Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 20, 2014

James Chadwick (1891–1974) was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of the neutron, and who led the British team that worked on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War to produce atomic bombs. He studied under Ernest Rutherford in Manchester and Hans Geiger in Berlin, where he demonstrated that beta radiation produced a continuous spectrum, not discrete lines as had been thought. He later became Rutherford's assistant director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Chadwick's research led to his discovery of the neutron in 1932; he later measured its mass. In 1935 he became a professor at the University of Liverpool, which he made an important centre for the study of nuclear physics. During the Second World War, Chadwick carried out research as part of the Tube Alloys project to build an atomic bomb, and wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atomic bomb research efforts. He later served as the British scientific advisor to the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission and as Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. (Full article...)