Nuclear Structure Quotes

One of the principal achievements of physics in the 20th century has been the revelation that the atom is not indivisible or elementary at all but has a complex structure.

Investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task.

The strongest interactions are the nuclear interactions, which include the forces that bind nuclei together and the interaction between the nuclei and the z mesons. It also includes the interactions that give rise to the observed strange-particle production.

I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.

The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.

Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron.

Direction coupling between the various radiations generated in a nuclear reaction both with one another and with the initiating radiation can also be detected and measured by coincidences; this provides valuable information about the structure of the atomic nuclei.

In particular, I established a reasonably accurate energy threshold for permanent displacement of a nucleus from its regular lattice position, substantially smaller than had been previously presumed.

The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.

The research included neutron resonance spectroscopy, the angular distribution of pion elastic and inelastic scattering on nuclei with optical model fitting.

The Maria Mayer shell model suggestion in 1949 was a great triumph and fitted my belief that a nuclear shell model should represent a proper approach to understanding nuclear structure.

Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist.

For her PhD, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a theoretical physicist, came up with the idea of multi-photon physics. That means an atom absorbs two or more photons simultaneously.

Unless the structure of the nucleus has a surprise in store for us, the conclusion seems plain — there is nothing in the whole system of laws of physics that cannot be deduced unambiguously from epistemological considerations.

From the results so far obtained it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the long-range atoms arising from collision of alpha particles with nitrogen are not nitrogen atoms but probably atoms of hydrogen, or atoms of mass 2. If this be the case, we must conclude that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated under the intense forces developed in a close collision with a swift alpha particle, and that the hydrogen atom which is liberated formed a constituent part of the nitrogen nucleus.