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Article: Louis Rosen, at 91; physicist worked on first nuclear bombs
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- September 7, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2009 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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NEW YORK - On May 9, 1951, on a coral atoll in the Pacific,
scientists ignited what they hoped would be the first man-made
thermonuclear reaction, the basis of the hydrogen bomb. A fireball
rose 1,800 feet.
But the explosion alone, awe-inspiring though it was, was not
enough to convince one eyewitness, Edward Teller, considered the
father of the H-bomb, that thermonuclear fusion had indeed occurred.
For that he had to wait for the results of a test devised by two
young fellow physicists who worked with him at Los Alamos, N.M.,
where the first atomic bombs had been built.
At 5:30 the next morning, one of those colleagues, Louis Rosen,
told Teller the exhilarating news: Yes, fusion had been ...