Oliphant, Mark

Tritium was discovered by British scientists Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), Mark Laurence Oliphant (1901-2000) and Paul Harteck (1902-1985) in 1934. It forms in the upper atmosphere under the action of protons and neutrons on atoms nuclei. For instance, at a coUlsion with nitrogen we have... 

That Wednesday Kapitza wined and dined the exhausted Chadwick into what Mark Oliphant calls a very mellow mood, then brought him along to a Kapitza Club meeting. The intense excitement of all in the Cavendish, including Rutherford, Oliphant remembers, was already remarkable, for we had heard rumors of Chadwick s results. Oliphant says Chadwick spoke lucidly and with conviction, not failing to mention the contributions of Bothe, Becker, Webster and the Joliot-Curies, a lesson to us all. C. P. Snow, who was also present, remembers the performance as one of the shortest accounts ever made about a major discovery. When tall and birdlike Chadwick finished speaking he looked over the assembly and announced abruptly, Now I want to be chloroformed and put to bed for a fortnight. ... 

Mark Oliphant directed the physics department at the University of Birmingham. Rather than initiate some complicated sponsorship he simply invited Frisch to visit him that summer to talk over the problem. So I packed two small suitcases and traveled by ship and train, just like any tourist. The war overtook him safe in the English Midlands but with nothing more of his possessions on hand than the contents of his two small suitcases. His friends in Copenhagen had to store his belongings and arrange the repossession of the piano he was buying. 

Look, shouldn t somebody know about that Frisch then asked Peierls. They hastened their calculations to Mark Oliphant. They convinced me, Ohphant testifies. He told them to write it all down. 

I have often been asked, Otto Frisch wrote many years afterward of the moment when he understood that a bomb might be possible after all, before he and Peierls carried the news to Mark Oliphant, why I didn t abandon the project there and then, saying nothing to anybody. Why start on a project which, if it was successful, would end with the production of a weapon of unparalleled violence, a weapon of mass destruction such as the world had never seen The answer was very simple. We were at war, and the idea was reasonably obvious very probably some German scientists had had the same idea and were working on it. ... 

What I should like, Henry Tizard wrote Mark Oliphant after he had studied the Frisch-Peierls memoranda, would be to have quite a small committee to sit soon to advise what ought to be done, who should do it, and where it should be done, and I suggest that you, Thomson, and say Blackett, would form a sufficient nucleus for such a committee. Thomson was G. P. Thomson, J.J. s son, the Imperial College physicist who had ordered up a ton of uranium oxide the previous year to study and felt ashamed at the absurdity. He had concluded after neutron-bombardment experiments that a chain reaction in natural luranium was unlikely and a war project therefore impractical. Tizard, who had been skeptical to begin with and had taken Thomson s conclusions as support for his skepticism, appointed Thomson chairman of the small committee James Chadwick, now at Liverpool, his assistant P. B. Moon and Rutherford prot g John... 

The surge of national emotion sustained Mark Oliphant as well, and in that mood he found even less patience than usual for obstructive rules. When P. B. Moon questioned the assumption that gaseous thermal difiusion was the method of choice for isotope separation, he won no encouragement from the Thomson committee, but back in Birmingham Oliphant simply told him to go ahead and talk it over with Peierls. Within a week or two, writes Moon, Peierls identified ordinary difiusion as a logically superior process and wrote directly to Thomson on the matter. Peierls proposed that the Thomson committee consult with Simon, the best man around. The committee hesitated, even though Simon was a naturalized citizen. Oliphant then authorized Peierls out of hand to visit Simon at Oxford. 

Szilard presented his ideas to the group on Friday. He emphasized that the bombs would get bigger, bypassing secrecy by quoting a public statement of Mark Oliphant s to the effect that weapons corresponding to one million and to ten million tons of TNT. .. are entirely possible. Of Szilard s talk Lilienthal noted ... 

Australian Mark Oliphant visited the United States in 1941 and helped goad the American atomic-bomb program to commitment. 

Mark LE Oliphant and Lord Penney (1968). John Douglas Cockcroft. 1897-1967 , Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 14, 139-188. 

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