
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz (10 October 1921-31 December 2002) was an American physicist.
Biography[]
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz was born in Bryan, Texas in 1921, the son of a Polish political radical father and an Eastern European immigrant mother; he was named for the Italian socialist Giovanni Rossi. He was raised in Oklahoma, where he went to university, and he became a protege of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1940s. Lomanitz was an open communist who supported the unionization of Berkeley's faculty, and Oppenheimer persuaded Lomanitz to forgo all political activity when he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942. However, the military terminated Lomanitz's deferment to give them an excuse to remove Lomanitz from Los Alamos and have him fight in World war II. Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and David Bohm were accused of spying on the project for the Soviets, and Lomanitz served in the Pacific War before completing his PhD at Cornell. After the war, Lomanitz testified before HUAC and assured his loyalty to the United States, while declining to name others involved with communist activities. Lomanitz, blacklisted, was forced to work as a railroad maintenance worker, but he chaired the physics department at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology from 1962 to 1991. Lomanitz moved to Pahoa, Hawaii, where he died in 2002.