chambers_search-1

Search Chambers

Consult Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, The Chambers Thesaurus (1996) or Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1997 edition with amendments). Enter your search and choose your title from the drop-down menu.

Chadwick, Sir James 1891-1974
English physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born near Macclesfield, Cheshire, he studied at the universities of Manchester, Berlin and Cambridge, and worked on radioactivity with Ernest Rutherford. In 1932 he repeated the experiment previously performed by Walther Bothe and Irčne and Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie in which a neutral penetrating radiation was released from the bombardment of beryllium by alpha particles. He suggested that the radiation was due to a neutral particle whose mass was close to that of the proton. He named the particle the neutron and was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize for physics for this discovery. He built Great Britain's first cyclotron in 1935 at Liverpool University and during World War II worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb in the USA. He was elected FRS in 1927 and knighted in 1945.