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Norman Foster Ramsey Jr.
Born	(1915-08-27)August 27, 1915 Washington, D.C., U.S.
Died	November 4, 2011(2011-11-04) (aged 96) Wayland, Massachusetts, U.S.
Education	Columbia University (BA, PhD) University of Cambridge (BA)
Known for	Ramsey interferometry
Relatives	Anne Ramsey (cousin)
Awards	Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (1960) Davisson-Germer Prize (1974) IEEE Medal of Honor (1984) Rabi Prize (1985) Rumford Prize (1985) Oersted Medal (1988) National Medal of Science (1988) Nobel Prize in Physics (1989) UNSW Dirac Medal (1990) Vannevar Bush Award (1995)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Columbia University Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Isidor Isaac Rabi
Doctoral students	William Nierenberg (1947) Francis F. Chen (1954) Noel Corngold (1954) Daniel Kleppner (1959) Howard Berg (1964) David J. Wineland (1971) Richard R. Freeman (1973) Geoffrey L. Greene (1977) Blayne Heckel (1981)
Other notable students	Sunney Chan (post doc)

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. (August 27, 1915 – November 4, 2011) was an American physicist who was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the separated oscillatory field method (see Ramsey interferometry), which had important applications in the construction of atomic clocks. A physics professor at Harvard University for most of his career, Ramsey also held several posts with such government and international agencies as NATO and the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Among his other accomplishments are helping to found the United States Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab.

Early life

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., on August 27, 1915, to Minna Bauer Ramsey and Norman Foster Ramsey. His mother was the daughter of German immigrants and an instructor at the University of Kansas. His father, who was of Scottish descent, was a 1905 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and an officer in the Ordnance Department who rose to the rank of brigadier general during World War II, commanding the Rock Island Arsenal. He was raised as an Army brat, frequently moving from post to post, and lived in France for a time when his father was Liaison Officer with the Direction d'Artillerie and Assistant Military Attaché. This allowed him to skip a couple of grades along the way, so that he graduated from Leavenworth High School in Leavenworth, Kansas, at the age of 15.

Ramsey's parents hoped that he would go to West Point, but at 15, he was too young to be admitted. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Kansas, but in 1930 his father was posted to Governors Island, New York. Ramsey therefore entered Columbia University in 1931 and began studying engineering. He became interested in mathematics and switched to this as his academic major. By the time he received his BA from Columbia in 1935, he had become interested in physics. Columbia awarded him a Kellett Fellowship to Cambridge University, where he studied physics at Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Rutherford and Maurice Goldhaber, and encountered notable physicists, including Edward Appleton, Max Born, Edward Bullard, James Chadwick, John Cockcroft, Paul Dirac, Arthur Eddington, Ralph Fowler, Mark Oliphant and J. J. Thomson. At Cambridge, he took the tripos in order to study quantum mechanics, which had not been covered at Columbia, resulting in being awarded a second BA degree by Cambridge.

A term paper Ramsey wrote for Goldhaber on magnetic moments caused him to read recent papers on the subject by Isidor Isaac Rabi, and this stimulated an interest in molecular beams and in doing research for a PhD under Rabi at Columbia. Soon after Ramsey arrived at Columbia, Rabi invented molecular-beam resonance spectroscopy, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1944. Ramsey was part of Rabi's team that also included Jerome Kellogg, Polykarp Kusch, Sidney Millman and Jerrold Zacharias. Ramsey worked with them on the first experiments making use of the new technique and shared with Rabi and Zacharias in the discovery that the deuteron was a magnetic quadrupole. This meant that the atomic nucleus was not spherical, as had been thought. He received his PhD in physics from Columbia in 1940 and became a fellow at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., where he studied neutron–proton and proton–helium scattering.

World War II

Radiation laboratory

In 1940, he married Elinor Jameson of Brooklyn, New York, and accepted a teaching position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The two expected to spend the rest of their lives there, but World War II intervened. In September 1940 the British Tizard Mission brought a number of new technologies to the United States, including a cavity magnetron, a high-powered device that generates microwaves using the interaction of a stream of electrons with a magnetic field, which promised to revolutionize radar. Alfred Lee Loomis of the National Defense Research Committee established the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop this technology. Ramsey was one of the scientists recruited by Rabi for this work.

