Kenneth William Ford (born May 1, 1926) is an American theoretical physicist, teacher, and writer, currently residing near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
After summer employment at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Ford was called to active service and began the Navy's Electronic Technician Training.
In June 1951, Ford returned to Princeton to continue the H-bomb work there at Wheeler's Project Matterhorn.
"I was aware of the fact that Oppenheimer was expressing opposition to the development of the H-bomb, for various reasons, from technical to moral.
"The night prior to this meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study, I took a morning train down from New York with the latest results, went over to the Matterhorn building, got out a very large piece of paper, maybe about two feet by three feet in size, a large rectangle of paper, and sketched out a graph showing our latest calculation of thermonuclear burning, still very crude of course, because of those calculations, yet extremely encouraging.
He interrupted his speech, walked over to the window, opened it, took from me this large graph, carried it back and pasted it on the blackboard for all to see.
'"[1] In the fall of 1952, Ford left project Matterhorn and spent the next six months completing his graduate dissertation on the collective model of the nucleus.
After defending his dissertation in the spring of 1953, and after spending that summer working in Los Alamos, he took up a post-doctoral research appointment at Indiana University, beginning that fall.
Ford furthered his professional education in two subsequent leaves of absence: in 1955–56 at the Max Planck Institut in Göttingen, Germany, mentored by Werner Heisenberg and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship;[1] and in 1961–62 at Imperial College, London and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mentored by Abdus Salam, Herman Feshbach, and Victor Weisskopf and supported by a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship.
[3] Ford's principal research was in the theory of nuclear structure, with some work in particle and mathematical physics.
Later papers analyzed muonic-atom data to give evidence on the distribution of electric charge within nuclei.
Although Ford's initial appointment at Indiana University in 1953 was as a postdoctoral researcher, he was given the opportunity to teach a graduate course.
Then, in 1987, he became the director of the American Institute of Physics and later helped to shepherd its move from New York City (to which he'd been commuting from Philadelphia) to College Park, MD.
Ford's retirement from the institute in 1993, at age 67, coincided with its move to College Park, along with other physics organizations.
While in the final stages of writing his book Building the H Bomb, Ford was requested by the United States Department of Energy to excise approximately ten percent of his manuscript as the security officials at DOE felt that it had the potential to reveal decades-old government classified information.
After some back-and-forth, Ford made minimal edits to the book and went ahead with publishing, putting himself at risk of prosecution, but no action was taken by the DOE.