“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear power will ever be obtainable,” Albert Einstein declared in 1930, thereby disregarding the chain reaction that he had started in the first place.

“If we were able to control the degree of decay of radioactive elements, we could obtain enormous amounts of energy from small portions of material,” the physicist Ernest Rutherford noted in 1904. A year later, Albert Einstein’s famous equation E = mc² confirmed this observation. His algorithm proving that mass is energy made him world famous. However, the author of the equation didn’t really believe that it would be useful in day-to-day life. Splitting an atom joined by a negatively-charged electron and a positively-charged proton seemed impracticable to him.

Meanwhile, in 1920 Rutherford announced the hypothesis that an atom is made up of not only an electron and a proton, but its nucleus has one more elementary particle: a neutron. His words caused quite a stir. If the atom’s nucleus was not homogeneous, perhaps it was possible to split it. Rutherford’s assistant, James Chadwick, who was present at the lecture, had doubts about the hypothesis of his boss. Finally though, Chadwick figured that if the neutron exists, he would ‘hunt it down’.

The hunt