James Chadwick

2 Pages 592 Words

SIR JAMES CHADWICK
(1891 –1974)

James Chadwick was born in Cheshire, England, on October 20, 1891. James is the son of John Joseph Chadwick and Anne Mary Knowles. He attended Manchester High School prior to entering Manchester University in 1908. Strangely, while enrolling in the University of Manchester, Chadwick who intended to major in mathematics accidentally found himself in the physics line. Too shy to admit his mistake, he stayed in line. Good thing he made that mistake because he eventually receives the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935. He graduated from the Honors School of Physics in 1911 and spent the next two years under Professor (later Lord) Rutherford in the Physical Laboratory in Manchester, where he worked on various radioactivity problems, gaining his M.Sc. degree in 1913. That same year he was awarded the 1851 Exhibition Scholarship and proceeded to Berlin to work in the Physikalisch Technische Reichsanstalt at Charlottenburg under Professor Hans Geiger.

During World War I, he was interned in the Zivilgefangenenlager, Ruhleben. After the war, in 1919, he returned to England to accept the Wollaston Studentship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and to resume work under Rutherford, who in the meantime had moved to the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Rutherford had succeeded that year in disintegrating atoms by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles, with the emission of a proton. This was the first artificial nuclear transformation. In Cambridge, Chadwick joined Rutherford in accomplishing the transmutation of other light elements by bombardment with alpha particles, and in making studies of the properties and structure of atomic nuclei. He was elected Fellow of Gonville and Caius College (1921-1935) and became Assistant Director of Research in the Cavendish Laboratory (1923). In 1927 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In 1932, Chadwick made a fundamental discovery in the domain of nuc...