Initially, Ramsey was in Rabi's magnetron group. When Rabi became a division head, Ramsey became the group leader. The role of the group was to develop the magnetron to permit a reduction in wavelength from 150 centimetres (59 in) to 10 centimetres (3.9 in), and then to 3 centimetres (1.2 in) or X band. Microwave radar promised to be small, lighter and more efficient than older types. Ramsey's group started with the design produced by Oliphant's team in Britain and attempted to improve it. The Radiation Laboratory produced the designs, which were prototyped by Raytheon, and then tested by the laboratory. In June 1941, Ramsey travelled to Britain, where he met with Oliphant, and the two exchanged ideas. He brought back some British components, which were incorporated into the final design. A night fighter aircraft, the Northrop P-61 Black Widow, was designed around the new radar. Ramsey returned to Washington in late 1942 as an adviser on the use of the new 3 cm microwave radar sets that were now coming into service, working for Edward L. Bowles in the office of the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson.

Manhattan Project

In 1943, Ramsey was approached by Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Bacher, who asked him to join the Manhattan Project. Ramsey agreed to do so, but the intervention of the project director, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr., was necessary in order to prise him away from the Secretary of War's office. A compromise was agreed to, whereby Ramsey remained on the payroll of the Secretary of War and was merely seconded to the Manhattan Project. In October 1943, Group E-7 of the Ordnance Division was created at the Los Alamos Laboratory with Ramsey as group leader, with the task of integrating the design and delivery of the nuclear weapons being built by the laboratory.

The first thing he had to do was determine the characteristics of the aircraft that would be used. There were only two Allied aircraft large enough: the British Avro Lancaster and the US Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) wanted to use the B-29 if at all possible, even though it required substantial modification. Ramsey supervised the test drop program, which began at Dahlgren, Virginia, in August 1943, before moving to Muroc Dry Lake, California, in March 1944. Mock-ups of Thin Man and Fat Man bombs were dropped and tracked by an SCR-584 ground-based radar set of the kind that Ramsey had helped develop at the Radiation laboratory. Numerous problems were discovered with the bombs and the aircraft modifications, and corrected.

Plans for the delivery of the weapons in combat were assigned to the Weapons Committee, which was chaired by Ramsey and answerable to Captain William S. Parsons. Ramsey drew up tables of organization and equipment for the Project Alberta detachment that would accompany the USAAF's 509th Composite Group to Tinian. Ramsey briefed the 509th's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, on the nature of the mission when the latter assumed command of the 509th. Ramsey went to Tinian with the Project Alberta detachment as Parsons's scientific and technical deputy. He was involved in the assembly of the Fat Man bomb and relayed Parsons's message indicating the success of the bombing of Hiroshima to Groves in Washington, D.C.

Research

At the end of the war, Ramsey returned to Columbia as a professor and research scientist. Rabi and Ramsey picked up where they had left off before the war with their molecular-beam experiments. Ramsey and his first graduate student, William Nierenberg, measured various nuclear magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole moments. With Rabi, he helped establish the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. In 1946, he became the first head of the Physics Department there. His time there was brief, for in 1947, he joined the physics faculty at Harvard University, where he would remain for the next 40 years, except for brief visiting professorships at Middlebury College, Oxford University, Mt. Holyoke College and the University of Virginia. During the 1950s, he was the first science adviser to NATO and initiated a series of fellowships, grants and summer school programs to train European scientists.

Ramsey's research in the immediate post-war years looked at measuring fundamental properties of atoms and molecules by use of molecular beams. On moving to Harvard, his objective was to carry out accurate molecular-beam magnetic-resonance experiments, based on the techniques developed by Rabi. However, the accuracy of the measurements depended on the uniformity of the magnetic field, and Ramsey found that it was difficult to create sufficiently uniform magnetic fields. He developed the separated oscillatory field method in 1949 as a means of achieving the accuracy he wanted.

Ramsey and his PhD student Daniel Kleppner developed the atomic-hydrogen maser, looking to increase the accuracy with which the hyperfine separations of atomic hydrogen, deuterium and tritium could be measured, as well as to investigate how much the hyperfine structure was affected by external magnetic and electric fields. He also participated in developing an extremely stable clock based on a hydrogen maser. From 1967 until 2019, the second has been defined based on 9,192,631,770 Hz hyperfine transition of a cesium-133 atom; the atomic clock which is used to set this standard is an application of Ramsey's work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 "for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks". The Prize was shared with Hans Georg Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul.

In collaboration with the Institut Laue–Langevin, Ramsey also worked on applying similar methods to beams of neutrons, measuring the neutron magnetic moment and finding a limit to its electric dipole moment. As president of the Universities Research Association during the 1960s he was involved in the design and construction of the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. He also headed a 1982 National Research Council committee that concluded that, contrary to the findings of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, acoustic evidence did not indicate the presence of a second gunman's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Later life

Ramsey eventually became the Eugene Higgins professor of physics at Harvard and retired in 1986. However, he remained active in physics, spending a year as a research fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at the University of Colorado. He also continued visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, Williams College and the University of Michigan. In addition to the Nobel Prize in Physics, Ramsey received a number of awards, including the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1960, Davisson–Germer Prize in 1974, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1984, the Rabi Prize in 1985, the Rumford Premium Prize in 1985, the Compton Medal in 1986, and the Oersted Medal and the National Medal of Science in 1988. In 1990, Ramsey received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2004, he signed a letter along with 47 other Nobel laureates endorsing John Kerry for President of the United States as someone who would "restore science to its appropriate place in government".

His first wife, Elinor, died in 1983, after which he married Ellie Welch of Brookline, Massachusetts. Ramsey died on November 4, 2011. He was survived by his wife Ellie, his four daughters from his first marriage, and his stepdaughter and stepson from his second marriage.

Bibliography

• Ramsey, N. F.; Birge, R. W.; Kruse, U. E.. "Proton–Proton Scattering at 105 MeV and 75 MeV", Harvard University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the United States Atomic Energy Commission), (January 31, 1951).
• Ramsey, N. F.; Cone, A. A.; Chen, K. W.; Dunning, J. R. Jr.; Hartwig, G.; Walker, J. K.; Wilson, R. "Inelastic Scattering Of Electrons By Protons", Department of Physics at Harvard University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the United States Atomic Energy Commission), (December 1966).
• Greene, G. L.; Ramsey, N. F.; Mampe, W.; Pendlebury, J. M.; Smith, K.; Dress, W. B.; Miller, P. D.; Perrin, P. "Determination of the Neutron Magnetic Moment", Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Harvard University, Institut Laue–Langevin, Astronomy Centre of Sussex University, United States Department of Energy, (June 1981).
• Ramsey, N. F. "Molecular Beams", Oxford University Press (First edition 1956, Reprinted 1986).

Notes

1. ^ "Norman F. Ramsey – Autobiography". The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
2. Cullum 1950, p. 101.
3. Cullum 1930, pp. 669–670.
4. Cullum 1940, pp. 167–168.
5. ^ "Norman F. Ramsey". Soylent Communications. Retrieved June 11, 2013.
6. ^ "Norman F. Ramsey, an oral history conducted in 1991 by John Bryant". IEEE History Center. Retrieved June 11, 2013.
7. ^ Tucker, Anthony (November 18, 2011). "Norman Ramsey obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved February 13, 2010.
8. "Isidor Isaac Rabi". Nobel Media. Retrieved August 17, 2012.
9. Kellogg, J. M. B.; Rabi, I. I.; Ramsey, N. F. Jr.; Zacharias, J. R. (October 1939). "The Magnetic Moment of the Proton and the Deuteron. The Radiofrequency Spectrum of H in Various Magnetic Fields". Physical Review. 56 (8): 728–743. Bibcode:1939PhRv...56..728K. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.56.728.
10. Wineland, D. (2011). "Norman Ramsey (1915–2011)". Nature. 480 (7376): 182. Bibcode:2011Natur.480..182W. doi:10.1038/480182a. PMID 22158235.
11. Conant 2002, pp. 209–213.
12. Conant 2002, p. 204.
13. Rigden 1987, pp. 135–135.
14. Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 59.
15. ^ Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 378–379.
16. Groves 1962, p. 254.
17. Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 380–382.
18. Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 248.
19. Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 387–388.
20. Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 392–393.
21. ^ "The Passing of a Scientific Giant: Norman F. Ramsey (1915–2011)". National Geographic. Archived from the original on November 12, 2011. Retrieved June 11, 2013.
22. "Nobel Prize press release". The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
23. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1989". The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
24. ^ "Norman Ramsey Dies at 96; Work Led to the Atomic Clock". New York Times. November 6, 2011. Retrieved November 7, 2011.
25. "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
26. "Norman Foster Ramsey". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
27. "Norman F. Ramsey". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
28. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
29. "48 Nobel Winning Scientists Endorse Kerry-June 21, 2004". George Washington University. Retrieved July 6, 2013.

