Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
May/June 1997
Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 11-14 The Neutron and the Bomb: A Biography of Sir James Chadwick By Andrew Brown Oxford University Press, 1997 384 pages; $35.00 William Lanouette In contrast to the New York Times's failure to give Chadwick much ink, this avidly researched and artfully written biography demonstrates his importance to both science and society. Born in an English mill town in 1891, Chadwick later moved with his family to Manchester and there enrolled in the city's university. Gifted at math, he intended to pursue that study, but Chadwick was so shy that when he talked to the wrong interviewer he enrolled by mistake as a physics major. Under the pioneering physicist Ernest Rutherford, winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize for his theoretical work on the radioactive transformation of atoms, Chadwick soon became a nuclear physicist. But Chadwick's family poverty forced him to take a study grant in Germany, where he worked with Hans Geiger (creator of the radiation counter). When World War I broke out, Chadwick was imprisoned as an enemy alien and confined to a Berlin stable. There he doggedly continued research by using a popular brand of radioactive toothpaste as his radiation source, with teacups and beer glasses as his instruments, As early as 1920, Rutherford had postulated that a "neutron" might exist; then he lost interest in the idea. But Chadwick continued his search on "just the possibility of something turning up." The neutron was an elusive object, however, because it lacked an electrical charge. This prompted some Cavendish colleagues, in a skit, to celebrate the "fewtron." Other sub-atomic particles left tracks in a Wilson cloud chamber, while a neutron might not. So, they joked, when you saw no tracks you knew that a fewtron had passed through. Despite such jest, Chadwick persisted; he finally discovered and described the neutron after a three-week, round-the-clock, research ordeal in February 1932. It was front-page news in the New York Times. | |
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