When World War I broke out, Chadwick was imprisoned as an enemy alien and confined to a Berlin stable. In 1913 Chadwick earned his Master in Science degree and a scholarship to work in Berlin with Hans Geiger (1882-1945), creator of the radiation counter.

He graduated from the Honours School of Physics in 1911 and spent the next two years at Manchester working with Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize for his theoretical work on the radioactive transformation of atoms. Chadwick, who had intended to be a mathematician, was too shy to seek out the proper line. While enrolling at the University of Manchester, Chadwick accidentallyįound himself in the line for those hoping to major in physics. James Chadwick, the son of John Joseph Chadwick and Anne Mary Knowles, was born in Cheshire, an English mill town, and later moved with his family to Manchester. Using the neutron as a tool for investigating the atom, physicists were able to create a wide variety of new radioisotopes, split atoms and molecules, and initiate the nuclear chain reactions that led to the atomic bomb. The English physicist James Chadwick is primarily remembered for his discovery of the neutron, which other physicists referred to as the historical beginning of nuclear physics.

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