Early life Nicholas was born to Nicholas P. Kemmer and Barbara Stutzer in
Saint Petersburg. His family moved to Germany in 1922, where he was educated at Bismarckschule
Hanover and then at the
University of Göttingen. He received his doctorate in nuclear physics at the
University of Zurich and worked as an assistant to
Wolfgang Pauli, who had to give strong arguments in 1936, before being allowed to employ a non-Swiss national. Later on, Kemmer moved to the Beit Fellowship at
Imperial College London.
British nuclear development Kemmer moved to
Trinity College, Cambridge in 1940 to work on
Tube Alloys, the wartime atomic energy project. In 1940, when
Egon Bretscher and
Norman Feather showed that a slow neutron reactor fuelled with uranium would in theory produce substantial amounts of
plutonium-239 as a by-product, Kemmer (who was lodging at the Bretschers') proposed the names
Neptunium for the new element 93 and
Plutonium for 94 by analogy with the outer planets Neptune and Pluto beyond Uranus (uranium being element 92). The Americans
Edwin M. McMillan and
Philip Abelson at the
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, who had made the same discovery, fortuitously suggested the same names.
Professorship Kemmer spent 1944–1946 in Canada. In 1953 he became the third Tait Professor of
Mathematical Physics at the
University of Edinburgh, succeeding the retiring
Max Born. He founded the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics in 1955 and taught at Edinburgh until 1979. He was elected as a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1954. His proposers were
Norman Feather,
Max Born, Sir
Edmund Whittaker and
Alexander Aitken. He served as the Society's Vice-President from 1971 to 1974. Kemmer was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society in 1956 Nicholas Kemmer was also a mentor and a teacher of the only Pakistani Nobel laureate, Dr. Abdus Salam. Kemmer is credited to trained and work with Salam in
Neutron scattering by using relativity equations. == Work and legacy ==