Thomson, George Paget

George Thomson was born into the family of Nobel Prize winning physicist J.J. Thomson and Rose Elizabeth Paget, daughter of a professor of medicine at Cambridge. Thomson attended Pierce's private school in Cambridge , then was a student at Trinity College at Cambridge University until the outbreak of World War I , during which he fought in the infantry. After a short military service in France, he worked in the field of aerodynamics , among other places in Farnborough .

In 1924, Thomson marries Kathleen Buchanan Smith, daughter of Sir George Adam Smith. They had four children - two daughters and two sons. Kathleen Smith died in 1941.

After military service during World War I, Thomson became a lecturer at Cambridge University and a member of Corpus Christi College. He soon became professor of natural philosophy (as physics was called in Scotland at that time) at the University of Aberdeen , which he held for 8 years. Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discoveries while working in Aberdeen .

In 1930 , Thomson was appointed professor at Imperial College London , where he became interested in one of the new areas of physics - nuclear physics, in particular the physics of uranium fission using neutrons. He concluded that the uranium fission process was promising in applications, especially in the military, and convinced the British Air Ministry of the advisability of purchasing a ton of uranium oxide for the experiments. In the years 1940-1941. Thomson led the MAUD committee , which found that the creation of an atomic bomb is technically feasible. In 1942 , he was appointed Scientific Negotiator in Ottawa, Canada, and was closely associated with the US nuclear bomb project. Upon his return to Britain, Thompson was appointed chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Aviation of the British Empire. In the following years of his life, he continued to work in the field of nuclear physics, but also studied aerodynamics and wrote articles on the importance of science in society.

In 1952 , Thomson resigned from Imperial College London as a Master at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. In 1964, the college celebrated his achievements by naming the building, the outstanding work of modernist architecture on the college campus in Leckhampton, in his honor. From 1958 to 1960, Thomson was president of the Institute of Physics .

Knighted in 1943

While the famous Thomson’s father J.J. Thomson discovered the particle itself and received the Nobel Prize for it in 1906 , George Thomson demonstrated that the electron has wave properties, in particular, it can diffract on an ordered lattice ^{[5] [ 6]} . This discovery experimentally confirmed the principle of wave-particle duality , which was formulated by Louis de Broglie in 1920 .

Thomson D. The Foreseeable Future. M .: In. lit., 1958.

“... three elements are involved in the technical process: knowledge, energy and materials. Knowledge is certainly the main one ”(D.P. Thomson).

• Temples Yu. A. Thomson George Paget ( Physics: Biographical reference book / Ed. A.I. Akhiezer . - Ed. 2nd, rev. and add. - M .: Nauka , 1983 .-- S. 263. - 400 p. - 200,000 copies. (per.)

• The biography of George Paget Thompson on the website of the Nobel Committee
• The Emergence of Professional Science by George Thomson
• Sir George Thomson "The Foreseeable Future" (1955 )