Peierls, Sir Rudolf Ernst

▪ 1996

      German-born British physicist (b. June 5, 1907, Berlin, Germany—d. Sept. 19, 1995, Oxford, England), laid the theoretical foundations for the creation of the first atomic bomb. In 1940 he and Otto Frisch, a colleague at the University of Birmingham, England, issued a three-page memorandum that correctly theorized that a highly explosive but compact bomb could be fashioned out of small amounts of the rare element uranium-235. This memo ignited the race to develop the bomb in Britain and the United States, advancing it from an issue of academic speculation to an Allied war project of the highest priority. Peierls studied and conducted research at universities in Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig, Germany; Zurich, Switz.; and Manchester and Cambridge, England, before becoming a professor of mathematical physics at Birmingham in 1937. His early work in quantum theory led to studies in nuclear physics. Despite the fact that it was his research that gave rise to the British bomb effort, he was initially excluded from official proceedings because of his German origins. In 1943 his British atomic research group joined the Manhattan Project in the United States. After the war he reassumed his professorship at Birmingham, working there until 1963, when he joined the University of Oxford. He retired from Oxford in 1974 and taught for three years at the University of Washington. Among his books are The Laws of Nature (1955), Surprises in Theoretical Physics (1979), and More Surprises in Theoretical Physics (1991); he also wrote on nuclear disarmament for the Pugwash Conference. He became a British citizen in 1940 and was knighted in 1968. His autobiography, Bird of Passage, was published in 1985.

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