Inventor Name
Clapp, Roger Edge
Repository
American Institute of Physics
Center for History of Physics
Niels Bohr Library
One Physics Ellipse
College Park, MD 20740
http://www.aip.org/history/
Physical Description
8.75 ft.
Summary
Correspondence; lecture notes; patents; proposals; reports; research notebooks and notes; unpublished articles; drafts of proposed publications; a diary. This collection provides a record of Clapp's wide ranging career. While employed at the MIT Radiation Laboratory (1942-1946) Clapp worked on microwave scanning linear ray antennas, and made pioneering contributions to the theoretical and experimental understanding of radar reflections from the terrain. The material reflecting this work comprises correspondence, patents (describing microwave antenna inventions), and a report. Clapp was a doctoral student at Harvard University (1946-1949) under professor Julian Schwinger; he held an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) postdoctoral fellowship in theoretical physics at MIT (1949-1950); and was a research associate at the MIT Lab for the Nuclear Sciences and Engineering (1951). This period (1949-1951) is documented primarily by research and lecture notes, thesis material, and a report to the AEC (both on a variational solution to the nuclear three body problem). The lecture notes are from lectures given at Harvard and MIT by Percy Williams Bridgman (thermodynamics), David H. Frisch (scattering elementary particles), Bruno Rossi (cosmic ray phenomena), Julian Schwinger (nuclear physics, wave fields, and quantum electrodynamics), and Victor Frederick Weisskopf (nuclear reactors). Between 1951 and 1978 Clapp followed a relatively unconventional career path, as a consulting physicist not located in academia. From 1978 he was on the staff of the MITRE corporation, while continuing a personal program of research in gravitation, elementary particle theory, and biophysics. Notebooks on gravitation, proposals, peer reviews, correspondence, and unpublished articles extensively document Clapp's research and theories, which were often controversial and inter-disciplinary. Topics covered in the collection include gravitation, elementary particle theory, biophysics, cell wall molecular operation, nerve cell electrical communication, mobius theory of electron excitation, non-impact printing-electrophoresis, electron orbits, philosophy, and plant growth. Correspondents include: John A. Behnke (as editor of BioScience), Albert Einstein, Richard P. Feynman, David Finkelstein (as editor of International Journal of Theoretical Physics), Thomas Kuhn, Elihu Lubkin, and John A. Wheeler. Physicist (theoretical physics, biophysics). Radiation Lab, MIT (1942-1946), AEC fellow (1949-1950); senior physicst, Snow & Schule, Inc. (1950-1952); Ultrasonic Corp. (1952-1957); Adv. Industries, Inc. (1957-1961); Air Tech Corp. (1961-1967); Basic Research Assoc.,Inc. (1970-); Mitre Corp., (1978-).
