Interview with Frank Oppenheimer - Caltech Oral Histories

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Oppenheimer–5OPPENHEIMER: Well, the Van de Graaff was already built when I arrived. Then they built asecond one, the tandem one.GOODSTEIN: This is the one that Fowler and Tommy Lauritsen built.OPPENHEIMER: Yes. That was after the war.GOODSTEIN: No, it was before, in ’38.OPPENHEIMER: I left there in ’39.GOODSTEIN: And they started building this in ’38.OPPENHEIMER: Okay, they started this. But they had one that was already working on whichthey did most of the work. But it was a single one; it wasn’t a tandem.GOODSTEIN: I was wondering if you had given them any help with the building of that?OPPENHEIMER: No.GOODSTEIN: When you left, what happened to your apparatus that you had built?OPPENHEIMER: Well, another man, E. P. Tomlinson, took it over, another graduate student.GOODSTEIN: Was it used for a long time afterwards?OPPENHEIMER: I think for a while. I don’t know when it got to be disused. It probably wasn’tused much during the war.GOODSTEIN: No, I think they essentially shut down the lab. I noticed, in reflecting on thehttp://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Oppenheimer_F
Oppenheimer–6experimental approach at the Cavendish Lab, that you told Charlie that you weren’t reallylearning much about nuclei from the approach at the Cavendish. What was different about it?OPPENHEIMER: Well, I think what I was doing was different. Because [John D.] Cockcroft and[Ernest T. S.] Walton were learning a lot about deuterium and whatnot. But I had done a nuclearlevel system for radium C, and it broke up, for some reason, into two groups each with abouttwelve levels, and I couldn’t give assigned quantum numbers to these levels from the transitionrates. But it was like looking at the iron spectrum rather than at the hydrogen spectrum.GOODSTEIN: So your comment was more about your own work.OPPENHEIMER: Yes. We did learn—and corroborated by making the level system—that theradium C has two branches. One is an alpha emitter, and then goes to radium D. And the other’sa beta emitter, and then it goes with an alpha emission. And so there’s these two ways aroundthat end up with the same product, and one had to find out whether the energy emitted is equalfor both cases. In one case, the energy was emitted through a gamma ray, and this I corroboratedby developing the level system that showed that that had to be so.GOODSTEIN: Tell me, just physically, how big is the instrument you built? Was it as big as adesk top?OPPENHEIMER: It was smaller. The magnet started here and went up to here and then there wereGeiger counters at one end of it.GOODSTEIN: About the size of your desk?OPPENHEIMER: Just about, a little smaller.GOODSTEIN: But not exactly portable.OPPENHEIMER: No, because it was heavy. You could lift it with a forklift. But I didn’t move ithttp://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Oppenheimer_F
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Interview with Frank Oppenheimer - Caltech Oral Histories

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