Mark Oliphant
Sir Marcus 'Mark' Laurence Elwin Oliphant (October 8, 1901 – July 14, 2000) was an Australian physicist and humanitarian who played a fundamental role in the development of the Atomic bomb.
Oliphant's contribution to this work was his discovery of helium 3 and tritium. He was also the first to discover heavy hydrogen nuclei could be made to react with each other. This fusion reaction is the basis of a hydrogen bomb. Ten years later American scientist Edward Teller would press to use Oliphant's discovery in order to build one. However, Oliphant did not forsee this:
...we had no idea whatever that this would one day be applied to make hydrogen bombs. Our curiosity was just curiosity about the structure of the nucleus of the atom, and the discovery of these reactions was purely, as the Americans would put it, coincidental.
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