Career
Booth joined the Columbia University faculty as a lecturer. He also helped professor John R. Dunning with his cyclotron construction and research. Thus began Booth’s lengthy professional collaboration with Dunning.
In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. In 1944, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Some historians have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission and believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn.
Even before it was published, Meitner’s and Frisch’s interpretation of the work of Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Niels Bohr, who was to lecture at Princeton University. Isidor Isaac Rabi and Willis Lamb, two Columbia University physicists working at Princeton, heard the news and carried it back to Columbia. Rabi said he told Fermi; Fermi gave credit to Lamb. It was soon clear to a number of scientists at Columbia that they should try to detect the energy released in the nuclear fission of uranium from neutron bombardment. On 25 January 1939, Booth was a member of the experimental team at Columbia University which conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States, which was done in the basement of Pupin Hall; the other members of the team were Herbert L. Anderson, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, G. Norris Glasoe, and Francis G. Slack.
During World War II, Booth was a member of Columbia’s scientific staff in the Division of War Research. During the Manhattan Project, Dunning conducted pioneering work at Columbia University on gaseous diffusion to separate uranium isotopes; others working on the project included Booth, Henry A. Boorse, Willard F. Libby, Alfred O. C. Nier, and Francis G. Slack.
After World War II, Booth was director of the project for the design, construction, and operation of a 385-MeV Synchrocyclotron at the Nevis Laboratories in Irvington-on-the-Hudson. The project was a collaborative effort of Columbia University, the United States Atomic Energy Commission, and the Office of Naval Research.
Booth was the scientific director of the SCALANT Research Center, in Italy.
Booth was dean of graduate studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)