In the second year of his National Research Council Fellowship, Bacher moved across the country to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work with John C. Slater, who had taught Bacher at Harvard. While there, Slater asked him to conduct a seminar on John Chadwick 's recent discovery of the neutron. Reading Chadwick's paper, he realized that anomalies in then-current theory would be resolved if the spin of the neutron was 1 ⁄ 2. This became the subject of a letter he submitted to the Physical Review with visiting scholar Edward Condon. A year later, Bacher became the first to suggest the neutron had a magnetic moment equal to about minus one nuclear magneton, based on the unusually small magnetic moment of nitrogen determined from its hyperfine structure.