Author: Artemis Spyrou, Professor of Nuclear Physics, Michigan State University

The word magic is not often used in the context of science. But in the early 1930s, scientists discovered that some atomic nuclei – the center part of atoms, which make up all matter – were more stable than others. These nuclei had specific numbers of protons or neutrons, or magic numbers, as physicist Eugene Wigner called them. Maria Goeppert Mayer won the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics. Argonne National Laboratory, CC BY-NC-SA The race to figure out what made these nuclei so stable began. Understanding these magic numbers would allow scientists to predict the properties of other nuclei, such…