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Katharine Way, John Wheeler, and the Dawn of Nuclear Fission

Header Image: Katharine Way, undated. Photo courtesy of Physics Today.

I had already encountered her name, but I had not done much investigation: partly because I was focused on Wheeler's activities from the 1950s on, when he reinvented his career as a nuclear physicist and became one of the leaders of the so-called “Renaissance of General Relativity” (with all its astrophysical and cosmological implications). A change in emphasis between the two texts, also due to the different circumstances, is quite obvious: the one for the symposium seems a sober recollection and contextualization, while the other, more recent and semi-popular, resounds with more pathos and has some imprecise detail—quite a natural failure of human memory. As for Wheeler, in the light of his heuristic notes and personal annotations, it becomes clear that his meditations on the “quasi-discovery” of fission were not just a regret that he expressed with some exaggeration toward the end of his life, looking back at the dramatic century he had crossed.

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