SOME FISSION PROBLEMS CIRCA 1950 AND 2008

In the first part of the talk I will recall conversations with Niels Bohr and John Wheeler concerning the puzzle of the asymmetric mass division in nuclear fission. In 1950 this was the outstanding problem in fission theory, and for a brief period I foolishly believed to have found the solution by relaxing the incompressibility assumption in the liquid drop model of fission. In the second part I will describe recent progress in the formulation and streamlining of the transition-state formulae for the competition between the disintegration of an excited compound nucleus by particle emission and fission.