Unravelling the Mystery of the Atomic Nucleus, 2013 A Sixty Year Journey 1896 — 1956

Unravelling the Mystery of the Atomic Nucleus is a history of atomic and nuclear physics. It begins in 1896 with the discovery of radioactivity, which leads to the discovery of the nucleus at the center of the atom. It follows the experimental discoveries and the theoretical developments up to the end of the Fifties.

Unlike previous books regarding on history of nuclear physics, this book methodically describes how advances in technology enabled physicists to probe the physical properties of nuclei as well as how the physical laws which govern these microscopic systems were progressively discovered. The reader will gain a clear understanding of how theory is inextricably intertwined with the progress of technology.

Unravelling the Mystery of the Atomic Nucleus will be of interest to physicists and to historians of physics, as well as those interested development of science.

Bernard Fernandez, a graduate from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, is a physicist from Saclay, France, a laboratory of the French Atomic Energy Commission.  He performed experiments on nuclear structure using the Van de Graaff Tandem accelerator and later on the GANIL heavy ion accelerator located in Caen. From 1965 to 1967 he spent two years in the University of Washington in Seattle and in 1976-1977 a year at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.  In 2008 the French edition of this book was awarded the Médaille Marc-Auguste Pictet by the Physics and Natural History Society of Geneva.

Georges Ripka, a physicist from the same laboratory in Saclay, worked on nuclear theory, condensed matter and particle physics. In 1963 he spent a year in the University of Pittsburgh and a further two sabbatical years in the University of Princeton (1967) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978). Since 1999 he has also worked in the European Center for Theoretical Physics in Trento, Italy. He is the author of several books, including Quantum Theory of Finite Systems (co-author with Jean Paul Blaizot), MIT Press, 1986 and Vivre Savant sous le communisme, Editions Belin, 2002. In 1995 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung prize.