James Rainwater

AKA Leo James Rainwater

Born: 9-Dec-1917
Birthplace: Council, ID
Died: 31-May-1986
Location of death: Yonkers, NY
Cause of death: unspecified

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Physicist

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Determined shapes of nuclei

Father: (civil engineer, d. 1918 influenza pandemic)
Father: George Fowler (stepfather)
Wife: Emma Louise Smith (m. 1942, three sons, one daughter)
Son: James
Son: Robert
Son: William
Daughter: Elizabeth Ann (d. while young)

University: California Institute of Technology
University: PhD, Columbia University (1946)
Professor: Physics, Columbia University (1952-)

Nobel Prize for Physics 1975 (with Aage N. Bohr and Ben R. Mottelson)
American Physical Society
IEEE
American Association for the Advancement of Science
National Academy of Sciences

American physicist who won a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei.
Educated at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1946, Rainwater worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. In 1949 he began formulating a theory that not all atomic nuclei are spherical, as was then generally believed. The theory was tested experimentally and confirmed by Danish physicists Aage N. Bohr and Ben R. Mottelson. For their work the three scientists were awarded jointly the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Rainwater was a professor of physics at Columbia from 1952 and Pupin professor of physics there from 1982. He also conducted valuable research on X rays and took part in Atomic Energy Commission and naval research projects. He was awarded the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Prize for Physics in 1963.

Children

James Rainwater, son of John Rainwater and Mary Fussell, was born in North Carolina. His parents were married in or before 1735. In 1754, he served in the Granville Co., NC militia - something which under normal circumstances he would not have done before the age of 16. We therefore place the year of his birth between 1735 and 1738.

Little is known of James Rainwater. He left no marriage record, no will, no family Bible. All that is known of him comes from property records, militia records and the occasional service on a jury (see Evidence for Early Rainwaters, prior to 1800). As I have assembled these lists, it has become apparent that the children of two different families have been routinely confused with one another - that is, the children of James Rainwater of North Carolina, and James Rainwater of Sevier Co., Tennessee.

The difficulty for many researchers is that James is the link from their provable ancestors to John Rainwater and Mary Fussell. So far, none has been able to satisfactorily prove the names of James's children. What we have is a tradition of these children, with nothing on which to base it. Over the years I have collected a number of lists of James Rainwater's children. I don't reproduce them here to humiliate the originators but to illustrate the thorny problem of proving descent from James. Just to further complicate things, the existance of many of the individuals on these lists in not in question - merely the identity of their parents.

Leo Jaspar Rainwater, the son of George M. and Leonella Wood Rainwater, was born in 1884. A civil engineer, he was married to Edna E. Teague in Calfornia, and the couple settled in Council, Adams Co., Idaho. In November 1918, at the height of the 1918 influenza epidemic, Leo Jaspar Rainwater died, leaving behind his wife and orphaned son, Leo James Rainwater, who was then not quite a year old.

Leo James Rainwater received a batchelor's degree in physics in 1939 from the California Institute of Technology, followed by his doctoral degree from Columbia University in 1946. Like most American physicists, he contributed his talents to the the Manhattan Project during World War II.. He eventually became a professor at Columbia teaching and doing experimental work in physics, until he retired in 1986. Dr. Rainwater also twice served as director of the university's Nevis Cyclotron Laboratory. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 for his contributions in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei.

Nuclear Energy Level Argument for a Spheroidal Nuclear Model

Recently there has been notable success, particularly by Maria Mayer, in explaining many nuclear phenomena including spins, magnetic moments, isomeric states, etc. on the basis of a single particle model for the separate nucleons in a spherical nucleus. The spherical model, however, seems incapable of explaining the observed large quadrupole moments of nuclei. In this paper it is shown that an extension of the logic of this model leads to the prediction that greater stability is obtained for a spheroidal than for a spherical nucleus of the same volume, when reasonable assumptions are made concerning the variation of the energy terms on distortion. The predicted quadrupole moment variation with odd A is in general agreement with the experimental values as concerns variation with A, but are even larger than the experimental values. Since the true situation probably involves considerable "dilution" of the extreme single particle model, it is encouraging that the present predictions are larger rather than smaller than the experimental results. A solution is given for the energy levels of a particle in a spheroidal box.

