Dinner with another one of David Hawkins' Los Alamos colleagues, Viki Weisekopf

Viki Weiskopf, another eminent scientist and a friend of David's from his wartime Los Alamos days, came to Boulder for a few days.
David invited me to join him when he went to listen to Viki's lecture one evening at the University to an auditorium filled with post-graduate physics students.

I was thrilled to be a member of the audience, though, as I said to David afterwards, I enjoyed the atmosphere generated by an incredible lecture, but couldn't really understand the scientific detail! It was way above my head. I was struck, though, by Viki's energy and his fascination with the world of physics.

Viki came for dinner at the Hawks the next evening, and, as usual, I was fascinated and especially attentive when he and David exchanged memories about their time at Los Alamos. Piece by piece I was putting the Manhattan Project together in my head.............hearing the reflections of the working and social life of David, Viki, Phil Morrison, Stan Ulam, and Frank Oppenheimer gave me incredible insights into the wartime A Bomb project.

Here's what Wikipedia says about Viki:

Victor Frederick "Viki" Weisskopf (September 19, 1908 – April 22, 2002) was an Austrian-born Americantheoretical physicist. He did postdoctoral work with Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli andNiels Bohr. During World War II he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, and later campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Weisskopf was born in Vienna and earned his doctorate in physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1931. His brilliance in physics led to work with the great physicists exploring the atom, especially Niels Bohr, who mentored Weisskopf at his institute in Copenhagen. By the late 1930s, he realized that, as a Jew, he needed to get out of Europe. Bohr helped him find a position in the U.S.

In the 1930s and 1940s, 'Viki', as everyone called him, made major contributions to the development of quantum theory, especially in the area of Quantum Electrodynamics. One of his few regrets was that his insecurity about his mathematical abilities may have cost him a Nobel prize when he did not publish results (which turned out to be correct) about what is now known as the Lamb shift.

From 1937 to 1943 he was a Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester.

After World War II, Weisskopf joined the physics faculty at MIT, ultimately becoming head of the department.

Weisskopf was a co-founder and board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. He served as director-general of CERN from 1961 to 1966.

Weisskopf was awarded the Max Planck medal in 1956 and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1972, the National Medal of Science (1980), the Wolf Prize (1981) and the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences (1991).

Weisskopf was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was president of the American Physical Society (1960–61) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976–1979).

He was appointed by Pope Paul VI to the 70-member Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1975, and in 1981 he led a team of four scientists sent by Pope John Paul II to talk to President Ronald Reagan about the need to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons.