Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp Kusch "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb was able to precisely determine a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom, known as the Lamb shift. He was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.
Biography
Lamb was born in
Los Angeles,
California, and attended Los Angeles High School. First admitted in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938.
Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Mössbauer.
He worked on nuclear theory, laser physics, and verifying quantum mechanics.
Lamb was a physics professor at Stanford from 1951 to 1956.[ Stanford Report, "Other Nobel connections to the Farm," Oct. 3, 2001] He was the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1962, and also taught at Yale, Columbia and the University of Arizona. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.
Lamb is remembered as a "rare theorist turned experimentalist" by D. Kaiser.[D. Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams (University of Chicago, Chicago, 2005).]
Quantum physics
In addition to his crucial and famous contribution to quantum electrodynamics via the
Lamb shift, in the latter part of his career he paid increasing attention to the field of quantum measurements.
[W. E. Lamb, Quantum theory of measurement, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 480, 407-416 (1986).][W. E. Lamb, Quantum theory of measurement, in Noise and Chaos in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1990) pp. 1-14.] In one of his writings Lamb stated that "most people who use quantum mechanics have little need to know much about the interpretation of the subject."
Lamb was also openly critical of many of the interpretational trends on quantum mechanics
[W. E. Lamb, Super classical quantum mechanics: the best interpretation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, Am. J. Phys. 69, 413-421 (2001)] and of the use of the term
photon.
[Lamb, Willis E. "Anti-photon." Applied Physics B 60 (1995): 77-84.]
Personal
In 1939 Lamb married his first wife,
Ursula Lamb, a German student, who became a distinguished historian of Latin America (and assumed his last name).
[Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James Sheehan (eds.), The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, , 12, 34, 36, 398‒99.][ accessed 5 July 2016.] After her death in 1996, he married physicist
Bruria Kaufman in 1996, whom he later divorced. In 2008 he married Elsie Wattson.
Lamb died on May 15, 2008, at the age of 94,
External links
