James Leslie Tuck OBE (9 January 1910 – 15 December 1980) was a British physicist, working on the applications of explosives as part of the British delegation to Manhattan Project.
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James L. Tuck |
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Born | James Leslie Tuck (1910-01-09)9 January 1910
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Died | 15 December 1980(1980-12-15) (aged 70)
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Alma mater | |
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Spouse |
Elsie M. Harper (m. 1937 ) |
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Children | 2 |
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Scientific career |
Fields | Physics |
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Tuck was born in Manchester, England, and educated at the Victoria University of Manchester. Because of his involvement with the Manhattan Project, he was unable to submit his thesis on time and never received his doctoral degree.
In 1937 he was offered an appointment as a Salter Research Fellow at Oxford University, where he worked with Leó Szilárd on particle accelerators. In 1937 he married Elsie Harper, with whom he would later adopt two children.
At the outbreak of World War II, he was appointed as the scientific advisor to Frederick Alexander Lindemann, who was on the private staff of Winston Churchill. His research included work on shaped charges, used in anti-tank weapons. For this work in 1944 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.[4]
At Los Alamos, Tuck took up research on fusion power, which he had learned about in the UK. Tuck suggested that the Los Alamos group pursue a pinch program similar to the one being carried out in the UK. This was only months after Lyman Spitzer had started work on his stellarator design. Both were invited to Washington to present their ideas, where Spitzer won $50,000 in funding from the Atomic Energy Commission. Returning to Los Alamos, he arranged for a similar $50,000 from the lab's discretionary budget and started a pinch project under the name Perhapsatron.
Like all pinch systems, Perhapsatron failed due to instabilities in the plasma. Theoretical work by Edward Teller and others suggested ways out of the instability problem, either pinching so quickly that fusion took place before the instabilities formed, or by using "cusped" magnetic fields. The former was developed as the Columbus while the latter became the picket fence reactor design, both led by Tuck's teams.
He remained at Los Alamos until his retirement in 1972. Earlier in 1972 he had published a review in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of the book Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Frontiers of Public and Private Science by Solly Zuckerman.
After his retirement Tuck became a prominent public supporter of research into thermonuclear fusion for power generation.
From the late 1960s onwards Tuck took a keen interest in the phenomenon of ball lightning, probably because of the connection between plasmas and their role in fusion power schemes. In 1980 he appeared in the Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World episode 'Clarke's Cabinet of Curiosities' where he described his experiments at Los Alamos, carried out during lunch breaks, to create ball lightning using a large storage battery of the type then used in submarines.
Sources
- Baker, D. A.; Dreicer, Harry; Lewis, H. Ralph; Marshall, John; Metropolis, N.; Phillips, James A.; Quinn, Warren E.; Rosen, Louis (1 March 1981). "James Leslie Tuck". Physics Today. 34 (3): 87–88. doi:10.1063/1.2914494. ISSN 0031-9228.
- Fakley, Dennis C. (1983). "The British Mission" (PDF). Los Alamos Science. 4 (7). Los Alamos National Laboratory: 186–189.
- Szasz, Ferenc (1992). British Scientists and the Manhattan Project: The Los Alamos Years. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-06167-8.
- Szasz, Ferenc M. (1998). "James L. Tuck: Scientific Polymath and Eternal Optimist of the Atomic West". In Hevly, Bruce; Findlay, John M. (eds.). The Atomic West. University of Washington Press. pp. 136–156. ISBN 978-0-295-97716-4 – via Internet Archive.