Lew Kowarski (10 February 1907,

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

– 30 July 1979,

Geneva Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Situa ...

) was a

naturalized Naturalization (or naturalisation) is the legal act or process by which a non-citizen of a country may acquire citizenship or nationality of that country. It may be done automatically by a statute, i.e., without any effort on the part of the in ...

French

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

. He was a lesser-known but important contributor to nuclear science.

Early life

Lew Kowarski was born in Saint Petersburg to Nicholas Kowarski, a businessman and the Ukrainian singer Olga Vlassenko. Following the

Bolshevik Revolution The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key mom ...

, when Lew was 12 years old, his family fled west under adventurous circumstances and settled in

Vilnius Vilnius ( , ; see also other names) is the capital and largest city of Lithuania, with a population of 592,389 (according to the state register) or 625,107 (according to the municipality of Vilnius). The population of Vilnius's functional urba ...

(then in Poland). During his youth, Lew was a talented musician and considered a music career; however, his fingers grew too large for the keyboard.

Education

He received a Chemical Engineering degree from the University of

Lyon Lyon,, ; Occitan: ''Lion'', hist. ''Lionés'' also spelled in English as Lyons, is the third-largest city and second-largest metropolitan area of France. It is located at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Saône, to the northwest of ...

and an Sc.B. and Ph.D. from the University of Paris where he carried out research on

neutron The neutron is a subatomic particle, symbol or , which has a neutral (not positive or negative) charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. Protons and neutrons constitute the atomic nucleus, nuclei of atoms. Since protons and ...

counting.

Research during World War II

He joined

Frédéric Joliot-Curie Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie (; ; 19 March 1900 – 14 August 1958) was a French physicist and husband of Irène Joliot-Curie, with whom he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of Induced radioactivity. T ...

's group in 1934, where Hans von Halban came in 1937. They established in 1939 the possibility of

nuclear chain reaction In nuclear physics, a nuclear chain reaction occurs when one single nuclear reaction causes an average of one or more subsequent nuclear reactions, thus leading to the possibility of a self-propagating series of these reactions. The specific nu ...

s and nuclear energy production. While doing their research, the events of World War II forced them to eventually move to England, bringing with them the world's entire stock of heavy water, given on loan by Norway to France so that it would not fall into German hands. They continued their research at the

Cavendish Laboratory The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

for the

MAUD Committee The MAUD Committee was a British scientific working group formed during the Second World War. It was established to perform the research required to determine if an atomic bomb was feasible. The name MAUD came from a strange line in a telegram fro ...

, part of the wartime

Tube Alloys Tube Alloys was the research and development programme authorised by the United Kingdom, with participation from Canada, to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War. Starting before the Manhattan Project in the United States, the ...

project. Just before the invasions, the records and papers of Frédéric Joliot, Hans von Halban and Lew Kowarski were smuggled out of France, and eventually to England. Included in this operation were 26 drums of heavy water, the world’s entire stock at the time. Some of the papers written by Halban and Kowarski were deposited at the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

in the UK, where they were sealed with a note from

James Chadwick Sir James Chadwick, (20 October 1891 – 24 July 1974) was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspi ...

, dated December 18, 1941, that said, “The paper is such that it would be inadvisable to publish it at the present time.” The papers described the outline of a design for a nuclear

fission reactor A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from ...

. Kowarski then worked in the Montreal Laboratory in Canada, but only after Halban had been replaced as Director by John Cockcroft, as he did not want to work under Halban. He supervised the construction of Canada's first nuclear reactor (

ZEEP The ZEEP (Zero Energy Experimental Pile) reactor was a nuclear reactor built at the Chalk River Laboratories near Chalk River, Ontario, Canada (which superseded the Montreal Laboratory for nuclear research in Canada). ZEEP first went critical ...

) at the

Chalk River Laboratories Chalk River Laboratories (french: Laboratoires de Chalk River; also known as CRL, Chalk River Labs and formerly Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, CRNL) is a Canadian nuclear research facility in Deep River, about north-west of Ottawa. CRL is ...

in 1945.

Post war research

He came back to France to supervise the first two French reactors in 1948 and 1952. A staff member of

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...

(Geneva) since participating in its formation in 1953, he was a Decorated Officer Legion of Honor, Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, and a recipient of citation and prize from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. After his retirement in 1972, he was a University Professor at

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original cam ...

, focusing on the interaction between Science and Mankind.

Recently discovered documents

In 1940,

forwarded the work of two French scientists, Hans von Halban and Kowarski, who worked in Cambridge, to the

. He asked that the papers be held, as they were not appropriate for publication during the war. In 2007, the Society discovered the documents during an audit of their archives.BBC Article about discovered documents
/ref> The documents describe how to control the chain reaction, describe the components of a

nuclear reactor A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat fr ...

, and describe how to produce

plutonium Plutonium is a radioactive chemical element with the symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exh ...

References

External links

1965 Audio Interview with Lew Kowarski by Stephane Groueff
Voices of the Manhattan Project
Annotated Bibliography for Lew Kowarski from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

Lew Kowarski papers, 1907-1981 Oral history interview with Lew Kowarski, 1969-1971 Oral history interview with Lew Kowarski, 1974
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kowarski, Lew 1907 births 1979 deaths People from Vilnius Russian Jews Polish emigrants to France French people of Russian-Jewish descent People associated with CERN Manhattan Project people Jewish physicists French physicists People associated with the nuclear weapons programme of the United Kingdom Officiers of the Légion d'honneur