Word: atomics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Atomic Medicine." What nuclear scientists at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratories are doing to harness the atom for medicine...
With his primitive equipment, he repeatedly bombarded the element uranium with neutrons in an effort to create new man-made radioactive isotopes. According to the theories of the time, the neutrons should have combined with the nucleus of the uranium atoms to produce heavier, unstable isotopes. Yet he kept finding lighter atoms of barium. Gradually, the inexplicable presence of the barium, which is only about half the weight of uranium, persuaded Hahn that he had done what had always been considered impossible: he had split the atom...
...this step, so contradictory to all the experience of nuclear physics." But Hahn's former coworker, Physicist Lise Meitner, had no such hesitation. Hearing of the experiment in exile in Sweden, she not only proclaimed that Hahn and Strassmann had achieved nuclear fission, but also calculated that each atom of uranium had released 20 million times as much energy as a comparable amount...
...Jews like Lise to be worthy of much support. Although not a Jew himself, Hahn was no friend of the regime. Throughout World War II, he was left undisturbed at his work, exploring radioactive isotopes. In the U.S., where scientists assumed that the Germans were following up his atom-splitting success, the race was on to achieve fission on a more Promethean scale. In 1945, after Germany's defeat, the results were displayed at Hiroshima...
Died. Otto Hahn, 89, Nobel laureate who proved that the atom could be split (see SCIENCE...