Eugene T. Booth

Eugene Theodore Booth, Jr. (28 September 1912 – 6 March 2004) was an American nuclear physicist. He was a member of the historic Columbia University team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States. During the Manhattan Project, he worked on gaseous diffusion for isotope separation. He was the director of the design, construction, and operation project for the 385-Mev synchrocyclotron at the Nevis Laboratories, the scientific director of the SCALANT Research Center, and dean of graduate studies at Stevens Institute of Technology.Booth was the scientific director of the SCALANT Research Center, in Italy.

He was born on 28 September 1912 in Rome, Georgia to Reverend Eugene Theodore Booth, Sr. and Lucy Cornelia Gibson.

Booth studied physics at the University of Georgia, where he received his Bachelor of Science (1932), Master of Science (1934), and Doctor of Philosophy (1937) degrees. In 1934, he was a Rhodes Scholar.

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.

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