Word: strassmann
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Hahn's innate caution stopped him from making so bold a claim in public. "As nuclear chemists," Hahn and his young collaborator, Fritz Strassmann, wrote later, "we 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...
...start of World War II, Bohr made a trip to the U.S. Just as his ship was about to leave Copenhagen, two German refugee physicists, Lise Meitner and O. R. Frisch, rushed aboard with a dismaying report. They had just heard that German Chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin had split the uranium atom. This was atomic fission, and with it the Nazis might soon be able to build an atomic bomb...
...popularizers like to point out with bated breath that there is enough atomic energy locked in a cupful of water to drive a big liner across the Atlantic. To hardheaded physicists, the idea of releasing and harnessing this energy was a wild dream. Then, early in 1939, Hahn and Strassmann of Germany, with help from France, Sweden and Denmark, used neutrons to break uranium atoms into two nearly equal fragments, with release of some 200,000,000 electron-volts of atomic energy per atom (TIME, Feb. 6; March 13). This was by far the most violent atomic explosion ever effected...
...Otto Hahn, 60, of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and his coworker, F. Strassmann, had bombarded uranium with neutrons. In the products of bombardment they found something which seemed to be atoms of barium. This barium was the clue to something terrific. For the huge uranium atom, heaviest of the 92 standard elements, weighs 238 units.* The barium atom weighs 137 units. Since the barium could have originated only as a fragment of the big uranium atom, it was logical to suppose that the latter had cracked asunder, in two nearly equal parts. The release of atomic energy...