Robert F. Christy (born 1916) is an American theoretical physicist
and later astrophysicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He is
a Professor Emeritus at Caltech.
Christy was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and attended the
University of British Columbia in the 1930s, where he studied
mathematics and physics. He then entered the PhD program at UC
Berkeley under Robert Oppenheimer where he found himself in the
middle of the most active program in nuclear and theoretical
physics. He obtained his PhD in 1941 and after a few months at the
Illinois Institute of Technology he joined the Manhattan Project at
the University of Chicago working on the first chain reaction. He
then joined the joined the project at Los Alamos in the spring of
1943 and worked on the first implosion bomb.
After a few months at the University of Chicago he joined the
faculty at Caltech in 1946 and remained there until retirement in
1986. Christy was awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal
Astronomical Society in 1967. In 1968 he became Provost and then
Acting President.
He worked in cosmic rays, elementary particles, nuclear physics, and
astrophysics.