Boyce D. McDaniel, emeritus professor of physics at Cornell, former director of the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS) and a Manhattan Project scientist who gave the first atomic bomb its final check before its test at Trinity site in New Mexico in July 1945, died of a heart attack, May 8, in Ithaca. He was 84.
McDaniel, whose faculty career at Cornell spanned 56 years, got his professional start in World War II when he was hired by his Cornell mentor, Robert Bacher, to work at a secret facility in Los Alamos, N.M., conducting nuclear physics research on a device nicknamed "the gadget." The device was the atomic bomb, and the young McDaniel would play a critical role on physicist Robert Wilson's cyclotron research team, which helped identify the amount of uranium-235 (U-235) needed to create the atomic fission to detonate the world's first nuclear weapon.
McDaniel had finished his doctoral thesis at Cornell in 1943, researching the absorption rates of neutrons in indium. While the thesis itself was not considered classified information by the U.S. government, McDaniel and Bacher understood its implications for weapons research. They marked each page "secret" and locked two copies away in the university's library.
The alternative plutonium bomb was chosen over the U-235 bomb for the first test at Trinity site on the U.S. Army's Alamogordo Bombing Range on July 15, 1945. One of McDaniel's tasks was to check the bomb's radiation levels every few hours. The gadget had been hoisted atop a 100-foot metal tower, and as McDaniel climbed the tower at 1 a.m., just hours before the test, a thunderstorm developed over the site. McDaniel later wrote that "I made the trip to the top and returned safely, heaving a sigh of relief." McDaniel would be the last man to check and even touch the bomb before it was detonated at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time, July 16, 1945.
In 1946, McDaniel joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor and became a full professor in 1955. With Cornell physicist Robert Walker, he invented the pair spectrometer, an important tool used to measure gamma ray energies.
He was a leader in establishing LNS and had a leading role in designing and building the 300 megavolt (MeV) electron synchrotron, one of the first such accelerators in the world. He and Wilson, who was McDaniel's predecessor as director of LNS, built three more electron synchrotrons of successively higher energies, each of which enabled physicists to study phenomena in a new energy range. "Each of these accelerators was a masterpiece of technology, built rapidly and economically by a small team of physicists," said Peter Stein, Cornell professor of physics.
McDaniel became director of LNS in 1967 and remained in that position until he retired from the Cornell faculty in 1985. He pioneered the technique of tagged gamma rays and performed important measurements with each of these accelerators, including a long series of work in K-meson and lambda-meson photo production and measurements of the neutron electromagnetic form factors.
In 1972, McDaniel took a year's leave from Cornell to become acting head of the accelerator section at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. Though the Fermilab accelerator had operated at a near-design energy, component failure was frequent and operation intermittent. McDaniel had the accelerator working by the end of the year.
Back at Cornell in 1974, McDaniel proposed upgrading the existing 10 GeV (gigavolt) synchrotron into an 8 GeV electron-positron storage ring. "Mac convinced the National Science Foundation to support the project and threw himself heart and soul into the job of making it work," said Stein. The storage ring, known as CESR, became the world's leading source of information about the b-quark, one of the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Said Kurt Gottfried, Cornell emeritus professor of physics: "Mac exemplified what is known in the international high-energy physics community as the Cornell spirit: The ingenuity, dedication and persistence to repeatedly produce world-class cutting-edge facilities and experiments with much smaller resources than other laboratories had at hand."
McDaniel's longtime colleague, Thor Rodin, emeritus professor in chemistry and chemical biology, spoke of his integrity, which was, he said, "always genuine and likeable even upon those occasions when you disagreed with him."
McDaniel was born June 11, 1917, in Brevard, N.C. He graduated from Chesterville High School, Chesterville, Ohio, in 1933. He earned his bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1938 and his master's degree from the Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1940. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a trustee of the Associated Universities, on the governing board of Brookhaven National Laboratory, a member of the Department of Energy High Energy Advisory Panel, a trustee of the Universities Research Association and a governing board member of Fermilab.
McDaniel is survived by Jane, his wife of 61 years; a son, James, of Victoria, British Columbia, and a daughter, Gail, of New York City
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