The Nobel Tradition at Berkeley
Owen Chamberlain
Physics, 1959
By Russell Schoch
1984
Owen Chamberlain was born in San Francisco on July 10,
1920. His father, W. Edward Chamberlain, a former instructor at the
University of California, was a radiologist on the staff of the Stanford
University Hospital when his son was born. The family moved to Philadelphia
when Chamberlain was 10 years old, and he received his early education in
the public schools there. He earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth
College with the last pre-World War II graduating class, in June 1941.
That fall, Chamberlain came to the Berkeley campus to do
graduate work in physics. But within a year the United States had entered
the war, and the government had embarked on a crash research program.
Chamberlain abandoned his own studies in 1942 to join a group of scientists
investigating uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project under the direction
of Ernest O. Lawrence. In the middle of 1943, Chamberlain transferred
to Los Alamos, where he continued his atomic research and participated in
the firing of the first atomic bomb test in 1945. (Chamberlain lost a
$5 bet on the test: "There were just too many possibilities it wouldn't
work," he thought, incorrectly, at the time.)
At the end of the war, Chamberlain continued his work in
atomic physics in Chicago, earning his Ph.D. under Professor Enrico Fermi at
the University of Chicago in 1948. He was then invited to the Berkeley
campus as an instructor in physics. He became an assistant professor in 1950
and an associate professor four years later.
When Chamberlain returned to the University of California,
he began a series of scientific investigations that laid the foundation for
the work that later brought him fame. Using the giant cyclotron on the hill
above the campus, Chamberlain concentrated on the study of the scattering of
high-energy protons and neutrons. He was particularly successful with proton
polarization experiments, including the first triple-scattering experiments
with polarized protons.
His work with protons, which have a positive charge, was
superseded by a study of their opposite particles, the anti-protons.
Anti-protons had been the object of scientific discussion since their
existence was first suggested in the 1920s. Though stable in a vacuum,
anti-protons could not exist with ordinary matter and were extremely
elusive. Scientists had not been able to establish their existence in atomic
nuclei despite involved experiments with cosmic rays.
During the early 1950s, Chamberlain entered into a
fruitful scientific collaboration with Emilio Segrč, Italian-born physicist
and fellow member of the Berkeley faculty who was conducting research of a
similar nature. In 1955, using the Berkeley Bevatron---then the most
powerful "atom-smasher" in the world---the Chamberlain-Segrč team
created anti-protons artificially which stayed alive long enough to be
identified. Their findings indicated that all particles in the atom's
nucleus have twins of opposite polarities.
Ernest Lawrence compared the discovery of the anti-proton
with the discovery of the positive electron, which initiated the remarkable
developments that followed in nuclear physics. In recognition of his
outstanding work in discovering the anti-proton, Chamberlain shared the 1959
Nobel Prize in Physics with his co-worker, Emilio Segrč.
__________
Schoch, Russell. "Owne Chamberlin: Physics, 1959." The
Nobel Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 16.
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