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Mark Oliphant
Sign in to saveAlso known as Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant, Marcus 'Mark' Laurence Elwin Oliphant, Mark Laurence Oliphant, Mark L. Oliphant
nuclear physicist, Governor of South Australia (1901–2000)
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1901
- Died
- 2000
- Works
- 6
Top works
- Rutherford
- Rutherford
- Challenge to Australia
- The Atomic age
- Rutherford
via Open Library + Wikidata
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Fiji: an open-source platform for biological-image analysis
· 2012 · cited 65,151x
- STAR: ultrafast universal RNA-seq aligner
· 2012 · cited 49,752x
- Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches
· 1995 · cited 39,637x
- <tt>edgeR</tt>
: a Bioconductor package for differential expression analysis of digital gene expression data
· 2009 · cited 39,069x
- SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python
· 2020 · cited 34,759x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “I, who had been in favour of nuclear energy for generating electricity … I suddenly realised that anybody who has a nuclear reactor can extract the plutonium from the reactor and make nuclear weapons, so that a country which has a nuclear reactor can, at any moment that it wants to, become a nuclear weapons power. And I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of nuclear weapons and very much against their use.”
- “I was a member of a group that was led by Niels Bohr, after the test in Alamogordo, that was very much opposed to the use of this new weapon on civilian cities. … But by and large we were in a minority, but a rather distinguished minority. But the trouble was that this second memorandum to Roosevelt went off to him, but he never read it, he died before he read it. And Truman, of course, was a different kettle of fish.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Key facts
- Born
- Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant , ( 1901-10-08 ) 8 October 1901, Adelaide , South Australia, Australia
- Died
- 14 July 2000 (2000-07-14) (aged 98), Canberra , Australian Capital Territory, Australia
- Education
- University of Adelaide Trinity College, Cambridge
- Known for
- Co-discovery of tritium , helium-3 and nuclear fusion Development of microwave radar
- Awards
- Fellow of the Royal Society (1937) Hughes Medal (1943) Faraday Medal (1948) James Cook Medal (1974) ANZAAS Medal (1979)
- Institutions
- Cavendish Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory University of Birmingham Australian National University
- Thesis
- The Neutralization of Positive Ions at Metal Surfaces, and the Emission of Secondary Electrons (1929)
- Doctoral advisor
- Ernest Rutherford
- Doctoral students
- Ernest William Titterton Alan Howard Ward
- Monarch
- Elizabeth II
- Premier
- Don Dunstan
- Lieutenant governor
- Sir Mellis Napier (1971–1973) Sir Walter Crocker (1973–1976)
- Preceded by
- Sir James Harrison
- Succeeded by
- Sir Douglas Nicholls
- Party
- Australia Party (until 1977), Australian Democrats (from 1977)
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Image
- Sir Mark Oliphant.jpg
Show 3 more facts
- date of birth
- 1901-10-08
- date of death
- 2000-07-14
- Commons category
- Mark Oliphant
Sources (11)
via Wikidata · CC0
~37 min read
Article
Sir Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant (8 October 1901 – 14 July 2000) was an Australian physicist and humanitarian who played an important role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and in the development of nuclear weapons.
Born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia, Oliphant graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1922. He was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1927 on the strength of the research he had done on mercury, and went to England where he studied under Sir Ernest Rutherford at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. There, he discovered the respective nuclei of helium-3 (helions) and of tritium (tritons). He also discovered that when they reacted with each other, the particles that were released had far more energy than they started with. Energy had been liberated from inside the nucleus, and he realised that this was a result of nuclear fusion.