I recently looked at the calendar to be reminded that I just reached 82, wonderful years of planetary existence, which means that some of you out there must also be celebrating benign longevity. So, before it is too late, I say:
“Let’s all celebrate and be thankful!”
But, how did I locate 24, former, R&D co-workers during this time of Covid-19? That was quite easy. A web company called the “White Pages” helped out a lot.
For me, it all started back in the 1950s – I was about fifteen at the time – when I realized that broadband radio transmissions also contained high frequency waves that can be reflected back to earth over the horizon by an ionospheric plasma created in the upper atmosphere by a solar irradiation.
A radio message could be sent from Warsaw to Boston or New York at the push of a button. Somehow, this made me happy!
However, it was quite some time before I could grasp the meaning of fission and fusion processes in elements. Actually, the Periodic Table was not taught at my parochial, elementary school nor high school in the 1950s. Apparently, benefits of a STEM education were discovered, much later.
Science – exciting discoveries over the years
Some time during my undergraduate training at U-Mass-Lowell, quantum mechanics and all those many quanta permeated the classrooms of that center of excellence. However, many questions followed.
Who was Lise Meitner? And, did she really work clandestinely with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann on the neutron-induced, nuclear fission in uranium (1938)? Rumor had it that she had been spotted by neighbors at a famous Bierstube in downtown Göttingen with her two colleagues even before the scientific article hit the German news-stands.
Was all that secret research done at Los Alamos, NM, with General Groves calling all the Army shots really not the beginning of our exciting, future exploits financed by the DOE (then called the Atomic Energy Commission) through many R&D programs at Sandia Labs, Los Alamos, LANL or Oak Ridge Tennessee, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, LLL, and Hanford Laboratory, WA? Maybe, we benefited from an R&D bonanza, which made our very careers possible?
Looking back to the very late 1800s, of course, experimentalists and theoreticians – Max Planck was one of them – were frantically poking their bulbous noses into atomic events happening in diverse laboratories across Europe.
Rumor has it that Lord Rutherford even had an alpha particle bounce back directly onto his mustache when he was bombarding gold foil with his alpha particles. But, fortunately, he was not seriously injured, only humiliated!
But, where was all the laboratory decorum that we, eager science students, had read about in the 1950s in Evans‘ book called: “The Atomic Nucleus”? Boy, there was a lot to learn in that tome!
Certainly, one could not expect to do well in science R&D as a downcast, defeated, high-school dropout! This fact kept me hitting the books. But, maybe, if you could not “cut the mustard”, you could still write about great discoveries in magazines like: Nature or, even, Scientific American? Oh, the shame of it all!
Yes, it really went well for us with long-term career goals to accomplish way back when “Atoms for Peace” was a popular concept. But, today, we still have the Union of Concerned Scientists, UCS, and science fairs to attend! Also, we can promote STEM courses in our schools.
But, it’s not quite the same. Where are the glorious parades down Fifth Avenue plus the bottles of cognac and the champagne ceremonial balls?
In closing, I want to thank you all for sharing this R&D excitement over the years. So, as Bob Hope often said:
“Thanks for the memories!”
Paul E. Bolduc
P.S. If you find yourself with copious amounts of “free time” on your hands and you wish to entertain your neocortex with a variety of “facts not worth knowing”, then I can enthusiastically recommend your perusing the web-site called: www.paulebolduc.com where you will be disabused of your present anomie.
P.P.S. A warning to the reader: Be ready to encounter material on a broad variety of topics including: world history, philosophy, languages, literature, humor, politics, science, mathematics, socioeconomic theory and more. There is even stuff on human feelings, love, appreciation and baseball.