Owen Chamberlain in 1984
(photo courtesy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Posted on 03/01/2006 8:40:52 PM PST by NormsRevenge
BERKELEY – Owen Chamberlain, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics as co-discoverer of the antiproton, has died at age 85.
Chamberlain, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, died Tuesday at his Berkeley home from complications of Parkinson's disease, campus officials said Wednesday.
Chamberlain and Berkeley physicist Emilio Segre shared the Nobel Prize in 1959 for discovering the antiproton, which is the opposite counterpart to the positively charged proton.
“The discovery opened up a whole new field of physics and expanded our understanding of particle physics,” Chamberlain's colleague and former student Herbert Steiner, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, said in a news release issued by the campus.
Campus officials described Chamberlain as a gifted teacher whose unique explanations for physical phenomena were known as “Chamberlainisms” in the department.
Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau described Chamberlain as an example of Berkeley's best, combining a piercing intellect with caring teaching, and also as “the last of the Nobel generation at Cal that emerged from the Manhattan Project and, with E. O. Lawrence's cyclotron, changed the face of physics.”
In addition to his scientific achievements, Chamberlain was a humanist and social activist, Steiner said, taking part in Free Speech Movement demonstrations in the 1960s and speaking out on race relations, the Vietnam War and many liberal causes. In the 1950s and 1960s, he campaigned for a nuclear test ban treaty.
Chamberlain retired in 1989, but had continued to attend weekly department meetings, including one last week, Steiner said.
Chamberlain was born July 10, 1920, in San Francisco. He graduated from Dartmouth College and then enrolled at UC Berkeley, where he joined the Manhattan Project. He was present at the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico, where he lost a $5 bet it wouldn't explode.
Chamberlain went on to work at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago while obtaining a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago and then returned to Berkeley in 1948 as a physics instructor.
He was a student of Segre's in the 1940s at Berkeley and after getting his doctorate returned to work in Segre's group at the Radiation Laboratory, now known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Survivors include his wife, Senta Pugh-Chamberlain, and four children by his first wife, Beatrice Babette Copper, who died in 1988 – Karen Chamberlain of Tampa, Fla., Lynne Guenther of Ithaca, N.Y., Pia Chamberlain of San Jose, and son Darol of Ithaca. He also is survived by stepdaughters Mary Pugh of Toronto and Anne Pugh of Oakland. A second wife, June Steingart Greenfield, died in 1991.
He had a sense of humor or so it sounds.
Owen Chamberlain in 1984
(photo courtesy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
I want some physicist to discover anti-calories. If that isn't worth a Nobel Prize, nothing is.
Granted, for peace or literature. But chemistry or physics?
1st Barney Fife. Then Kolchak. Then McCloud. Now Chamberlain! Who's next?
"Anti-proton" sounds like a double-negative. Why didn't he just name it a "conton"?
Chamberlain's Los Alamos ID photo. Remarkably, He studied under Enrico Fermi, earning his PhD at University of Chicago. Fermi recognized his aptitude for experimental physics and guided him in that direction and away from the always exotic field of theoretical physics. More recently, he lobbied in behalf of physicists imprisoned by the Soviet Union for expressing political ideas antithetical to the welfare of the communist state.
From what I understand there was rampant betting before the Trinity Test, about various outcomes.
Some scientists present were concerned that Trinity would set off a chain reaction, igniting the entire earth's atmosphere. Fortunately, that didn't happen. But it would be hard to collect on a bet aftewards...
He looks a lot like a fellow I met years ago, long since gone, he used to do research for 3M and worked at Grumman during WW2 on fighter aircraft, held a number of patents.
He was a staunch believer that this nation has been under attack from within for years. I can probably give him much of the credit for some of my own beliefs and pursuits that I have followed in my own life.
Farewell to a great scientist.
The obit noted that he agitated for a lot of liberal causes, as did most physicists of his generation. If there is one single reason why the physics community is so much more liberal than the chemistry or even the biology communities, it can probably be summed up in one word: Hiroshima.
Well, Octavia Butler, the first black woman to receive prominence in the science fiction community, recently passed away as well.
He looks like Radiohead's Thom Yorke.
Yeah, there was. Some of the more interesting bets were whether or not it would ignite the atmosphere or blow a hole down to the center of the Earth. A lot of the weird bets are often attributed to Edward Teller but it isn't known whether or not he was responsible for all of them.
Teller was known to be a joker. Just before the test, he was putting on sun screen.
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