I explore the fifty-year development of Mössbauer spectroscopy by focusing on three episodes in its development at Argonne National Laboratory: work by nuclear physicists using radioactive sources in the early 1960s, work by solid-state physicists using radioactive resources from the mid- 1960s through the 1970s,and work by solid-state physicists using the Advanced Photon Source from the 1980s to 2005. These episodes show how knowledge about the properties of matter was produced in a national-laboratory context and highlights the web of connections that allow national laboratory scientists working at a variety of scales to produce both technological and scientific innovations.

The experiments which established the existence of naturally and artifcially radioactive emissions of negative and positive electrons by atomic nuclei and the critical calorimetric experiments which showed that part of the energy released during a P-decay process escapes in some yet undetected form were completed before 1933. In that year there was introduced the currently accepted picture of the P-process, in which Pauli's neutrino hypothesis occupies a central position. The assumption is that in the process a nucleon is transformed from a proton into a. neutron (or vice versa) with the simultaneous creation of a, positron (or negatron) and an (anti) neutrino. The latter particle is hypothesized to be the carrier of the missing energy and the failure to detect it after its emission is ascribed to its having no charge, probably no magnetic moment, and only small non-electromagnetic interactions with other particles.

Plans for the greatest laboratory of its kind for research into the fundamental forces that hold the universe together and into the mysteries of the vital processes of life were unfolded yesterday by a group of leading atomic scientists at the first conference to be held in the Brookhaven National Laboratory for Atomic Research, Brookhaven, L.I.

At three centers universities will unite with AEC in a vast project to develop the atom for peace. The research program is designed to advance science and promote the welfare of mankind.

The principal ideas of the theory and the main results of the experimental studies of the coherent resonant scattering ofγ-radiation by nuclear ensembles in matter are briefly over-viewed. An analysis of transmission of the Mössbauerγ-radiation and of synchrotron radiation through a nuclear resonant medium is suggested using an approach based on the optical theory. The feasibilities of the nuclear resonant scattering of synchrotron radiation as a new technique for studying the hyperfine interactions and some other phenomena of the physics of condensed matter are considered.

Fermi advanced his successful theory of p-decay in 1934. It has since then undergone development in which two general directions may be dis­cerned. One has been a broadening of the scope of the theory, the other a narrowing of its initial ambiguities.

Heralded as the "first privately-financed laboratory dedicated to research in nuclear power", the newly created Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratories, Inc. has announced that it will perform research, development, and experimentation in the field of nuclear energy with services to be available to other organizations interested in the design of nuclear power plants or in applications of nuclear technology to their products and processes.