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James Chadwick is given credit for the discovery of the neutron in 1932.

Chadwick did experiments to demonstrate the existence of a neutral particle in the nucleus that was later given the name neutron.

For this, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935.

Chadwick was not the first person to assert the existence of the neutron, or rather was not the first to assert the existence of a neutral particle in the nucleus with the characteristics of the neutron.

Santiago Antunes de Mayolo, a Peruvian scientist, proposed the existence of such a particle as the neutron at the Third Scientific Panamerican Congress in 1924.

Ettore Majorana, an Italian theoretical physicist, is credited with make a proposal of the existence of this particle also, but this was not documented in a scientific publication.

As with many scientific developments, ideas form over time and with different people. Credit of single person for a single "discovery" is not the same as saying the ideas all evolved from one person.

Background on this topic is in the related link and the related questions.

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12y ago

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