Biographical Memoirs Volume 90 (2009) / Chapter Skim
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ANTHONY L. TURKEVICH
ANTHONY L. TURKEVICH
Pages 432-448
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From page 433... ...
Turkevich was born in New York City in 1916, one of three children of a Russian Orthodox clergyman, Leonid Turkevich, who became head of the entire Russian Orthodox Church in North America and Japan. Tony went to Dartmouth College for his undergraduate studies, completing his B.A.
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From page 434... ...
Turkevich made accurate estimates of the energy released in that explosion -- rather more accurate than the estimate Fermi made by measuring how far the blast wave carried bits of torn paper. After the Alamogordo test, Turkevich moved to the theory group under Edward Teller to investigate thermonuclear reactions and the potential of fusion.
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From page 435... ...
Katcoff, proposed using atmospheric sampling as a way to monitor nuclear explosions. An early application was the determination of the atmospheric concentration of the radioactive isotope krypton-85 as a means to measure the number of fissions produced in reactors and atmospheric nuclear bomb tests.
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From page 436... ...
Los Alamos was involved in measuring other Soviet emissions and evaluating reports of atmospheric and seismic signals, mostly but not exclusively from nuclear tests. Tony consulted with George Cowan and Rod Spence, members of the Bethe Panel that regularly met, examined data, and reported to intelligence authorities in Washington.
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From page 437... ...
The group that met to evaluate Soviet plutonium production from the isotope measurements had regular meetings at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida for several years. George Cowan, who chaired the meetings in the early seventies, recalls that they ate well at the officer's club across the street from their meeting center, and would regularly visit the best local citrus orchards to collect loads of tree-ripe fruit to carry home.
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From page 438... ...
A long vacuum pipe led a fraction of the pulse to a collecting wheel of metallic uranium-235 that spun past a thin slit in a heavy neutron shield. From the recovered wheel they were able to isolate fission products from individual epithermal resonances and demonstrate that fission symmetry varied with spin at each resolved resonance.
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From page 439... ...
A quotation from George Cowan is appropriate here: "Fortunately for the majority, there was also a variable sprinkling of those who liked to bet to inside straights and three card flushes." In the late 1970s Tony became a visiting laboratory senior fellow, a position that gave him complete freedom to work on whatever he liked at Los Alamos. He was a close associate and friend of the resident senior fellows.
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From page 440... ...
But then Surveyors V, VI, and VII were successful, and all three carried Tony's analytical devices: foremost, an alpha-particle backscattering instrument that not only gave us the first complete elemental composition of the lunar surface but also showed that the Moon is a differentiated body, not a homogeneous conglomerate such as a giant chondrite, which was the prevailing view at that time. Surveyor V, landing on September 11, 1967, at Mare Tranquillitatis, showed that there are basalt-like materials -- essentially cold lava on the lunar surface.
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From page 441... ...
Surveyor VII, which landed January 10, 1968, this time at highlands near crater Tycho, was perhaps the most remarkable insofar as it was successfully repaired remotely when the backscatter instrument became stuck during deployment and was freed by commands from Earth 250,000 miles away. The other remarkable thing of the Surveyor analyses was the finding of a very high titanium level in the lunar material, comparable to the basalts on Earth.
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From page 442... ...
Despite early failures Tony persisted until they finally separated a countable sample of plutonium-238 from some old uranyl nitrate Tony found stored for many years at Chicago. The indicated half-life was 2x1021 years, an order of magnitude shorter than theory predicted.
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From page 443... ...
S Wu and Leon Lederman and reported at a meeting in New York of the American Physical Society, Eugene Wigner gave an elegant talk that explained how these experiments "proved" that the neutrino could not have a finite rest mass.
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From page 444... ...
His own experimental results clearly showed that the cold fusion was not occurring. After a few years in the university faculty housing development on 57th Street, the Turkevich family moved to the suburbs in Oak Brook.
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From page 445... ...
He would ask the most penetrating questions, and look hardest at the qualities of originality and deep insight that he wanted to find in anyone appointed to a faculty position at Chicago. Praise from Tony was as strong a recommendation as a faculty candidate could receive.
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From page 446... ...
Fried lander. Monte Carlo calculations on intranuclear cascades.
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From page 447... ...
Chemical analysis of the Moon at the Surveyor VII landing site: Preliminary results. Science 162:117-118.
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From page 448... ...
Double-beta decay of 238U.
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