Robert Serber

Robert Serber
Robert Serber ID badge photo from Los Alamos.
Born	(1909-03-14)March 14, 1909 Philadelphia, USA
Died	June 1, 1997(1997-06-01) (aged 88) New York City, USA
Alma mater	Lehigh University University of Wisconsin–Madison
Doctoral advisor	John Hasbrouck Van Vleck
Doctoral students	Leon Cooper
Influences	Eugene Wigner J. Robert Oppenheimer

Robert Serber (March 14, 1909 – June 1, 1997) was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer.

He was born in Philadelphia as the eldest son of David Serber and Rose Frankel. He married Charlotte Leof (26 Jul 1911 – 1967) in 1933. Rose Serber died in 1922 and David married Charlotte's cousin Frances Leof in 1928. He earned his B.S. in Engineering Physics from Lehigh University in 1930 and earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with John Van Vleck in 1934, after which he was initially going to begin postdoctorate work at Princeton University with Eugene Wigner. He changed his plans and went to work with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley (and shuttled with Oppenheimer between Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology). In 1938 he took a job at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he stayed until he was recruited for the Manhattan Project. He later became a professor and chair of the physics department at Columbia University.

He was recruited for the Manhattan Project in 1941, and was in Project Alberta on the dropping of the bomb. When the Los Alamos National Laboratory was first organized, Oppenheimer decided not to compartmentalize the technical information among different departments. This increased the effectiveness of the technical workers in problem solving, and emphasized the urgency of the project in their minds, now they knew what they were working on. So it fell to Serber to give a series of lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project. These lectures were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer, LA-1. It was declassified in 1965, and is available at . Serber developed the first good theory of bomb disassembly hydrodynamics.