Patrick Blackett

Patrick Blackett proved in 1925 that radioactivity could transmute one element into another—the first direct evidence of nuclear transformation. During World War II he turned his precision to strategy, helping develop operational research for the Allies. The 1948 Nobel Prize in Physics followed. But the bomb's aftermath pulled him into politics: he spoke out for restraints on atomic weapons, championed Third World development, and advised Labour on science policy through the 1950s and '60s. By his death in 1974, the Times called him the "Radical Nobel-Prize Winning Physicist"—a measure of how…