"Nobel Prize in Physics" Val Fitch Hand Signed FDC Dated 2005 Todd Mueller COA

Description

Up for auction the "Nobel Prize in Physics" Val Fitch Hand Signed FDC Dated 2005.
This item is certified authentic by Todd Mueller and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES - 6121E
Val Logsdon Fitch
(March 10, 1923 – February 5, 2015) was an American
nuclear physicist
who, with co-researcher
James Cronin
, was awarded the 1980
Nobel Prize in Physics
for a 1964 experiment using the
Alternating Gradient Synchrotron
at
Brookhaven National Laboratory
that proved that certain
subatomic
reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of
K-mesons
, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of
CP violation
was discovered. This demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry. Born on a cattle ranch near
Merriman, Nebraska
, Fitch was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II, and worked on the
Manhattan Project
at the
Los Alamos Laboratory
in
New Mexico
. He later graduated from
McGill University
, and completed his Ph.D. in
physics
in 1954 at
Columbia University
. He was a member of the faculty at
Princeton University
from 1954 until his retirement in 2005. Val Logsdon Fitch was born on a cattle ranch near
Merriman, Nebraska
, on March 10, 1923, the youngest of three children of Fred Fitch, a cattle rancher, and his wife Frances née Logsdon, a school teacher. He had an older brother and sister. The family farm was about 4 square miles (10 km
2
) in size. The ranch was small; his father specialized in raising breeding stock. Soon after his birth, his father was badly injured in a horse riding accident and could no longer work on his ranch, so the family moved to the nearby town of
Gordon, Nebraska
, where his father entered the insurance business.
Here he attended school,
[1]
graduating from Gordon High School in 1940 as
valedictorian
. Fitch attended
Chadron State College
for three years, then transferred to
Northwestern University
. This was during WWII; his studies were interrupted by being drafted into the US Army in 1943. After completing basic training, he was sent to
Carnegie Institute of Technology
for training under the
Army Specialized Training Program
. Under this program, some 200,000 soldiers attended colleges for intensive courses. Fitch was in the program for less than a year before the manpower requirements of the war became too great, and the Army terminated the program. Most of the soldiers in the ASTP were posted to combat units, but Fitch was one of a hundred or so ASTP soldiers who joined the
Special Engineer Detachment
(SED), which provided much-needed technicians to the
Manhattan Project
.
The Army sent Fitch to the Manhattan Project's
Los Alamos Laboratory
in New Mexico. By mid-1944, about a third of the technicians at Los Alamos were from the SED. There he met many of the greats of physics including
Niels Bohr
,
James Chadwick
,
Enrico Fermi
,
Isidor Isaac Rabi
,
Bruno Rossi
,
Emilio Segrè
,
Edward Teller
and
Richard C. Tolman
, in some cases attending physics courses taught by them. He worked in the group headed by
Ernest Titterton
, a member of the
British Mission
, and became well-acquainted with the techniques of
experimental physics
. He participated in the drop testing of mock
atomic bombs
that was conducted at
Wendover Army Air Field
and the
Naval Auxiliary Air Station Salton Sea
, and worked at the Trinity site, where he witnessed the
Trinity nuclear test
on July 16, 1945. He was discharged from the Army in 1946. He continued to work at Los Alamos as a civilian for another year to earn money. He briefly returned to Los Alamos in summer 1948.