George Paget Thomson

George Paget Thomson (May 3, 1892 – September 10, 1975), British physicist and son of Nobel Prize winning physicist J. J. Thomson.

Related Topics:
May 3 - 1892 - September 10 - 1975 - Nobel Prize - J. J. Thomson

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Thomson 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.

Related Topics:
Mathematics - Physics - Trinity College, Cambridge - World War I - Queen's Regiment of Infantry - France - Aerodynamics - Farnborough

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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.

Related Topics:
1924 - Very Rev. Sir George Adam Smith - 1941

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After serving in the first world war Thomson followed in his father's footsteps working first at Cambridge and then Aberdeen and was himself jointly (with Clinton Joseph Davisson) awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for his work in discovering the wave-like properties of the electron. Where 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 twenties as what is often dubbed the de Broglie hypothesis.

Related Topics:
First world war - Clinton Joseph Davisson - 1937 - Electron - Particle - Diffracted - Wave-particle duality - Louis-Victor de Broglie - De Broglie hypothesis

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In the late thirties and during the second world war Thomson specialised in nuclear physics, concentrating on practical military applications. In later life he continued this work on nuclear energy but also wrote works on aerodynamics and the value of science in society.

Related Topics:
Second world war - Nuclear physics - Aerodynamics

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In 1952, Thomson 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.

Related Topics:
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge - Leckhampton

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