What Little I Remember

Otto Robert Frisch

Aug 2019 · Plunkett Lake Press

About this ebook

Otto Robert Frisch took part in some of the most momentous developments in modern physics, notably the discovery of nuclear fission (a term which he coined). His work on the first atom bomb, which he saw explode in the desert “like the light of a thousand suns”, brought him into contact with figures such as Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Richard Feynman and the father of electronic computers, John von Neumann. He also encountered the physicists who had made the great discoveries of recent generations: Einstein, Rutherford and Niels Bohr. This characterful book of reminiscences sheds an engagingly personal light on the people and events behind some of the greatest scientific discoveries of this century, illustrated with a series of fascinating photographs and witty sketches by the author himself.

“This is a happy book, from which the author's personality and his enjoyment of physics, of music, of life, emerges clearly. It is also a portrait of the pre-War world of physics, of days of small numbers and small apparatus, of times when a physicist could think of an ingenious experiment today and set it up tomorrow.” — Rudolf Peierls, Nature

“In writing a charming, light-hearted cameo of his life and times as a scientist, Professor Frisch has revealed more about science than many authors with greater pretensions. This is a book that deserves to be read, and will be enjoyed, by a wide audience.” — The Economist

“Despite his modest title, what Frisch ‘manages to remember’ is quite impressive. He loved to tell stories and his many vignettes of his associates... include nearly every outstanding physicist who worked in nuclear physics.” — Science

“In the straightforward narrative style he developed writing lay treatments of modern physics, Frisch recounts his memories of significant men and events in the history of physics between 1920 and 1960... Frisch tells his stories well...” — Robert W. Seidel,Isis, A Journal of the History of Science Society

About the author

Born in Vienna of Jewish parents, Otto Robert Frisch (1904-1979) studied physics, graduating in 1926, and worked in Berlin, Hamburg and London in the 1920s and 1930s. From 1934 until 1939 he worked in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr. While there, with his auntLise Meitner, he helped explain some puzzling behavior which Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had found when various chemical compounds were bombarded with neutrons. This lead to the discovery of fission and the development of atomic physics, nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In 1939 he went to work in Birmingham, where with his colleague Rudolf Peierls he showed the feasibility of an atomic bomb. From there he went to Los Alamos where he worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons.

On his return to the UK in 1945, Frisch was employed briefly at the then new Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. After a few years there, he was offered the post of Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge University, a position he retained until his death in 1979. In Cambridge, a fellow of Trinity College, he pursued his research interests in the Cavendish Laboratory and helped develop scientific instrumentation. This led to the formation of LaserScan Limited which designed, developed and manufactured a machine for measuring bubble chamber tracks. He also wrote several books on physics and many articles and papers.

Besides working as a physicist and designer of scientific devices, Frisch was a family man, having married in 1951, with a son and daughter. He had a deep love of classical music and was an avid pianist.