References

• Conant, Jennet (2002). Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-87287-0. OCLC 48966735.
• Cullum, George W. (1930). Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the US Military Academy at West Point New York Since Its Establishment in 1802: Supplement Volume VII 1920–1930. Chicago: R. R. Donnelly and Sons, The Lakeside Press. Retrieved October 6, 2015.
• Cullum, George W. (1940). Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the US Military Academy at West Point New York Since Its Establishment in 1802: Supplement Volume VIII 1930–1940. Chicago: R. R. Donnelly and Sons, The Lakeside Press. Retrieved October 6, 2015.
• Cullum, George W. (1950). Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the US Military Academy at West Point New York Since Its Establishment in 1802: Supplement Volume IX 1940–1950. Chicago: R. R. Donnelly and Sons, The Lakeside Press. Retrieved October 6, 2015.
• Groves, Leslie (1962). Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-306-70738-1. OCLC 537684.
• Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44132-3. OCLC 26764320.
• Rigden, John S. (1987). Rabi, Scientist and Citizen. Sloan Foundation Series. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-06792-1. OCLC 14931559.

External links

• Group photograph taken at Lasers '93 including (right to left) Norman F. Ramsey, Marlan Scully, and F. J. Duarte.
• Norman Ramsey, an oral history conducted in 1995 by Andrew Goldstein, IEEE History Center, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
• Papers relating to the Manhattan Project, 1945–1946, collected by Norman Ramsey. Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Libraries, from SIRIS
• Norman F. Ramsey on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1989 Experiments with Separated Oscillatory Fields and Hydrogen Masers

v t e Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics
1901–1925	1901: Röntgen 1902: Lorentz / Zeeman 1903: Becquerel / P. Curie / M. Curie 1904: Rayleigh 1905: Lenard 1906: J. J. Thomson 1907: Michelson 1908: Lippmann 1909: Marconi / Braun 1910: Van der Waals 1911: Wien 1912: Dalén 1913: Kamerlingh Onnes 1914: Laue 1915: W. L. Bragg / W. H. Bragg 1916 1917: Barkla 1918: Planck 1919: Stark 1920: Guillaume 1921: Einstein 1922: N. Bohr 1923: Millikan 1924: M. Siegbahn 1925: Franck / Hertz
1926–1950	1926: Perrin 1927: Compton / C. Wilson 1928: O. Richardson 1929: De Broglie 1930: Raman 1931 1932: Heisenberg 1933: Schrödinger / Dirac 1934 1935: Chadwick 1936: Hess / C. D. Anderson 1937: Davisson / G. P. Thomson 1938: Fermi 1939: Lawrence 1940 1941 1942 1943: Stern 1944: Rabi 1945: Pauli 1946: Bridgman 1947: Appleton 1948: Blackett 1949: Yukawa 1950: Powell
1951–1975	1951: Cockcroft / Walton 1952: Bloch / Purcell 1953: Zernike 1954: Born / Bothe 1955: Lamb / Kusch 1956: Shockley / Bardeen / Brattain 1957: C. N. Yang / T. D. Lee 1958: Cherenkov / Frank / Tamm 1959: Segrè / Chamberlain 1960: Glaser 1961: Hofstadter / Mössbauer 1962: Landau 1963: Wigner / Goeppert Mayer / Jensen 1964: Townes / Basov / Prokhorov 1965: Tomonaga / Schwinger / Feynman 1966: Kastler 1967: Bethe 1968: Alvarez 1969: Gell-Mann 1970: Alfvén / Néel 1971: Gabor 1972: Bardeen / Cooper / Schrieffer 1973: Esaki / Giaever / Josephson 1974: Ryle / Hewish 1975: A. Bohr / Mottelson / Rainwater
1976–2000	1976: Richter / Ting 1977: P. W. Anderson / Mott / Van Vleck 1978: Kapitsa / Penzias / R. Wilson 1979: Glashow / Salam / Weinberg 1980: Cronin / Fitch 1981: Bloembergen / Schawlow / K. Siegbahn 1982: K. Wilson 1983: Chandrasekhar / Fowler 1984: Rubbia / Van der Meer 1985: von Klitzing 1986: Ruska / Binnig / Rohrer 1987: Bednorz / Müller 1988: Lederman / Schwartz / Steinberger 1989: Ramsey / Dehmelt / Paul 1990: Friedman / Kendall / R. Taylor 1991: de Gennes 1992: Charpak 1993: Hulse / J. Taylor 1994: Brockhouse / Shull 1995: Perl / Reines 1996: D. Lee / Osheroff / R. Richardson 1997: Chu / Cohen-Tannoudji / Phillips 1998: Laughlin / Störmer / Tsui 1999: 't Hooft / Veltman 2000: Alferov / Kroemer / Kilby
2001– present	2001: Cornell / Ketterle / Wieman 2002: Davis / Koshiba / Giacconi 2003: Abrikosov / Ginzburg / Leggett 2004: Gross / Politzer / Wilczek 2005: Glauber / Hall / Hänsch 2006: Mather / Smoot 2007: Fert / Grünberg 2008: Nambu / Kobayashi / Maskawa 2009: Kao / Boyle / Smith 2010: Geim / Novoselov 2011: Perlmutter / Schmidt / Riess 2012: Wineland / Haroche 2013: Englert / Higgs 2014: Akasaki / Amano / Nakamura 2015: Kajita / McDonald 2016: Thouless / Haldane / Kosterlitz 2017: Weiss / Barish / Thorne 2018: Ashkin / Mourou / Strickland 2019: Peebles / Mayor / Queloz 2020: Penrose / Genzel / Ghez 2021: Parisi / Hasselmann / Manabe 2022: Aspect / Clauser / Zeilinger 2023: Agostini / Krausz / L'Huillier 2024: Hopfield / Hinton

