Francis William Aston Quotes
There is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us .... One day man will release and control its almost infinite power.
Francis W. Aston, 1877–1945, English Nuclear Chemist & Physicist, Inventor of the Mass Spectrograph, Answering critics of the new research into the atom, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Lecture, Cambridge University, 1936
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The lecture was on radium and the radioactivity that scientists had recently discovered. This appears to be the first time a scientist suggested the possibility of using atomic energy to produce a powerful weapon. At the same time, note that he also mentioned the possible destruction of the earth. “Heavy matter” referred to the elements—many of which had not yet been discovered—that had larger atomic numbers than radium like uranium.
Rutherford had been the first to split the atom in 1919.
Meitner and her nephew Frisch had been the first people to realize that the atom had been split. Meitner had described the process to her nephew and he made some drawings of the process she described. A few of these looked like a bacteria dividing. Frisch happened to meet with William A. Arnold, an American Biologist doing research in Stockholm. He asked Arnold what the biologists called it when a bacteria divided, and he replied, “fission”. Frisch told his aunt and she decided that they should use that term in the scientific article they were preparing on the splitting of the atom.
There was massive opposition to nuclear power in most countries of the world except France where the operators and technicians are so well trained and there are such high safety standards that the public had confidence in the nuclear management that did not exist in most other countries.
Nuclear fusion is different from nuclear fission that currently powers atomic power plants. Fusion is the process the sun uses to generate all its power. Scientists understand exactly how fusion works—it’s much simpler than fission, but actually creating a way of doing it on earth has been a very difficult challenge. The National Ignition Facility has been trying to produce a fusion reaction for a number of years with no success.
Francis William Aston FRS was an English chemist and physicist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes in many non-radioactive elements and for his enunciation of the whole number rule. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
