Leading Up To World War II
He was studying on a Rockefeller Scholarship at Cambridge University when Adolf Hitler came to power in his native Germany. Granted leave to remain in Britain, he worked in Manchester under a fund set up for refugees, with Hans Bethe on photodisintegration and the statistical mechanics of alloys when asked by James Chadwick. Their results still serve as the basis for mean-field theories of structural phase changes in complete alloys. Moving back to Cambridge, he worked with P. G. L. Kapur at the Mond Laboratory on superconductivity and liquid helium. The group derived the dispersion formula for nuclear reactions originally given in perturbation theory by Gregory Breit and Eugene Wigner, but now included generalizing conditions. This is now known as the Kapur–Peierls derivation. In 1937, he became Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Birmingham.
Read more about this topic: Rudolf Peierls
Famous quotes containing the words leading, world and/or war:
“There are people who are so presumptuous that they know no other way to praise a greatness that they publicly admire than by representing it as a preliminary stage and bridge leading to themselves.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The world ‘s a bubble, and the life of man
Less then a span:
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“This is not only a war of soldiers in uniform. It is a war of the people, of all the people, and it must be fought not only on the battlefield but in the cities and the villages, in the factories and on the farms, in the home and in the heart of every man, woman and child who loves freedom.”
—Arthur Wimperis (1874–1953)