Disintegration of lithium by swift protons, p. 649 in Nature, vol. 129, no. 3261, April 30, 1932. SPLITTING THE ATOM: NOBEL PRIZE 1951

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First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of the first announcement of the "splitting of the atom", the first transmutation of an element using artificially accelerated particles, for which Cockcroft and Walton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1951. "[Cockcroft and Walton] provided the nuclear physicists with a new, powerful instrument to obtain controlled disintegration of nuclei" (Mehra & Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 6, p. 792). "The Cockcroft Walton machine was the first atom smasher, later so called by the press" (Brandt, The Harvest of a Century, p. 222). The first to make use of the instrument were Cockcroft and Walton themselves. "1932 saw the announcement of the first apparatus for artificially accelerating atomic particles to high energies: the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. And, barely a month later, beams of high-energy protons produced by this machine were used to initiate the disintegration of lithium nuclei" (Nature Physics Portal). A year after this experiment, the eminent Harvard physicist Kenneth Bainbridge pointed out that it was also the first experimental test of Einstein s mass-energy equivalence E = mc2: "The results of atomic mass measurements in cooperation with disintegration experiments furnish an experimental proof of the equivalence of mass and energy deduced theoretically by Einstein. The best example of this is given by the experiments of Cockcroft and Walton" (quoted in Beller et al, p. 198). "Einstein happened to be visiting Cambridge a few days after the triumph of Cockcroft and Walton. Einstein insisted on seeing the accelerator that had split the atom. Walton spent a morning showing him the apparatus and explaining the details of its operation. Einstein wrote a letter afterwards, expressing 'astonishment and admiration' for what he had seen" (Freeman Dyson, Seeing the unseen, New York Review of Books, February 24, 2005). Large 8vo, pp. cxxxvii-cxl, 629-646, xvi, 647-664, cxli-cxliv. Original printed wrappers (staples rusted). N° de ref. del artículo ABE-1595436092320

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