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17.—Remarks on the Prehistory of the Discovery of Slow Neutrons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2012

Maurice Goldhaber
Maurice Goldhaber
Affiliation:
Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York.
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Extract

Segrè in his recent book [1] on Fermi gives an interesting account of the discovery of slow neutrons at the Institute of Physics of the University of Rome on October 22, 1934. He quotes (p. 80) a statement Fermi made many years later in a conversation with S. Chandrasekhar on the process of discovery in physics:

‘I will tell you how I came to make the discovery which I suppose is the most important one I have made. We were working very hard on the neutron-induced radioactivity and the results we were obtaining made no sense. One day, as I came to the laboratory, it occurred to me that I should examine the effect of placing a piece of lead before the incident neutrons. Instead of my usual custom, I took great pains to have the piece of lead precisely machined.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A: Mathematics , Volume 70 , 1972 , pp. 191 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1972

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References

References to Literature

[1]Segrè, E., Enrico Fermi: Physicist, 1970. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
[2] See Fermi, E., Collected Papers, II, p. 926, footnote 4, 1965. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
[3] See, e.g., Shankland's, R. S. remarks in his review of Nucl. Energy, 106: Experimental Neutron Thermalization (by Egelstaff, P. A. and Poole, M. J., 1969, New York: Pergamon Press) in Physics Today, May 1971, p. 53.Google Scholar
[4]Lea, D. E., 1934. Nature, Lond., 133, 24.Google Scholar
[5]Chadwick, J. and Goldhaber, M., 1934. Nature, Lond., 134, 237.Google Scholar
[6]Bethe, H. and Peierls, R., 1935. Proc. Roy. Soc, A, 148, 146.Google Scholar
[7]Fermi, E., Amaldi, E., Pontecorvo, B., Rasetti, F. and Segrè, E., 1934. Rie. Sci., 5, 282. [(P)reprints were an ingenious innovation of the Fermi school; they were preprints rapidly produced in the format of reprints from Ric. Sci. (see ref. 1, p. 81).]Google Scholar
[8]Lea, D. E., 1935. Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 150, 653–4.Google Scholar