Emilio Segr

Vocation

Lifestyle

Notable

Italian born, American physicist. In 1937 he discovered technetium, the first man-made element. In 1938 Segrè was fired from his position as Administrator of the Physics Laboratory at the University of Palermo because Mussolini had deemed that Jewish scientists should not be allowed to hold such posts. He then came to America, where he was a group leader in the Manhattan Project. In 1944 he made the crucial discovery that plutonium made in a nuclear reactor has higher levels of the isotope plutonium-240 than plutonium produced in a cyclotron. He is best known for his 21 September 1955 discovery with Owen Chamberlain of the antiproton, the unstable negatively charged proton that exists as the antiparticle of a proton. This helped to support Paul Dirac's theory or antimatter, and earned the Chamberlain and Segrè the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1959. He died 22 April 1989, Lafayette, Ca, caused by heart attack. Link to Wikipedia biography