James L. Tuck

After his retirement Tuck became a prominent public supporter of research into thermonuclear fusion for power generation. He also became interested in the phenomenon of ball lightning, probably because of the connection between plasmas and their role in fusion power schemes, and in 1980 he appeared in the Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World episode 'Clarke's Cabinet of Curiosities' where he described his experiments at Los Alamos, carried out during lunch breaks, to create ball lightning using a large storage battery of the type then used in submarines.

He remained at Los Alamos until his retirement in 1972. Earlier in 1972 he had published a review in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of the book Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Frontiers of Public and Private Science by Solly Zuckerman.

After the war, he returned briefly to England, where he worked at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University. However, he found the postwar conditions there difficult and in 1949 returned to the United States, assuming a position at the University of Chicago. A year later, he returned to Los Alamos when he was invited to work on thermonuclear research.

In 1937 he was offered an appointment as a Salter Research Fellow at Oxford University, where he worked with Leó Szilárd on particle accelerators.

James Leslie Tuck OBE, (9 January 1910 – 15 December 1980) was a British physicist. He was born in Manchester, England, and educated at the Victoria University of Manchester. Because of his involvement with the Manhattan Project, he was unable to submit his thesis on time and never received his doctoral degree.