The Experts below are selected from a list of 6 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Crispin Rope - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Bringing ENIAC to Life
Eniac in Action, 2016Co-Authors: Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, Crispin RopeAbstract:This chapter explores the construction and initial use of ENIAC during 1944 and 1945. It highlights the challenges of procuring components in the wartime environment, from wire and steel to custom-built power supplies and high precision resistors. ENIAC was built by a forgotten, almost exclusively female, team of “wiremen.” The project was repeatedly delayed, requiring contract renegotiations. The chapter then introduces machine’s initial cohort of six female operators, putting their work into the broader context of labor in applied mathematics. In concludes with a description of some of the challenges, including a flood, faced by the team as it worked to debug ENIAC as it struggled to run a calculation for Los Alamos intended to determine the viability of Edward Teller’s design for a “Super” Fusion Weapon.
Anne C. Fitzpatrick - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952
2013Co-Authors: Anne C. FitzpatrickAbstract:The American system of nuclear Weapons research and development was conceived and developed not as a result of technological determinism, but by a number of individual architects who promoted the growth of this large technologically-based complex. While some of the technological artifacts of this system, such as the fission Weapons used in World War II, have been the subject of many historical studies, their technical successors--Fusion (or hydrogen) devices--are representative of the largely unstudied highly secret realms of nuclear Weapons science and engineering. In the postwar period a small number of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory's staff and affiliates were responsible for theoretical work on Fusion Weapons, yet the program was subject to both the provisions and constraints of the US Atomic Energy Commission, of which Los Alamos was a part. The Commission leadership's struggle to establish a mission for its network of laboratories, least of all to keep them operating, affected Los Alamos's leaders' decisions as to the course of Weapons design and development projects. Adapting Thomas P. Hughes's ''large technological systems'' thesis, I focus on the technical, social, political, and human problems that nuclear Weapons scientists faced while pursuing the thermonuclear project, demonstrating why the early American thermonuclear bomb project was an immensely complicated scientific and technological undertaking. I concentrate mainly on Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory's Theoretical, or T, Division, and its members' attempts to complete an accurate mathematical treatment of the ''Super''--the most difficult problem in physics in the postwar period--and other Fusion Weapon theories. Although tackling a theoretical problem, theoreticians had to address technical and engineering issues as well. I demonstrate the relative value and importance of H-bomb research over time in the postwar era to scientific, politician, and military participants in this project. I analyze how and when participants in the H-bomb project recognized both blatant and subtle problems facing the project, how scientists solved them, and the relationship this process had to official nuclear Weapons policies. Consequently, I show how the practice of nuclear Weapons science in the postwar period became an extremely complex, technologically-based endeavor.
Thomas Haigh - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Bringing ENIAC to Life
Eniac in Action, 2016Co-Authors: Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, Crispin RopeAbstract:This chapter explores the construction and initial use of ENIAC during 1944 and 1945. It highlights the challenges of procuring components in the wartime environment, from wire and steel to custom-built power supplies and high precision resistors. ENIAC was built by a forgotten, almost exclusively female, team of “wiremen.” The project was repeatedly delayed, requiring contract renegotiations. The chapter then introduces machine’s initial cohort of six female operators, putting their work into the broader context of labor in applied mathematics. In concludes with a description of some of the challenges, including a flood, faced by the team as it worked to debug ENIAC as it struggled to run a calculation for Los Alamos intended to determine the viability of Edward Teller’s design for a “Super” Fusion Weapon.
Mark Priestley - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Bringing ENIAC to Life
Eniac in Action, 2016Co-Authors: Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, Crispin RopeAbstract:This chapter explores the construction and initial use of ENIAC during 1944 and 1945. It highlights the challenges of procuring components in the wartime environment, from wire and steel to custom-built power supplies and high precision resistors. ENIAC was built by a forgotten, almost exclusively female, team of “wiremen.” The project was repeatedly delayed, requiring contract renegotiations. The chapter then introduces machine’s initial cohort of six female operators, putting their work into the broader context of labor in applied mathematics. In concludes with a description of some of the challenges, including a flood, faced by the team as it worked to debug ENIAC as it struggled to run a calculation for Los Alamos intended to determine the viability of Edward Teller’s design for a “Super” Fusion Weapon.
