Nuclear physics

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history of astronomy

Hubble Space Telescope, photographed by the space shuttle Discovery.
...the proton-proton reaction, in which four atoms of hydrogen are combined to produce one atom of helium, with the mass difference released in the form of energy. Because of the primitive state of nuclear physics at the time, he could not say in detail how this might occur, but he pointed to the mere existence of helium in the stars as the surest proof that such a process must exist. Nuclear...

mass spectrometry

...energies of nuclear reactions then being observed through the mass-energy relation that had been given two decades earlier by the special theory of relativity. Since that time mass spectroscopy and nuclear physics have combined to determine isotopic masses to a high degree of accuracy. The mass unit now used is defined so that the mass of the carbon-12 isotope is exactly 12 atomic mass units...
The particle accelerators used in nuclear physics can be viewed as mass spectrometers of rather distorted forms, but the three principal elements—the ion source, analyzer, and detector—are always present. L.W. Alvarez and Robert Cornog of the United States first used an accelerator as a mass spectrometer in 1939 when they employed a cyclotron to demonstrate that helium-3...

physical principles

This branch of physics deals with the structure of the atomic nucleus and the radiation from unstable nuclei. About 10,000 times smaller than the atom, the constituent particles of the nucleus, protons and neutrons, attract one another so strongly by the nuclear forces that nuclear energies are approximately 1,000,000 times larger than typical atomic energies. Quantum theory is needed for...

work of


Niels Bohr.
In the early 1930s Bohr found use once more for his fund-raising abilities and his vision of a fruitful combination of theory and experiment. He realized early that the research front in theoretical physics was moving from the study of the atom as a whole to the study of its nucleus. Bohr turned to the Rockefeller Foundation, whose “experimental biology” program was designed to...


Ernest Rutherford.
...greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867). Rutherford was the central figure in the study of radioactivity, and with his concept of the nuclear atom he led the exploration of nuclear physics. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908, was president of the Royal Society (1925–30) and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1923), was conferred the...
nuclear physics
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