Word: fissioning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cannot bring ourselves to take 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...
...Fission's frightening potential quickly became apparent to scientists everywhere. But Hitler considered the new theoretical physics too contaminated by 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...
Shattered Remains. One of many German scientists interned by the Allies, Hahn heard the news of the atomic bomb in England. Normally a man of dry, underplayed wit, he became so depressed by the appalling application of fission that his colleagues feared that he might commit suicide. Once back in Germany, Hahn struggled to rebuild the shattered remains of his old institute as president of its successor, the Max Planck Society. He also became an outspoken foe of atomic weapons. In 1957, joining the 17 other prominent West German scientists in the Göttingen Manifesto, he vowed never...
...postwar Germany, Hahn became the most revered elder statesman of what had once been Europe's proudest scientific establishment. He collected many awards, including a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of fission. But he always accepted such honors with characteristic humility. Visiting an atomic reactor or nuclear power station, he would shrug modestly: "It has all been the work of others." In a soon-to-be-published 300-page memoir, he brushed off his historic work in fewer than five pages. Last week, at the age of 89, the father of fission died peacefully in his beloved...
...want to investigate the very limits of matter," he says. Much more than mere scientific curiosity could be involved. It was in an attempt to create transuranium elements that scientists first bombarded a rare isotope, uranium 235, with slow neutrons. Investigating the strange reaction that resulted, they discovered nuclear fission...