Interpreting the Elusive Robert Serber: What Serber Says and What Serber Does Not Explicitly Say
✍ Scribed by Barton J Bernstein
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2001
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 268 KB
- Volume
- 32
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1355-2198
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
1909-1997)
, an American-born and -educated theoretical physicist, belonged to what might be described, respectfully, as the second tier of important U.S. physicists in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Entering the field at a time when theoreticians still ranged broadly, Serber in his career made valued contributions to quantum electrodynamics, accelerator physics, and pion physics, among other areas. After spending his earlier professional years at Berkeley, Illinois and Los Alamos, he became a Professor of Physics at Columbia University from 1951 to 1978, the Department Chairman from 1975 until his required retirement from the university in 1978, and a long-time consultant at Brookhaven and other American labs. Serber, receiving the professional endorsement of colleagues, was elected to serve as President of the American Physical Society (APS) for 1971-1972. When the turmoil about the Vietnam War burst into academic fields and professional organisations, he uneasily, as an APS executive, faced political protests by dissident anti-war members.
The 25-year old Serber took his Ph.D. at Wisconsin in 1934 with future Nobel prizewinner John Van Vleck, and then moved on to Berkeley to become a post-doctoral student with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Partly on the advice of that long-time avuncular counsellor I. I. Rabi, Serber, as he later put it, cut the