Walther Bothe

Walther Bothe was a German experimental physicist who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics with Max Born for the coincidence method and the discoveries he made with it. Born in 1891, he served in the First World War, spent years as a prisoner of war in Russia, and on his return worked at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt under Hans Geiger, where he published the coincidence method in 1924. He became professor at Giessen and then director of the Physical and Radiological Institute at Heidelberg and later of the Institute for Physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research. In the German Uranverein, the wartime nuclear-energy project, he and his staff measured atomic constants, the energy distribution of fission fragments and nuclear cross sections; his erroneous value for neutron absorption in graphite was central to the German decision to favour heavy water as a moderator. He died in 1957. He is included here for that reactor-physics episode.