Ernest Lawrence, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Ernest Lawrence

American nuclear physicist

Date of Birth: 08-Aug-1901

Place of Birth: Canton, South Dakota, United States

Date of Death: 27-Aug-1958

Profession: physicist, university teacher, nuclear physicist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Leo


Show Famous Birthdays Today, United States

👉 Worldwide Celebrity Birthdays Today

About Ernest Lawrence

  • Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was a pioneering American nuclear scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron.
  • He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, as well as for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A graduate of the University of South Dakota and University of Minnesota, Lawrence obtained a PhD in physics at Yale in 1925.
  • In 1928, he was hired as an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, becoming the youngest full professor there two years later.
  • In its library one evening, Lawrence was intrigued by a diagram of an accelerator that produced high-energy particles.
  • He contemplated how it could be made compact, and came up with an idea for a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet.
  • The result was the first cyclotron. Lawrence went on to build a series of ever larger and more expensive cyclotrons.
  • His Radiation Laboratory became an official department of the University of California in 1936, with Lawrence as its director.
  • In addition to the use of the cyclotron for physics, Lawrence also supported its use in research into medical uses of radioisotopes.
  • During World War II, Lawrence developed electromagnetic isotope separation at the Radiation Laboratory.
  • It used devices known as calutrons, a hybrid of the standard laboratory mass spectrometer and cyclotron.
  • A huge electromagnetic separation plant was built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which came to be called Y-12.
  • The process was inefficient, but it worked. After the war, Lawrence campaigned extensively for government sponsorship of large scientific programs, and was a forceful advocate of "Big Science", with its requirements for big machines and big money.
  • Lawrence strongly backed Edward Teller's campaign for a second nuclear weapons laboratory, which Lawrence located in Livermore, California.
  • After his death, the Regents of the University of California renamed the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory after him.
  • Chemical element number 103 was named lawrencium in his honor after its discovery at Berkeley in 1961.

Read more at Wikipedia

See Also