Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
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Charles Thomson Rees Wilson CH (February 14, 1869 – November 15, 1959) was a Scottish physicist.
He was born in the parish of Glencorse, Midlothian, near Edinburgh, Scotland, to a farmer, John Wilson, and his mother Annie Clerk Harper. After his father died in 1873, his family moved to Manchester. He was educated at Owen's College from 1884 to 1888, studying biology with the intent to become a physician. He then went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge where he became interested in physics and chemistry. He remained there from 1888 to 1894, earning a master's degree in 1892.
Wilson became particularly interested in meteorology after his admission to Cambridge, and in 1893 he began to study clouds and their properties. He worked for some time at the observatory on Ben Nevis, and was particulary impressed by the beautiful play of colors and effects from the interaction between the sunlight and the cloud cover surrounding the mountain's summit. He tried to reproduce this effect on a smaller scale in the laboratory in Cambridge, expanding humid air within a sealed container. Usually the nucleus of condensation for saturated gas is a piece of dust. But Wilson noticed that, even when he eliminated the dust, condensation still occurred under certain circumstances, primarily that the expanded volume be 1.25 of the original volume. He suspected that the condensation nucleii were ions, and reported his results to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in May of 1995. He then exposed the chamber to X-rays, and noticed that the degree of condensation was considerably enhanced, thus re-enforcing his original conjecture, since X-rays were already known for their quality of ionizing a gas.
In 1895 Wilson joined the Cavendish Laboratory, and in 1896 was appointed Clerk Maxwell Student at Cambridge, allowing him to devote the next three years to research on the cloud chamber. He continued his experiments, noting that when the enclosed supersaturated gas was exposed to an electric field, no clouds formed, thus affirming his original conjecture that ions of molecular dimensions caused clouds to form. He reported his results in a series of papers until 1900, when his investigations turned to atmospheric electricity.
In 1900, Wilson became a teaching fellow at Sindey Sussex College, while continuing to lecture in Physics at the Cavendish Labboratory. As his responsibilities increased over the years, he tended to have less time to devote to research. But in 1910, he returned to his original research, and in 1911 he experimented to see if the tracks of charged particles would become visible through their condensation tracks within the cloud chamber. Wilson first tried X-rays, and noted that the paths of electrons formed by x-ray exitation immediately became visible. He then introduced radioactive materials, and found that he could identify the paths of alpha and beta rays they emitted. Wilson reported these effects, including photographs of the same, to the Royal Society. After completing the construction of an improved apparatus, he reported further results to the society in 1912.
Tracks left by alpha rays closely matched diagrams of the paths postulated for these particles and published by William H. Bragg, who later went on to win a Nobel prize for his work in X-ray crystallography. Wilson enhanced the images of the paths of charged particles in his cloud chamber through stereophotography, which presents a three-dimensional image of the phenomena.
Wilson received an appointment as an observer at the Cambridge Solar Physics Observatory in 1913. He was able to continue his research in this position. But at the outbreak of World War II, his research came to a temporary halt.
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In late 1896, Wilson became
Wilson continued experimenting .
He married Jessie Fraser in 1908, the daughter of a minister from Glasgow, and the couple had four children. He died near Edinburgh, surrounded by his family.
The Wilson crater on the Moon is co-named for him, Alexander Wilson and Ralph Elmer Wilson.
The Wilson Society, the natural sciences society of Sidney Sussex College, is also named for him.
See also
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
<<At least 3 reliable references are needed here, properly formatted.>>
- Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, Isaac Asimov, 2nd ed., Doubleday & C., Inc., ISBN 0-385-17771-2.
External link
| Nobel Prize in Physics Laureates | |
|---|---|
Jean Perrin (1926) • Arthur Compton / Charles Wilson (1927) • Owen Richardson (1928) • Louis de Broglie (1929) • C. V. Raman (1930) • Werner Heisenberg (1932) • Erwin Schrödinger / Paul Dirac (1933) • James Chadwick (1935) • Victor Hess / Carl Anderson (1936) • Clinton Davisson / George Thomson (1937) • Enrico Fermi (1938) • Ernest Lawrence (1939) • Otto Stern (1943) • Isidor Rabi (1944) • Wolfgang Pauli (1945) • Percy Bridgman (1946) • Edward Appleton (1947) • Patrick Blackett (1948) • Hideki Yukawa (1949) • Cecil Powell (1950) | |
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