The 30's
Out of context: Reply #90
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- kezza_20
jesus BOne: arguments on the internet dont work...
"Many believe that Ernest Rutherford became the first person to deliberately split the atom by bombarding nitrogen with naturally occurring alpha particles from radioactive material and observing a proton emitted with energy higher than the alpha particle.[3] In 1932 his students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, working under Rutherford's direction, attempted to split the nucleus by entirely artificial means, using a particle accelerator to bombard lithium with protons thereby producing two alpha particles. This did split the nucleus, but nevertheless was not quite the classical nuclear fission which is induced in heavy nuclei, because the daughter fragments are alpha particles — already well-known fragments of excited nuclei, and not considered to be a truly new phenomenon, even if two of them had been produced, and nothing else.
The first clear induced (manmade) nuclear fission as we know it occurred in results of the bombardment of uranium by neutrons, which proved interesting and puzzling. First studied by Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in 1934, these results were not properly interpreted and understood until several years later."
"In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons;[4] simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission.[5] Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.[6] In 1944, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Some historians have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission and believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn."