George Paget Thomson

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

Sir George Paget Thomson FRS
Thomson in 1937
Born	(1892-05-03)3 May 1892 Cambridge, England
Died	10 September 1975(1975-09-10) (aged 83) Cambridge, England
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for	Electron diffraction
Spouse	Kathleen Buchanan Smith ​ ​ (m. 1924; died 1941)​
Children	4
Father	J. J. Thomson
Relatives	George Edward Paget (grandfather) George Adam Smith (father-in-law)
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 (/ˈtɒmsən/; 3 May 1892 – 10 September 1975) was an English physicist who shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics with Clinton Davisson 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 to undertake research on aerodynamics at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and elsewhere. He resigned his commission as a captain in 1920.

Career

After the war, Thomson became a Fellow at Cambridge and then moved to the University of Aberdeen. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for his work at 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 Thomson’s father William (who won the 1904 Nobel Prize) had seen the electron as a particle, the son demonstrated that the electron could be diffracted like a wave. By scattering electrons through thin metallic films (3 × 10⁻⁶ cm thick) with known crystal structures, such as aluminium, gold and platinum, Thomson found the dimensions of the observed diffraction patterns. In each case, his observed diffractions were within 5 per cent 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, he specialised in nuclear physics, concentrating on practical military applications. In particular, he 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 honoured 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, the Principal of the University of Aberdeen. They had two sons and two daughters. Kathleen died in 1941.

Thomson died on 10 September 1975, at Cambridge, aged 83, and is buried with his wife in Grantchester parish churchyard to the south of Cambridge.

One of their sons, 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). Their grandson Sir Adam Thomson (born 1955) 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.

See also

• Matter wave
• 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 Archived 4 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine
• 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
• The Papers of Sir George Paget Thomson at the Churchill Archives Centre
• George Paget Thomson on Nobelprize.org