Sir George Thomson

Sir George Thomson was born in 1892 in Cambridge, the son of the physicist Sir J.J. Thomson. George studied in Cambridge from his primary school to university, including University of Cambridge, where he attended Trinity College and studied mathematics and physics. Under his father's supervision in atomic structure, he also worked for a year at the Cavendish Laboratory until World War I. After the war he spent three years as Fellow and Lecturer at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and continued his physics research. He was then appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy (Physics) at the University of Aberdeen, a post he held for eight years.

At Aberdeen he carried out experiments on the behaviour of electrons as they passed through very thin films of metals, which showed that electrons could behave as waves in spite of being particles. For this work he later shared the Nobel Prize, with C.J. Davisson of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, who had arrived at the same conclusions by a different kind of experiment. They shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937, "for their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals". The process of electron diffraction, which these experiments established, has been widely used in the investigation of the surfaces of solids.

In 1930 he was appointed as a Professor at Imperial College, University of London. Soon, he became interested in nuclear physics. When the fission of uranium was discovered at the beginning of 1939, he predicted its military and other functions, and persuaded the British Air Ministry to procure a ton of uranium oxide for experiments. Later he became the Chairman of British Committee, investigating possibilities of making atomic bombs. This committee reported in 1941 that it was possible to make a bomb, and Thomson was authorized to give this report to American scientists, Vannevar Bush and James Conant. After the war he returned to work at Imperial College. He continued his nuclear research and published many papers.

He left atomic bomb research in 1952 and became the Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, retiring from the latter in 1962. In 1924 he married Kathleen Buchanan. They had two sons and two daughters. His favourite hobby was making model ships. He died in 1975.