History of Science at Dartmouth Dartmouth’S Nobel Laureate Jacob Waldbauer ‘01

History of Science at Dartmouth Dartmouth’s Nobel Laureate Jacob Waldbauer ‘01

Though few on campus would likely recognize him today, Owen Chamberlain ‘41 is one of the most internationally renowned scientists to have studied at Dartmouth. Chamberlain shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the existence of the antiproton, the antimatter counterpart to the proton. Today, he is considered by many to be one of the true states- men of science. Owen Chamberlain was born in San Francisco in 1920. After getting his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth in 1941, he started graduate school at the University of California. The involvement of the United States in World War II interrupted his studies, and in 1942 Chamberlain joined the Manhattan Project. Within the Manhattan Project he worked under Emilio Segrè, with whom he would later share the Nobel Prize. He resumed graduate study in 1946 at the University of Chicago, where he was advised by Enrico Fermi. He was awarded his doctoral degree in 1949. Chamberlain then began teaching and doing research at the University of California, Berkeley. The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory housed one of the most powerful particle accelerators at the time, the Bevatron, capable of generating beam energies of up to 6.2 GeV. By 1955, the hunt for the antiproton was on, and the Bevatron was considered a prime place to find it. Though the Owen Chamberlain ‘41 existence of the antimatter particles had been predicted theoreti- cally by Paul Dirac in 1929, thus far only the positron (the posi- tively-charged antimatter counterpart to the electron) had been observed experimentally. At Lawrence Berkeley, Chamberlain worked with a group headed by Emilio Segrè, which also includ- ed Clyde Wiegand and Thomas Ypsilantis. Other researchers, including other groups at Lawrence Berkeley, were also actively engaged in looking for the antiproton; it was a question of who would get there first. On September 21, 1955, after months of searching, equipment breakdowns, and experimental redesigns, the Segrè group recorded the first experimental observations of the antiproton. In 1959 Segrè and Chamberlain were recognized for their work with the Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech at the Nobel presentation ceremony, Chamberlain said, “The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one. Each new idea is dependent upon the ideas of the past. The whole structure of science gradually grows, but only as it is built upon a firm founda- tion of past research. Each generation of scientists stands upon the shoulders of those who have gone before.” Since winning the Nobel Prize, Chamberlain has lent his support to a great number of scientific and social causes, including the Committee of Concerned Scientists, the Ploughshares Fund (an organization for promoting peace in the nuclear age), the Manifesto Against H u n g e r, and the Heidelberg Appeal to environmental responsibility.

Chamberlain checking the proton target aparatus at Lawrence Berkeley Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science 25