppenheimer atUC Berkeley , the leading theoretical physicist in the US at that time.Christy received his PhD in 1941 and joined the Illinois Institute of Technology, however he also spent time at the
University of Chicago where he was recruited byEnrico 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".Christy joined the University of Chicago Physics department briefly after leaving Los Alamos before being recruited to join the Caltech faculty in 1946. 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 theRoyal Astronomical Society in 1967.He currently resides in Pasadena.
External links
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1967QJRAS...8..129. Text of the Eddington award speech]
He was an interview subject in Showtime's groundbreaking miniseries Hiroshima in 1995.
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