Ernest Lawrence
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Ernest Lawrence was an American nuclear physicist who invented the cyclotron, a machine that accelerated particles to high speeds for scientific research. His work was foundational to nuclear physics and led to important discoveries about the atom, making him one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.
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Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American physicist who received 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.
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1901 births1958 deaths20th-century American physicistsAccelerator physicistsAmerican experimental physicistsAmerican Nobel laureatesAmerican nuclear physicistsAmerican people of Norwegian descentAmerican people of World War IIAmerican recipients of the Legion of HonourCommons link from WikidataEnrico Fermi Award recipients