Scientist Compton

...His own research specialties were atoms and radiation...

...From the first he was an experimenter, and he tells how he bought his first telescope from Sears, Roebuck, tinkered with it until he understood it, used it, improved it, then went on to bigger and better instruments, culminating in his taking his wife-to-be along to the observatory to help him with a long-exposure photograph of Halley's Comet (this was 1910...

...There were a few bugs and the plane crashed, but only the sandbag was hurt...

...Compton handled every scientific problem with this same combination of intelligence, study, experimental skill, resourcefulness, and drive...

...CHANDLER BROSSARD, a former editor of Look, will teach literature and social science at the new New York State University College at Old Westbury this fall...

...This posthumous book is a collection of his writing and talks on the human implications of science, intended for the general reader...

...Compton transmitted the report to the War Department, but both he and Oppenheimer joined with the other scientists advising the Interim Committee in recommending immediate use against a target in Japan...

...As head of the Metallurgical Project, centered at the University of Chicago, he directed an organization that built the first self-sustaining chain reactor, devised the preliminary concept of the bombs, and planned the Oak Ridge and Hanford plants that provided the U-235 and plutonium used in the two weapons that ended the war in Japan...

...After the war Compton became chancellor of Washington University in St...

...Again, he personally built the plane, using tools and materials he could lay his hands on, and financed it from his own earnings...

...RICHARD CHRISTIANSEN is arts and amusements editor of "Panorama," the weekend magazine supplement of the Chicago Daily News...

...He had a hard time persuading his father to let him fly the plane, but with his mother's help he did...

...Oppenheimer was a theoretician, an older son, an intellectual, and before 1941 had friends in the Communist Party...

...He edited "Ambrose Bierce's America...

...By far the most interesting part of the book is the first section, Comp-ton's personal reminiscences, in which he recalls his boyhood in a small college town in the Midwest...

...As World War II drew nearer, he, naturally, was deeply involved in the discussions and conferences that led to the atomic bomb...

...In the summer of 1945, when testing and final assembly were being pressed to a conclusion at Los Alamos, Compton appointed a Committee on Social and Political Implications, which recommended in the Franck Report against use of the atomic bomb on Japan and favored instead a demonstration at an uninhabited area...

...The actual design of the bombs, testing, fabrication, and assembly were the responsibility of the Los Alamos Laboratory, and it is of some interest to compare Arthur Compton and Robert Oppenheimer, the one a product of Wooster Preparatory School, of Woo-ster College, and of Princeton University, the other a product of the Ethical Culture School, of Harvard University, and of Gottingen...

...DONALD OSTERBROCK is a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin...

...Louis, while Oppenheimer became director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and both had second thoughts about the wisdom of the decision...

...he was formerly on the faculty of lona College...

...Compton repaired the plane, improved it, tested it again, and then flew it himself...

...Compton was an experimentalist, a younger son, a practicing Presbyterian who taught Sunday School and "feared the domination of a dictatorial Communism...

...The photograph turned out to be excellent (Compton was always handy), and he recouped some of his expenses by selling copies of the picture to his classmates through the college bookstore...

...His earlier book, Atomic Quest, is a much more lively and interesting narrative of his part in the atomic project...

...Reviewed by Donald Osterbrock Arthur Compton was the third American ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics, one of this country's leading scientists for more than twenty years, and one of the key architects of the atomic bomb...

...LEONARD P. LIGGIO is a research historian...

...PHILIP G. ALTBACH is an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin...

...Having proved he could do it, having learned the fundamental ideas of the subject, and having made the sound judgment that aeronautics was too far in the future for him to waste time on, he burned the plane and went on to other fields of science...

...His book, "The Spanish Scene," was recently published by Viking Press...

...Then he tested the glider carefully, launching it with a sandbag strapped to the controls in place of himself...

...Written for various audiences and occasions over a period of many years, the individual chapters are uneven and do not together make up an integrated volume...

...It seemed clear to him and to most scientists in those days that Hitler would eventually have to be defeated by the United States, and that to ensure the victory he and his colleagues would have to produce workable atomic bombs before Germany could...

...Compton was always a serious thinker, but many of the essays in this book are perhaps a little too serious and a little too repetitive for the general reader...

...In addition, he had great gifts as a leader and organizer, and as he grew older he came to be more and more influential in directing the progress of American science...

...The flight was successful...

...the reviewers WILLIAM McCANN is a free lance writer...

...Another early hobby was aviation, and he progressed from small models with which he learned the principles of flight to a full-sized glider big enough to fly himself...