Willis Lamb

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Willis Lamb bigraphy, stories - American Physicist

Willis Lamb : biography

July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008

Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 together with Polykarp Kusch "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb and Kusch were able to precisely determine certain electromagnetic properties of the electron (see Lamb shift). Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.

Biography

Lamb was born in Los Angeles, California, United States and attended Los Angeles High School. First admitted in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Mössbauer.

Lamb was the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1962, and also taught at Yale, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Arizona. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.

Lamb is remembered as a "gifted experimentalist, and theoretician, in the best Newtonian tradition"F. J. Duarte, Laser Physicist (Optics Journal, New York, 2012). and referred to as a "rare theorist turned experimentalist."D. Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams (University of Chicago, Chicago, 2005). In the latter part of his career he paid increasing attention to the field of quantum measurements.

Personal

Lamb married his first wife, Ursula Schaefer in 1939. In 1996 he married physicist Bruria Kaufman, whom he later divorced. In 2008 he married Elsie Wattson.

Lamb died on May 15, 2008, at the age of 94.