Autobiography

I was born December 9, 1917 in a small town in Idaho (Council) where my parents had moved to from California to operate a general store. My father, who had previously been a civil engineer, died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. My mother then moved with me and her mother to Hanford, Calif. in the San Joaquin Valley of California, where she was re-married to George Fowler a few years later. In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics. Due mainly to my record on an open chemistry competition given by Cal Tech, I was admitted, graduating in 1939 as a physics major. Carl David Anderson was my physics group recitation instructor when he received his Nobel Prize and Milliken was the President of the Institute. I had a short biology course taught by Thomas Hunt Morgan. In 1939 I began graduate study in physics as a teaching assistant at Columbia University where I have remained. During the first two years, I had courses under I.I. Rabi, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and J.R. Dunning Fermi was working on neutron moderator assemblies which led to the first working nuclear "pile" after his group was moved to Chicago. Dunning, Booth, Slack, and Von Grosse held the basic patent on the gaseous diffusion process for 235U enrichment and were working on its development. This evolved into the Oak Ridge enrichment plants and the present U.S. technology for 235U enrichment. In March 1942, I married Emma Louise Smith. We have three sons, James, Robert and William who are all now adults. We also had a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, who died while young.

During W.W. II, I worked with W.W. Havens, Jr. and C.S. Wu under Dr. Dunning (Manhattan Project) mainly doing pulsed neutron spectroscopy using the small Columbia cyclotron. I received my Ph.D after my thesis was de-classified in 1946. I continued at Columbia, first as an instructor, reaching the rank of full professor in 1952. About 1946 funding was obtained from the Office of Naval Research to build a synchrocyclotron which became operational in early 1950. I was involved with the facility development from the beginning and my research has used that facility ever since. The research included neutron resonance spectroscopy, the angular distribution of pion elastic and inelastic scattering on nuclei with optical model fitting. Best known are the muanic-atom-x-ray studies starting with the pioneering 1953 paper with Val Fitch which first established the smaller proton charge radii of nuclei.

Starting in 1948, I taught an advanced nuclear physics graduate course. The Maria Mayer shell model suggestion in 1949 was a great triumph and fitted my belief that a nuclear shell model should represent a proper approach to understanding nuclear structure. Combined with developments of Weizsaker's semi-empirical explanation of nuclear binding, and the Bohr-Wheeler 1939 paper on nuclear fission, emphasizing distorted nuclear shapes, I was prepared to see an explanation of large nuclear quadrupole moments. The full concept came to me in late 1949 when attending a colloquium by Prof. C.H. Townes who described the experimental situation for nuclear quadrupole moments. It was a fortuitous situation made even more so by the fact that I was sharing an office with Aage Bohr that year. We had many discussions of the implications, subsequently very successfully exploited by Bohr, Mottelson, and others of the Copenhagen Institute.

Since I joined the Columbia Physics Dept., in 1939, it has been my privilege to have as teachers and/or colleagues many previous Nobel Laureates in Physics: E. Fermi, I.I. Rabi, H. Bethe (Visiting Prof.), P. Kusch, W. Lamb, C.H. Townes, T.D. Lee and L. Cooper in addition to R.A. Milliken, C.D. Anderson, and T.H. Morgan (Biology) while I was an undergraduate at Cal Tech.

Lee, Tsung-Dao; Rabi, Isidor Isaac; Rainwater, Leo James

Description: old age, three-quarter view, eyeglasses, suit, blackboard;
taken shortly after James Rainwater learned he'd won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics.
L-R: Isidor Rabi, James Rainwater, Tsung-Dao Lee.

Lee, Tsung-Dao; Bethe, Hans Albrecht; Rainwater, James;
Ting, Samuel Chao-chung; Schwinger, Julian Seymour

Description: Six Nobel Prize Winners at Columbia University Symposium,
L-R: T. D. Lee, Hans Bethe, James Rainwater, Samuel C. C. Ting,
Julian Schwinger, Dr. McGill of Columbia, Andre Cournand