Sir George Paget Thomson
( 3 May 1892 – 10 September 1975) was an English physicist and Nobel Prize Winner in physics recognized for his discovery with Clinton Davisson of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.
Thomson became a Fellow at Cambridge and then moved to the University of Aberdeen. George Thomson was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for his work in Aberdeen in discovering the wave-like properties of the electron. The prize was shared with Clinton Joseph Davisson who had made the same discovery independently. Whereas his father had seen the electron as a particle (and won his Nobel Prize in the process), Thomson demonstrated that it could be diffracted like a wave, a discovery proving the principle of wave-particle duality which had first been posited by Louis-Victor de Broglie in the 1920s as what is often dubbed the de Broglie hypothesis.
( 3 May 1892 – 10 September 1975) was an English physicist and Nobel Prize Winner in physics recognized for his discovery with Clinton Davisson of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.
Thomson became a Fellow at Cambridge and then moved to the University of Aberdeen. George Thomson was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for his work in Aberdeen in discovering the wave-like properties of the electron. The prize was shared with Clinton Joseph Davisson who had made the same discovery independently. Whereas his father had seen the electron as a particle (and won his Nobel Prize in the process), Thomson demonstrated that it could be diffracted like a wave, a discovery proving the principle of wave-particle duality which had first been posited by Louis-Victor de Broglie in the 1920s as what is often dubbed the de Broglie hypothesis.
In 1930 he was appointed Professor at Imperial College London in the chair of the late Hugh Longbourne Callendar. In the late 1930s and during the Second World War Thomson specialist in nuclear physics, concentrating on practical military applications. In particular Thomson was the chairman of the crucial MAUD Committee in 1940–1941 that concluded that an atomic bomb was feasible. In later life he continued this work on nuclear energy but also wrote works on aerodynamics and the value of science in society.
Thomson stayed at Imperial College until 1952, when he became Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1964, the college honored his tenure with the George Thomson Building, a work of modernist architecture on the college's Leckhampton campus.
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