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Awarded the Nobel Prize, he used the ceremony in Stockholm as a pretext to leave Italy with his family and travel to the US. However, in Mussolini’s Italy, Fermi’s Jewish wife was in danger. In Rome, physicist Enrico Fermi found that firing neutrons at a target substance through a filter of water – his assistants carried it in buckets from the goldfish pond in the garden behind his laboratory – dramatically slowed the neutrons’ speed, enhancing their chances of hitting and penetrating the target nuclei.
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In France, Marie Curie’s daughter, Irene, and her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, discovered how to force nuclei to disintegrate to form new, unstable elements that released radioactive energy as they decayed – so-called ‘artificial radioactivity’. No evening dress”), he accepted a post at Princeton University.Īgainst this increasingly tense backdrop, the final pieces of the atomic jigsaw were dropping into place. However, finding England too formal (he preferred “No butlers. Einstein crossed the Channel to England, protected by the British Naval Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson.
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Now, friendships and professional partnerships were sundered, as many were compelled to flee Nazi Germany and other countries gripped by totalitarian regimes because of their race or political views. Previously a small, close-knit community, they had met frequently at international conferences – disparagingly termed “witches’ sabbaths” by Einstein – and published their results openly. Their device, dubbed a linear accelerator, provided the first experimental confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of E = mc2 (energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared), implying that enormous amounts of energy could be squeezed from a tiny mass.īut in 1933 – the year when Rutherford dismissed the idea of harnessing energy from atoms as “moonshine”, and when Adolf Hitler came to power – the scientists’ world changed. Also at the Cavendish, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton built the first machine – using plasticine to seal its joints the Cavendish did not encourage extravagance – to disintegrate an atomic nucleus with accelerated particles. The year 1932 was a scientific annus mirabilis. Thus, it was an ideal tool for the investigation of atoms. The neutron contained no charge – hence its name – and, if used to bombard elements, it could penetrate atomic nuclei without being deflected.
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One of his former pupils, James Chadwick, discovered the sub-atomic particle at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory in 1932. Rutherford already suspected the presence of another particle within the nucleus: the neutron. He became the first person to chip a piece off an atomic nucleus, in the process identifying a sub-atomic particle – the positively charged proton (his mentor JJ Thomson had discovered electrons some years before).
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(Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images) As well as the 80,000 who died in the blast, 60,000 had succumbed to radiation sickness and related diseases by December 1945. Survivors of the atomic bombing lie in hospital beds in Hiroshima, suffering from the effects of radiation.