Monograph: Prominent names in nuclear fission

Ida Eva Tacke-Noddack, discovered rhenium and first mentioned the idea of nuclear fission

Ida Tacke and her husband published a paper in which they stated that ‘uranium, upon receiving neutrons, could be broken down into large fragments which would be isotopes of known elements, but not neighbours of the irradiated element’. This was the first prediction of what would later be called nuclear fission.Read more

Lise Meitner and nuclear fission

The Austrian physicist Lise Meitner is the most obvious case of a scientific discovery made by a woman and ignored by the Nobel Prize committee. It was she who realized in 1938 that nuclear fission had been produced in experiments carried out by her colleagues in the laboratory.Read more

Leó Szilárd, the man with great ideas on nuclear physics, engineering, and molecular biology

Leó Szilárd, the man with great ideas on nuclear physics, engineering, and molecular biologyRead more

Otto Hahn, discoverer of the nuclear fission of uranium and thorium

Otto Hahn, discoverer of the nuclear fission of uranium and thorium.Read more

Friedrich Strassmann, co-discoverer of the fission of uranium

Together with Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, he conducted experiments on the splitting of a uranium atom, when bombarded by a neturon, into two different elements, krypton and barium. The reaction was called "nuclear fission". Read more

Enrico Fermi, Nobel Prize for achieving the first nuclear chain reaction

Italian physicist who has gone down in history for being the first to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fission and for having devised the first mathematical method capable of describing the behaviour of certain types of subatomic particles.Read more

Katharine Way, known for her contribution to Physics and the construction of the Chicago Pile-1 reactor

Katharine Way carried out analyses of neutron flux data from Enrico Fermi's nuclear reactor designs to see if a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction could be achieved. These calculations were used in the construction of the Chicago Pile-1 reactor.Read more