Nobel Prize

I was born in 1911 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of John MacLeod Fowler and Jennie Summers Watson Fowler. My parents had two other children, my younger brother, Arthur Watson Fowler and my still younger sister, Nelda Fowler Wood. My paternal grandfather, William Fowler, was a coal miner in Slammannan, near Falkirk, Scotland who emigrated…

Sin-Itiro Tomonaga was born in Tokyo, Japan, on March 31, 1906, the eldest son of Sanjuro Tomonaga and Hide Tomonaga. In 1913 his family moved to Kyoto when his father was appointed a professor of philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University. From that time he was brought up in Kyoto. He is a graduate of the…

I was born on August 10, 1913 in Lorenzkirch a small village in Saxony, as the forth child of Theodor and Elisabeth Paul nee Ruppel. All in all we were six children. Both parents were descendants from Lutheran ministers in several generations. I grew up in München where my father has been a professor for…

Family BackgroundThe Kao family comes from a township called Zhangyan in the Jinshan district near Shanghai, China. As landowners, the family would have been considered wealthy. The sons of each generation would be well educated in the style of the times. My knowledge of the family’s genealogy goes back only to Grandfather. Grandfather Kao Hsieh…

by John N. Bahcall What makes the sun shine? How does the sun produce the vast amount of energy necessary to support life on earth? These questions challenged scientists for a hundred and fifty years, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. Theoretical physicists battled geologists and evolutionary biologists in a heated controversy over…

By Klaus Biedermann* Prize-awarded methods Among the Nobel Prizes in Physics, two scientists have been honored for their remarkable methods to record and present images: , awarded in 1908 “for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference,” and , awarded in 1971, “for his invention and development of the holographic…

by Sven Kullander Why accelerators Particle accelerators are devices producing beams of energetic ions and electrons which are employed for many different purposes, one being ultra-precision microscopy. As is well known objects with dimensions down to the size of a living cell are investigated by optical microscopes and those down to atomic dimensions by electron…

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Presentation Speech by Dr. A.G. Ekstrand, President of , on December 10, 1920 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize for Physics 1920 to Ch.E. Guillaume, Director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, for the services he has rendered to…