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James Chadwick
British physicist

James Chadwick

British physicist
Alternative Title: Sir James Chadwick

James Chadwick, in full Sir James Chadwick, (born October 20, 1891, Manchester, England—died July 24, 1974, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), English physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935 for the discovery of the neutron.

Chadwick was educated at the University of Manchester, where he worked under Ernest Rutherford and earned a master’s degree in 1913. He then studied under Hans Geiger at the Technische Hochschule, Berlin. When World War I broke out, he was imprisoned in a camp for civilians at Ruhleben. He spent the entire war there but nevertheless was able to accomplish some scientific work. After the war ended, Chadwick returned to England to study under Rutherford at the University of Cambridge. He received a doctorate in 1921, and in 1923 he was appointed assistant director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. There he and Rutherford studied the transmutation of elements by bombarding them with alpha particles and investigated the nature of the atomic nucleus, identifying the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, as a constituent of the nuclei of other atoms.

In 1932 Chadwick observed that beryllium, when exposed to bombardment by alpha particles, released an unknown radiation that in turn ejected protons from the nuclei of various substances. Chadwick interpreted that radiation as being composed of particles of mass approximately equal to that of the proton but without electrical charge—neutrons. That discovery provided a new tool for inducing atomic disintegration, since neutrons, being electrically uncharged, could penetrate undeflected into the atomic nucleus.

In 1935 Chadwick was appointed to a chair in physics at the University of Liverpool. In 1940 he was part of the MAUD Committee, which was to assess the feasibility of the atomic bomb. The committee concluded in 1941 that the 1940 memorandum of Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls was correct and that a critical mass of only about 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of uranium-235 was needed. Chadwick later said he realized “that a nuclear bomb was not only possible, it was inevitable. I had then to take sleeping pills. It was the only remedy.” The MAUD Committee’s results were influential in giving an impetus to the American atomic bomb program. He became head of the British delegation to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, U.S., in 1943 and formed a close rapport with its head, Gen. Leslie Groves.


Chadwick was knighted in 1945. He returned to Britain in 1946 and became the British scientific adivser to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. He became master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1946, and he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1950. He retired in 1958.

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