George Paget Thomson

For other people with the same name, see George Thomson (disambiguation).

Sir George Paget Thomson
Thomson in 1937
Born	(1892-05-03)3 May 1892 Cambridge, England
Died	10 September 1975(1975-09-10) (aged 83) Cambridge, England
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for	Electron diffraction
Spouse	Kathleen Buchanan Smith
Children	2 sons, 2 daughters
Awards	Howard N. Potts Medal (1932) Nobel Prize in Physics (1937) Hughes Medal (1939) Royal Medal (1949) Faraday Medal (1960)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Aberdeen Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Imperial College London
Academic advisors	J. J. Thomson

Sir George Paget Thomson, FRS (/ˈtɒmsən/; 3 May 1892 – 10 September 1975) was a British physicist and Nobel laureate in physics recognized for his discovery of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.

Education and early life

Thomson was born in Cambridge, England, the son of physicist and Nobel laureate J. J. Thomson and Rose Elisabeth Paget, daughter of George Edward Paget. Thomson went to The Perse School, Cambridge before going on to read mathematics and physics at Trinity College, Cambridge, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he was commissioned into the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment. After brief service in France, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1915 doing research on aerodynamics at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and elsewhere. He resigned his commission as a captain in 1920.

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 the American physicist Clinton 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 the electron could be diffracted like a wave. By scattering electrons through thin metallic films (3.10⁻⁶ cms) with known crystal structures, such as aluminum, gold and platinum, Thomson found the dimensions of the observed diffraction patterns. In each case, his observed diffractions were within 5 percent of the predicted values given by de Broglie's wave theory. This discovery provided further evidence for 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.

Between 1929 and 1930 Thomson was a Non-Resident Lecturer at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. In 1930 he was appointed Professor at Imperial College London in the chair of the late Hugh Longbourne Callendar. 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 honored his tenure with the George Thomson Building, a work of modernist architecture on the college's Leckhampton campus.

Awards and honours

In addition to winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Thomson was knighted in 1943. He gave the address "Two aspects of science" as president of the British Association for 1959–1960.

Personal life

Kathleen Adam Smith Paget Thomson

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. Thomson died in 1975 and is buried with his wife in Grantchester Parish Churchyard to the south of Cambridge. One son, Sir John Thomson (1927–2018), became a senior diplomat who served as High Commissioner to India (1977–82) and Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1982–87), and his grandson, Sir Adam Thomson (1955–present), also became a senior diplomat, serving as High Commissioner to Pakistan (2010–2013) and as Permanent Representative to NATO (2014–2016). One daughter, Lillian Clare Thomson, married the South African economist and mountaineer Johannes de Villiers Graaff.

Thomson died on September 10, 1975 at Cambridge aged 83.

See also

• Pinch (plasma physics)
• Z-pinch

External links

• Media related to George Paget Thomson at Wikimedia Commons
• Annotated Bibliography for George Paget Thomson from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• Portraits of Sir George Paget Thomson at the National Portrait Gallery
• George Thomson biography at Wageningen University
• A history of the electron: JJ and GP Thomson published by the University of the Basque Country
• George Paget Thomson on Nobelprize.org
• The Papers of Sir George Paget Thomson at the Churchill Archives Centre