Otto Robert Frisch

Otto Robert Frisch (born October 1, 1904, Vienna, Austria—died September 22, 1979, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England) was a physicist who, with his aunt Lise Meitner, described the division of neutron-bombarded uranium into lighter elements and named the process fission (1939). At the time, Meitner was working in Stockholm and Frisch at Copenhagen under Niels Bohr, who brought their observation to the attention of Albert Einstein and others in the United States. (Inspired by the similarity of the division of uranium to cell division, Frisch elicited the term fission from American biophysicist William Arnold.)

After receiving a doctorate at Vienna (1926), Frisch, with Otto Stern and Immanuel Estermann, measured the magnetic moment of the proton (1933). In 1940 he and Rudolf Ernst Peierls, a colleague at the University of Birmingham, England, issued a three-page memorandum that correctly theorized that a highly explosive but compact bomb could be fashioned out of small amounts of the rare isotope uranium-235. This memo ignited the race to develop the atomic bomb in Britain and the United States, advancing it from an issue of academic speculation to an Allied war project of the highest priority.

During World War II Frisch was engaged in atomic research at Los Alamos, New Mexico. From 1947 he taught at Cambridge and directed the nuclear physics department of the Cavendish Laboratory. His books included Atomic Physics Today (1961).

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