PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Robert Serber (March 14, 1909 - June 1, 1997) was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer. The New York Times called him the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb. Richard Rhodes won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. He subsequently published three further volumes of nuclear history: Dark Sun, Arsenals of Folly, and The Twilight of the Bombs.
"""...educational and designed to help the naive reader. . . .[the] definitive, extensively annotated reprint of the five bomb-physics lectures given in April 1943 by Robert Serber for new arrivals at Los Alamos.""-- ""American Physical Society Journal"" ""The Primer is an extraordinary document. Perusing it gives one a sense of being there at the start of the Los Alamos project. In its 24 pages, Serber both adroitly summarized the state of existing knowledge and laid out a prescient road map for the work ahead and the challenges that might arise. . . .mandatory reading for anyone interested in the origins of nuclear weapons.""-- ""Physics Today"""
