UU PRINCETON HISTORY by Carl Haag

In the March Skylights I promised to name the four world-renowned physicists who were founding members of our church. This month I will go one better — provide you with five. John Wheeler – coined the term “Black Hole” and decoded nuclear fission. Eugene Wigner – won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. He provided the math for quantum mechanics and was instrumental in persuading FDR to initiate the Manhattan Project. Milton White – was a leader in the development and use of particle accelerators for physics research and Creator of the first Cyclotron at Princeton University. Martin Schwarzschild – work was in the fields of stellar structure and stellar evolution that led to how stars become red giants and the ages of star clusters. He married fellow astronomer Barbara Cherry. *********************************************************

UU REFLECTIONS – The last article explored Lyman Spitzer’s far-reaching idea of putting a large telescope in space. This led to the Hubble space telescope and its fascinating findings.

When asked by his children “What were you doing today, Daddy?,” Lyman Spitzer would reply, “I was thinking what I would do if I were an electron.” In thinking like an electron or his scientific self, he knew that both plasma physics and stellar dynamics had a set of effects produced by two-body encounters between particles whose mutual force varies as the inverse square of their separation. This connection was made from his work on the evaporation of stars from globular clusters.

Then in 1951 Lyman Spitzer made another stellar connection. It occurred when he and his wife spent time on a ski -lift in Aspen. It was stimulated by an announcement by the Argentines that they “had successfully achieved a controlled thermonuclear reaction in a laboratory.” What he was wrestling with was how extremely hot thermonuclear plasma might be confined in a way that it would not touch, and melt, walls. He came up with the possibility of using magnetic confinement, working out the details back in Princeton, he says, “mostly in bed during the middle of the night.”

The AEC was interested enough in his proposal that they funded a small experimental project. Later, to obtain additional support for the promising program, Dr. Spitzer had to attract a distinguished experimental scientist to head the controlled fusion program. James Van Allen (for whom the “Van Allen belts” outside the earth’s atmosphere are named) agreed to head up the work in Princeton. The dream for fusion energy was nothing less than supplying a virtually unlimited power supply for humans.

Lyman Spitzer contributed directly to the work of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory for 15 years before retiring in 1966. The work has continued and expanded into a $10 billion dollar international fusion project. The plan to harness the power of the sun–fusion energy–requires the heating of two forms of hydrogen to millions of degrees as they are compressed by magnetic fields.

A new Tokamak machine looking like a 52 foot doughnut is designed to reach the flash point where a self-sustained nuclear burn would take place and give off more energy than it took to ignite it. It would do so without the dangers and nuclear waste disposal problems of the current atomic power plants based on fission, the splitting of atoms. Unlike the success of the Hubble telescope, the idea Spitzer worked on sailing through the air on the Aspen chairlift has not yet been realized. However, the brilliance of both of Lyman Spitzer’s concepts is spectacularly evident.