Jacksonian Professorship at Cambridge : Dr. O. R. Frisch, O.B.E

Abstract

DR. O. R. FRISCH has been appointed to the Jacksonian professorship of natural philosophy in the University of Cambridge in succession to Dr. J. D. Cockcroft. Dr. Frisch was born in 1904 in Vienna and was educated at the University of Vienna during 1922-26. He worked on photometry and interferometry at the Physikalisch Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin between 1927 and 1930. He then took up work with Prof. Otto Stern on experiments with molecular beams. With Stern he determined by this method the magnetic moment of the proton and studied the diffraction of helium atomic beams by crystal faces. During 1933-34 he worked for a year with Prof. P. M. S. Blackett, and, then for five years with Prof. Niels Bohr at Copenhagen. With L. Meitner he was the first to demonstrate by experiment in an ion chamber the physical nature of nuclear fission. He went to Birmingham in 1939. In the spring of 1940, with Prof. R. E. Peierls, he worked out the possibility of producing an atomic bomb by the fission of U235, and thereafter worked on this project for the British Government. In 1943 he proceeded to Los Alamos as part of the British team working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Project, and carried out important experimental work on the atomic bomb. For this work he was awarded the O.B.E. in 1946 and the Medal of Freedom with Bronze Palm (U.S.) in May 1947. Dr. Frisch has been deputy chief scientific officer in charge of nuclear physics at Harwell since 1946. By his election to the Jacksonian professorship, the Cambridge school of nuclear physics is assured of distinguished leadership.