Born March 14, 1909, in Philadelphia, Serber earned a doctorate in physics
at the University of Wisconsin in 1934. On his way for post-doctoral study
at Princeton University, he stopped at the University of Wisconsin at Ann
Arbor, where he heard Oppenheimer give a guest lecture.
He as so impressed that he instead moved to the University of California,
Berkeley, to work with J. Robert Oppenheimer. He later became an associate
professor at the University of Illinois, a job he held when Oppenheimer, his
friend and mentor, asked him to join him on the Manhattan Project.
During the summer of 1942 many of the basic principles of fission bomb
physics and design were worked out. Serber developed the first good theory
of bomb disassembly hydrodynamics.
In April 1943, when scientists were first gathering at Los Alamos, in New
Mexico, Serber presented a series of five lectures which summarized all that
was known at the time about designing and building an atomic bomb (mostly
Serber's own work). His notes for those introductory sessions became the
"Los Alamos Primer."
In early September 1945, he was with the first American team to enter
Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess the damage from the atomic bombs. He was in
Japan for five weeks to assess the damage and to collect debris for tests.
While he later became an advocate of arms control, he never became an
outspoken critic of nuclear weapons, as did some other Manhattan Project
scientists.
Starting as a professor of physics at Columbia in 1951, he became chair
of the physics department in 1975, retired from Columbia in 1978, and later
was named a professor emeritus at the university.
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