v t e Manhattan Project
Timeline
Sites	Ames Berkeley Chicago (Site A) Dayton Hanford Inyokern Los Alamos Montreal New York Oak Ridge Salt Wells Pilot Plant Trinity Wendover Heavy water sites
Administrators	Vannevar Bush Arthur Compton James B. Conant Priscilla Duffield Thomas Farrell Leslie Groves John Lansdale Ernest Lawrence James Marshall Franklin Matthias Dorothy McKibbin Kenneth Nichols Robert Oppenheimer Deak Parsons Boris Pash William Purnell Frank Spedding Charles Thomas Paul Tibbets Bud Uanna Harold Urey Stafford Warren Ed Westcott Roscoe Wilson
Scientists	Luis Alvarez Robert Bacher Hans Bethe Aage Bohr Niels Bohr Norris Bradbury James Chadwick John Cockcroft Charles Critchfield Harry Daghlian John R. Dunning Enrico Fermi Richard Feynman Val Fitch James Franck Klaus Fuchs Maria Goeppert Mayer George Kistiakowsky George Koval Willard Libby Edwin McMillan Mark Oliphant George B. Pegram Norman Ramsey Jr. Isidor Isaac Rabi James Rainwater Bruno Rossi Glenn Seaborg Emilio Segrè Louis Slotin Henry DeWolf Smyth Leo Szilard Edward Teller Stanisław Ulam John von Neumann John Wheeler Eugene Wigner Robert Wilson Leona Woods Chien-Shiung Wu
Operations	Alsos Mission Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Operation Crossroads Operation Peppermint Project Alberta Silverplate 509th Composite Group Enola Gay Bockscar The Great Artiste
Weapons	Fat Man Little Boy Pumpkin bomb Thin Man
Related topics	African Americans Atomic Energy Act of 1946 Bismuth phosphate process British contribution Calutron Girls Chicago Pile-1 Demon core Einstein–Szilard letter Franck Report Interim Committee K-25 Project Los Alamos Primer Nobel Prize laureates Oppenheimer security hearing Plutonium Quebec Agreement RaLa Experiment S-1 Executive Committee S-50 Project Smyth Report Uranium X-10 Graphite Reactor Y-12 Project
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