Nuclear Physics Quotes

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.

The $2 Billion was enormous at that time—the equivalent of $26 Billion in 2010 dollars. This was the first time that all but a handful of Americans knew of the huge sums that had been invested in the Manhattan Project. What made the quotation even more memorable is how President Truman, who himself had only learned about the Manhattan Project with the death of President Roosevelt, framed the event—as a contest between us and Germany as to who would build an atomic bomb first. Actually, although almost no one in the US government realized it then, the Germans had NO PROGRAM of nuclear weapons development at all. Hitler did not trust the Theoretical Physics and Theory of Relativity because Einstein and other Jewish scientists had been instrumental in its development. He derogatorily referred to it as “Jewish Science”. Germany bet its scientific efforts on the V2 Rockets and the Jet Airplane, both of which they were successful with but too late to have any material effect on the war. Ironically, even after most of the great German physicists were run out of Germany, there were still two of the greatest who may well have been capable of nuclear weapons development. But neither Werner Heisenberg or Otto Hahn were inclined to engage in that kind of research, and neither of them were even asked whether or not they thought it was possible. The anti-Semitic Nazis just assumed that it could not be. Truman and his associates did not find out for another year or more that there was no laboratory race. There was one OSS spy, Moe Berg, who had actually talked to Heisenberg in the midst of the war, and concluded that he not only was not working on an atomic bomb, but was not up on the latest pre-war critical research needed to develop a bomb. Hahn knew and had created the first chain reaction for which he later won the Nobel prize but he was a chemist and didn’t really understand the Physics and mathematics involved in making a weapon and was a confirmed pacifist. Ironically, his colleague, Lise Meitner who had done the physics and mathematics on that experiment was Jewish and had to flee Germany. In Denmark she gave the results to Niels Bohr, who shared then with Leo Slizard and Einstein when Bohr came to the United State and that initiated the famous letter that was sent to FDR which triggered the Manhattan Project. The German first nuclear reaction was used by the Americans because the politicians listened to the scientists, while in Germany, the politicians gave no credence to their scientists and their experiments in nuclear fission.

Morrison was then a graduate student of Oppenheimer. The quotation is important, not because it shows how quickly the “father of the atomic bomb” realized that a nuclear bomb could be made and how, but how relatively easy and rapid it was for a competent theoretical physicist could conceptually design a nuclear weapon if they first had knowledge of the Hahn / Strassmann Experiment and the Meitner / Frisch explanation of what had happened ({640924}). Note Leo Szilard’s letter at about the same time--{640925}.

This is one of the most momentous quotations of all time. Otto Hahn was a German Chemist who until recently had worked with Lisa Meitner in one of the most productive scientific collaborations of all time. However, Meitner was Jewish and had to flee from Germany with Hahn’s help for her life. She went to Stockholm where they were doing almost no nuclear research and although she was a famous physicist, there was no laboratory or university that could use her talents, thus her term “empty handed”. She and Hahn had conducted a series of experiments bombarding radioactive material with particles which transmuted the radioactive element to another element nearby on the Periodic Table of the elements—an element with a close atomic number. After Meitner escaped, Hahn with Fritz Strassmann assisting, bombarded uranium the heaviest element with neutrons, the heaviest particles. However, in addition to the expected results, a substantial amount of Barium remained after the bombardment. Hahn was a brilliant experimental chemist and at first he assumed that perhaps they had identified the Barium erroneously or the data was read incorrectly, or the experiment had been contaminated. There was no explanation for it. So he sent copies of all the data to Meitner a brilliant Physicist and Mathematician who was the theoretician of their team. She studied the data with her nephew, Otto Frisch who was a young up and coming mathematician. After a few days, she had figured it out. Hahn had produced the first human induced case of nuclear fission although they gave it that name a little later. She and her nephew confirmed all the data readings mathematically and proved exactly what had happened. She refers to it in the letter as “splitting” the atom. She wrote to Hahn and explained what had happened. Without any intention of doing so, he and Strassmann were the first scientists to create a real example of nuclear fission. The world has never been the same since. Hahn and Strassmann were awarded the Nobel Prize.