Rudolf Peierls

Born on 5 June 1907 in Berlin, Rudolf Peierls was a nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the construction of the atomic bomb. After attending math and physics courses at the Universities of Berlin and Munich, Peierls completed his doctorate at the University of Leipzig in 1929. Over the next eight years, Peierls worked at some of the most important universities in Europe, including ETH Zürich in Switzerland. When Adolf Hitler rose to power, Peierls settled in England, where he accepted a position in 1937 as professor of applied mathematics at the University of Birmingham. In 1940 he and Otto Frisch coauthored the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, in which they theorized the production of a fission bomb with relatively small amounts of uranium that could potentially win World War II. They also expressed moral concerns about the possible scale of destruction from such a weapon. Initially prevented from working on the atomic bomb project because of his German background, Peierls eventually joined the Manhattan Project, first in New York and then in Los Alamos, New Mexico. After the war, he returned to Birmingham, where he would work for the next two decades. There he investigated such topics as nuclear forces and scattering, quantum field theories, collective motion in nuclei, transport theory, and statistical mechanics. In 1963 Peierls accepted the Wykeham Professorship of Physics at Oxford University, where he would remain until he retired in 1974. A fierce advocate of nuclear disarmament during the Cold War, he chaired the Pugwash organization from 1970 to 1974. He received many honors and awards, including being made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and receiving its Copley Medal in 1986. Peierls died in 1995 at age 88. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 5 June 1907