Atomic Nuclei Quotes

After about 1940, scientists generally stopped looking for elements in nature. Instead, they had to create them by smashing smaller atoms together.

Scientists are like atomic nuclei. They are more easily split than fused.

Deep in the world of atomic nuclei, life is not always tranquil.

It was at the beginning of 1934 while working on the emission of these positive electrons that we noticed a fundamental difference between that transmutation and all the others so far produced; all the reactions of nuclear chemistry induced were instantaneous phenomena, explosions.

The part of uranium that's fissile - when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two - is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.

Direction coupling between the various radiations generated in a nuclear reaction both with one another and with the initiating radiation can also be detected and measured by coincidences; this provides valuable information about the structure of the atomic nuclei.

O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations that this type of nuclear reaction may be described in an essentially classical way like the fission of a liquid drop, and that the fission products must fly apart with kinetic energies of the order of hundred million electron-volts each.

Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on.

From the results so far obtained it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the long-range atoms arising from collision of alpha particles with nitrogen are not nitrogen atoms but probably atoms of hydrogen, or atoms of mass 2. If this be the case, we must conclude that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated under the intense forces developed in a close collision with a swift alpha particle, and that the hydrogen atom which is liberated formed a constituent part of the nitrogen nucleus.