Physicist — Otto Robert Frisch (Vienna, 1904 – Cambridge, 1979) was an Austrian-British physicist, among the protagonists of the discovery of nuclear fission. From a Jewish family, he left Germany and then Austria with the rise of Nazism, working at Copenhagen with Niels Bohr and finally in Britain. At Christmas 1938, together with his aunt Lise Meitner, he theoretically interpreted the experimental results of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, realising that the uranium nucleus was splitting in two and releasing enormous amounts of energy: it was he who coined the term “fission”. With Rudolf Peierls he wrote a 1940 memorandum demonstrating the feasibility of an atomic bomb with a surprisingly small critical mass of uranium, giving impetus to the Allied atomic project. He then took part in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and after the war was a lecturer at Cambridge.
Fun fact
Frisch and Lise Meitner worked out the mechanism of fission during a walk in the snowy woods: they estimated the energy released using Einstein’s famous and, by analogy with the division of biological cells, called the phenomenon “fission”.
Theories and contributions
- Interpretation of nuclear fission — Explanation (with Lise Meitner) of the splitting of the uranium nucleus into fragments with the release of energy according to ; coined the term “fission”.
- Frisch-Peierls memorandum — First calculation (1940) of the critical mass of uranium-235, which demonstrated the practical feasibility of a fission bomb.
Present in chapters
Linked atoms
1 linked atom.