Rudolph
Peierls,
the son of a Jewish businessman, was born
in Berlin, Germany, on 5th June, 1907. He studied nuclear physics
under Werner Heisenberg and in 1929
he conceived the theory of positive carriers to explain the thermal
and electrical conductiveness of semi-conductors.
When
Adolf Hitler gained power he moved to
England where he found work teaching physics at Birmingham
University and in 1939 worked on atomic research with James
Chadwick and Otto Frisch. In 1940
Peierls and Frisch wrote a paper that explained how a uranium fission
bomb could become a weapon that could win the Second
World War.
In
1943 Peierls
joined the
Manhattan
Project.
In the United States. Over the next two years he worked with Robert
Oppenheimer,
Edward Teller, Otto
Frisch,
Felix Bloch, Enrico
Fermi, David Bohm, James
Chadwick, James
Franck,
Emilio
Segre,
Eugene Wigner, Leo
Szilard and Klaus Fuchs in developing
the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
After
the war Peierls was professor of physics at Birmingham
University
(1945-63) and Oxford University (1963-74).
He wrote several books including The Laws
of Nature (1955), Surprises
in Theoretical Physics (1979) and an autobiography, Bird
of Passage (1985). Rudolph
Peierls
died in Oxford on 19th September, 1995.
