Information about George Paget Thomson

George Paget Thomson

Born	May 3 1892(1892--) Cambridge, England
Died	September 10 1975 (aged 83) Cambridge, England
Nationality	United Kingdom
Field	Physics
Institutions	University of Aberdeen University of Cambridge Imperial College London
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Academic advisor	John Strutt (Rayleigh)
Known for	Electron diffraction
Notable prizes	Nobel Prize in Physics (1937)

Sir George Paget Thomson FRS (May 3, 1892 – September 10, 1975) was an English physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Clinton Davisson of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.

Biography

Thomson was born in Cambridge, England, the son of physicist and Nobel laureate J. J. Thomson and Rose Elisabeth Paget, the daughter of the professor of medicine at the University of Cambridge. Thomson went to The Perse School, Cambridge before going onto read mathematics and physics at Trinity College, Cambridge, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he joined the Queen's Regiment of Infantry. After a brief service in France, he worked on aerodynamics at Farnborough and elsewhere.

In 1924, Thomson married Kathleen Buchanan Smith, daughter of the Very Rev. Sir George Adam Smith. They had four children, two sons and two daughters. Kathleen died in 1941.

Career

After briefly serving in the First World War 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. In the late 1930s and during the Second World War Thomson specialised 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 honoured his tenure with the George Thomson Building, an outstanding work of modernist architecture on the college's Leckhampton campus.

Thomson was knighted in 1943.

References

• George Paget Thomson. Le Prix Nobel. the Nobel Foundation (1937). Retrieved on 2007-09-12.
• Thomson, Sir George Paget. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (2007). Retrieved on 2007-09-12.

External links

• George Thomson portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
• George Thomson biography at Wageningen University

•  • [ e] Nobel Prize in Physics Laureates
Jean Perrin (1926) • Arthur Compton / Charles Wilson (1927) • Owen Richardson (1928) • Louis de Broglie (1929) • C. V. Raman (1930) • Werner Heisenberg (1932) • Erwin Schrdinger / Paul Dirac (1933) • James Chadwick (1935) • Victor Hess / Carl Anderson (1936) • Clinton Davisson / George Thomson (1937) • Enrico Fermi (1938) • Ernest Lawrence (1939) • Otto Stern (1943) • Isidor Rabi (1944) • Wolfgang Pauli (1945) • Percy Bridgman (1946) • Edward Appleton (1947) • Patrick Blackett (1948) • Hideki Yukawa (1949) • Cecil Powell (1950)
I I I I I

Persondata
NAME	Thomson, George Paget
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English Physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	3 May 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH	Cambridge, UK
DATE OF DEATH	10 September 1975
PLACE OF DEATH	Cambridge, UK