Since nuclear energy knowledge is pervasive today, it may be difficult to realize that it has been only little over a century since Albert Einstein's first publication of the theory of relativity. Einstein had theorized but not experimentally demonstrated that mass could be converted to energy. To do this required methods for measuring extremely small subatomic particles.

Nuclear physicist Walther Bothe was intimately associated with providing the necessary proof. One of Bothe's early teachers, Hans Geiger, created the basic device to measure radioactivity--the Geiger counter--but additional steps were needed to detect and measure particles and the rate of their emission. More specifically, Bothe sought to show that, when a single portion of an atom passes though two or more Geiger counters, the rate of passage is almost "coincident" in time. The rate of passage, or pulses, is then sent through a coincidence circuit to show that they are coincident in time. Banks of Geiger counters can be used to show small angular variations in the rate of passage of cosmic rays. Bothe applied his method to the study of the Compton effect, for example, whereby high-energy electromagnetic radiation increases in wavelength when it collides with electrons. His demonstration of the small angular scattering of light rays provided strong support for the corpuscular theory of light.

Classical physics held that the energy of incoming X-rays ought to equal the combined momentum and energy of the electrons and the scattered X-rays after collision. Bothe sought to validate the theories of Einstein and other theoretical physicists that held that the result of the collision was not equal in momentum and energy. To do this, Bothe combined two (or more) Geiger counters with a single amplifier that registered pulses only when particles triggered counters simultaneously. This process, called the coincidence method of particle detection, allowed Bothe to find small-scale variations, a crucial early step in the development of nuclear physics and nuclear energy. For this discovery and other discoveries that followed, Bothe and Max Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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