Rudolf Peierls

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Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, (; German: [ˈpaɪɐls]; 5 June 1907 – 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs". Peierls studied physics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München under Arnold Sommerfeld, Leipzig University under Werner Heisenberg, and ETH Zurich under Wolfgang Pauli. After receiving his DPhil from Leipzig University in 1929, he became an assistant to Pauli at ETH Zurich. In 1932, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, which he used to study in Rome under Enrico Fermi, and then at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge under Ralph H. Fowler. Because of his Jewish background, he elected to not return home...

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