Doctor Kessler

Character Background[edit]

Doctor Kessler was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York. As a child, he delighted in repairing radios and had a talent for engineering. At school he was bright, but his measured IQ was merely above average at 124, which he would scoff at later. By age 15, he had mastered differential and integral calculus. He kept experimenting on and re-creating mathematical topics utilizing his own notation even before entering college.

In his last year in high school, Kessler won the New York University Math Championship. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1939, and was named Putnam Fellow that same year. While there, Kessler took every physics course offered, including a graduate course on theoretical physics while only in his sophmore year. He obtained a perfect score on the entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics — an unprecedented feat — and he received his Ph.D. in 1942.

Though Kessler was quickly recruited to join work on the Manhattan Project, he was only a junior physicist in terms of age and experience, and his work on the project was relatively remote from the major action, consisting mostly of administering the computation group of human computers in the Theoretical division. His other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor at the desert lab, in order to measure how close a particular assembly of fissile material was to becoming critical. After this work he was transferred to the Oak Ridge facility, where he aided engineers in calculating safety procedures for material storage.

Due to the top secret nature of the work, Los Alamos was isolated; in his own words, "There wasn't anything to do there". Bored, Kessler indulged his curiosity by mastering the academic disciplines he'd skipped over in his formal education - history, literature, psychology, medicine and so on. He also befriended the local native americans and would often join them for drumming out on the mesa.

In the years following the war, he has begun to lecture and perform research at Caltech and is a lead researcher on the newly-formed Project Orion.