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 I
was born December 9, 1917 in a small town in Idaho (Council) where my parents
had moved to from California to operate a general store. My father, who had
previously been a civil engineer, died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918.
My mother then moved with me and her mother to Hanford, Calif. in the San
Joaquin Valley of California, where she was re-married to George Fowler a few
years later. In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in
chemistry, physics and mathematics. Due mainly to my record on an open chemistry
competition given by Cal Tech, I was
admitted, graduating in 1939 as a physics major. Carl
David Anderson was my physics group recitation instructor when he received
his Nobel Prize and Milliken was the President of the Institute. I had a short
biology course taught by Thomas Hunt Morgan. In 1939 I began graduate study in
physics as a teaching assistant at Columbia University where I have remained.
During the first two years, I had courses under I.
I. Rabi, Enrico
Fermi, Edward Teller and J. R. Dunning. Fermi was working on neutron
moderator assemblies which led to the first working nuclear "pile"
after his group was moved to Chicago. Dunning, Booth, Slack, and Von Grosse held
the basic patent on the gaseous diffusion process for 235U enrichment
and were working on its development. This evolved into the Oak Ridge enrichment
plants and the present U.S. technology for 235U enrichment.
In March 1942, I married Emma Louise Smith. We have three sons, James, Robert
and William who are all now adults. We also had a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, who
died while young.
During W.W. II, I worked with W. W. Havens, Jr. and C. S. Wu under Dr. Dunning
(Manhattan Project) mainly doing pulsed neutron spectroscopy using the small
Columbia cyclotron. I received my Ph. D after my thesis was de-classified in
1946. I continued at Columbia, first as an
instructor, reaching the rank of full professor in 1952. About 1946 funding was
obtained from the Office of Naval Research to build a synchrocyclotron which
became operational in early 1950. I was involved with the facility development
from the beginning and my research has used that facility ever since. The
research included neutron resonance spectroscopy, the angular distribution of
pion elastic and inelastic scattering on nuclei with optical model fitting. Best
known are the muanic-atom-x-ray studies starting with the pioneering 1953 paper
with Val Fitch
which first established the smaller proton charge radii of nuclei.
Starting in 1948, I taught an advanced nuclear physics graduate course. The
Maria Mayer shell model suggestion in 1949 was a great triumph and fitted my
belief that a nuclear shell model should represent a proper approach to
understanding nuclear structure. Combined with developments of Weizsaker's
semi-empirical explanation of nuclear binding, and the Bohr-Wheeler 1939 paper
on nuclear fission, emphasizing distorted nuclear shapes, I was prepared to see
an explanation of large nuclear quadrupole moments. The full concept came to me
in late 1949 when attending a colloquium by Prof. C. H. Townes who described the
experimental situation for nuclear quadrupole moments. It was a fortuitous
situation made even more so by the fact that I was sharing an office with Aage
Bohr that year. We had many discussions of the implications, subsequently very
successfully exploited by Bohr, Mottelson, and others of the Copenhagen
Institute.
Since I joined the Columbia Physics Dept., in 1939, it has been my privilege to
have as teachers and/or colleagues many previous Nobel Laureates in Physics: E.
Fermi, I. I. Rabi, H.
Bethe (Visiting Prof.), P.
Kusch, W. Lamb, C.
H. Townes, T.
D. Lee and L.
Cooper in addition to R.
A. Milliken, C.
D. Anderson, and T.
H. Morgan (Biology) while I was an undergraduate at Cal Tech.
Organization Membership, etc.
Fellow: American Physical Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers, New York Academy of Sciences, American Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Sciences.
Member: National Academy of Sciences, Optical
Society of America, American Association of Physics Teachers
Recipient: Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for Physics, 1963.
From Les
Prix Nobel 1975.
Dr. Rainwater died in 1986.
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