Nuclear Fission & Fusion

Leo Szilard (1898–1964) was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor whose visionary ideas launched the atomic age. He helped achieve the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in 194...

Glenn Theodore Seaborg was a trailblazing nuclear chemist who forever altered our understanding of the elements and ushered in the atomic era. Best known as the discoverer of ten transuranium elements...

Pioneer of the Nuclear Frontier In a modest laboratory at Berkeley in 1954, Emilio Segrè is already immersed in the atomic age. Born to well-to-do parents near Rome, he initially studied engineering b...

Master of Symmetry and Nuclear Power Eugene Wigner was a prodigious Hungarian-born physicist who became a towering figure in both quantum theory and nuclear technology. A child prodigy, he earned his ...

Sir George Paget Thomson was born into the very heart of British science – the son of Sir J. J. Thomson, the Cavendish Professor who discovered the electron. Following in his father’s footsteps, the y...

Lyman Spitzer Jr.: Pioneer of the Stars and Fusion Lyman Spitzer Jr. was born in 1914 in Ohio and from a young age combined classical scholarship with cosmic curiosity. He excelled at Yale University ...

Enrico Fermi in the mid-1940s, around the time he helped create the world’s first nuclear reactor. Fermi’s innovations in nuclear science earned him nicknames like “architect of the nuclear age.” Enri...