Emily Conover: Century of Science: Cracking The Atom

By
Emily Conover
JUNE 22, 2021 AT 6:00 AM
The Manhattan Project brought together the finest scientific minds in the
United States for one urgent purpose: to build an atomic bomb. That included
people who had historically been marginalized, including Black scientists, who
achieved greatness in an era of rampant discrimination.
One of those minds was J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., a Black mathematician, nuclear
scientist and optics researcher. Barely past his teen years as the Manhattan
Project ramped up, he quickly began working with the top physicists of the
time on what was perhaps the most consequential physics research project of
the century.
Born in Chicago in 1923, Wilkins was a math prodigy. He was one of the
youngest students ever admitted to the University of Chicago — at age 13. He
earned his Ph.D. at the university by the time he was 19, in 1942. His
academic feats were so impressive that newspaper articles proclaimed him a
genius.
To celebrate our upcoming 100th anniversary, we’re launching a series that

highlights some of the biggest advances in science over the last century. For
more on the story of the atom’s power, visit Century of Science: Cracking the
atom.
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Soon, Wilkins began working in the university’s Metallurgical Laboratory,

where much more was afoot than mundane studies of metals. Researchers
there were helping design nuclear reactors to produce the plutonium needed
to create an atomic bomb. With physicist Eugene Wigner, Wilkins began
laying the theoretical physics groundwork for nuclear reactors.
In a nuclear reactor, energy is released when uranium atoms fission, or split,

after being hit by a neutron. Each fission also releases additional neutrons,
which bounce around within the reactor at a variety of energies. Wigner and
Wilkins’ work on determining the energy distribution of such neutrons is a
foundation of nuclear physics, still cited by researchers today. Those neutrons
go on to initiate more fissions, producing a chain reaction, so understanding
their energies is crucial for designing reactors.
But in 1944, when Wilkins’ colleagues were scheduled to move to a
Manhattan Project site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Wilkins stayed behind. The
state’s racist laws enforcing segregation in businesses, schools and
workplaces would have meant unbearable indignities for the young man. “It’s
not that he couldn’t go. He refused to go,” says Ronald Mickens, a scientist
and colleague of Wilkins during his later years at Clark Atlanta University in
Georgia. “He would not allow, and certainly his family would not allow him to
live in segregated quarters.”
Wilkins worked at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, where in

1942 physicists had created the first self-sustaining, controlled nuclear chain reaction,
in a pile of graphite and uranium (illustrated).U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
ENERGY, OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Still, Wilkins’ skills were in high demand during the Manhattan Project. In
1944, physicist Edward Teller, who later became known as the father of the
hydrogen bomb, noted that “[M]en of high qualifications are scarce these
days,” and recommended Wilkins to Harold Urey of Columbia University,
saying that he “has been doing, according to Wigner, excellent work.”
Wilkins, however, stayed at the University of Chicago until 1946. He signed

the Szilard Petition, a letter from 70 scientists to President Harry Truman after
the defeat of Germany in World War II, which urged that Japan be given an
opportunity to surrender before any atomic bombs were used. The petition
never reached Truman.
Wilkins remained a prominent figure in the nuclear physics community
throughout his career, serving as president of the American Nuclear Society in
1974–75. According to a 1974 profile in Nuclear News, Wilkins was known for
“his quick intelligence, … his directness and good nature.” He delved deeply
into complex topics related to nuclear reactors, including how gamma rays, a
type of radiation produced in reactors, penetrate through materials.
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After working in the nuclear industry for several decades, Wilkins became a
professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1970, where he helped
establish the first mathematics Ph.D. program at a historically Black university.
In the 1990s, he joined Clark Atlanta University in Georgia. He died in 2011 at
age 87.
Despite his focus on nuclear physics, Wilkins had wide-ranging curiosity and
tackled diverse mathematical questions. He also tackled topics in optics; early
in his career he designed lenses for microscopes and other devices. He even
studied the mathematics of gambling, with a paper titled “The Bold Strategy in
Presence of House Limit,” which he presented, appropriately, in Las Vegas, at
the 1972 meeting of the American Mathematical Society.
“When you have a mathematics background … what you find is that the same
mathematics, the same structures, show up in many different places,” says
Mickens. “It’s not surprising that he had an interest in and was proficient in
many different areas.”
Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us
at [email protected]

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JUNE 22, 2021 AT 6:00 AM

To celebrate our upcoming 100th anniversary, we’re launching a series that

Soon, Wilkins began working in the university’s Metallurgical Laboratory,

In a nuclear reactor, energy is released when uranium atoms fission, or split,

Wilkins worked at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, where in

Wilkins, however, stayed at the University of Chicago until 1946. He signed

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