Everything about The Cavendish Laboratory totally explained
The
Cavendish Laboratory is the
University of Cambridge's Department of
Physics, and is part of the university's School of Physical Sciences. It was opened in
1874 as a teaching
laboratory and was initially located on the
New Museums Site,
Free School Lane, in the centre of Cambridge. After perennial space problems, it moved to its present site in
West Cambridge in the early 1970s.
The current head of the Cavendish is
Peter Littlewood. The
Cavendish Professorship of Physics is currently held by
Sir Richard Friend.
The Department is named after
Henry Cavendish, a famous
physicist, and a member of the
Dukes of Devonshire branch of the
Cavendish family. Another family member,
William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, was Chancellor of the University, and he gave money to endow the laboratory in memory of his learned relative. The original founder was Tom Heintz.
As of 2006, 29 Cavendish researchers have won
Nobel Prizes.
Nuclear physics
In World War II the laboratory carried out research for the
MAUD Committee, part of the British
Tube Alloys project of research into the
Atomic Bomb. Researchers included
Nicholas Kemmer,
Allan Nunn May,
Anthony French, and the French scientists including
Lew Kowarski and
Hans von Halban. Several transferred to Canada in 1943; the
Montreal Laboratory and some later to the
Chalk River Laboratories.
The production of
plutonium and
neptunium by bombarding
uranium-238 with neutrons was predicted in 1940 by two teams working independently:
Egon Bretscher and
Norman Feather at the Cavendish and
Edwin M. McMillan and
Philip Abelson at
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Biology
The Cavendish Laboratory has had an important influence on
biology, mainly through the application of
X-ray crystallography to the study of structures of biological molecules.
Francis Crick already worked in the Medical Research Council Unit, headed by
Max Perutz and housed in the Cavendish Laboratory, when
James Watson came from the
United States and they made a breakthrough in discovering the structure of
DNA. For their work while in the Cavendish Laboratory, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in
1962, together with
Maurice Wilkins of King's College London, himself a graduate of St. John's College, Cambridge.
Groups
Areas in which the Laboratory has been very influential since 1950 include:-
Nobel Prize winning Cavendish researchers
Lord Rayleigh (Physics, 1904)
Sir J.J. Thomson (Physics, 1906)
Lord Rutherford (Ernest Rutherford) (Chemistry, 1908)
Sir Lawrence Bragg (Physics, 1915)
Charles Barkla (Physics, 1917)
Francis Aston (Chemistry, 1922)
Charles Wilson (Physics, 1927)
Arthur Compton (Physics, 1927)
Sir Owen Richardson (Physics, 1928)
Sir James Chadwick (Physics, 1935)
Sir George Thomson (Physics, 1937)
Sir Edward Appleton (Physics, 1947)
Lord Blackett (Patrick Blackett) (Physics, 1948)
Sir John Cockcroft (Physics, 1951)
Ernest Walton (Physics, 1951)
Francis Crick (Physiology or Medicine, 1962)
James Watson (Physiology or Medicine, 1962)
Max Perutz (Chemistry, 1962)
Sir John Kendrew (Chemistry, 1962)
Dorothy Hodgkin (Chemistry, 1964)
Brian Josephson (Physics, 1973)
Sir Martin Ryle (Physics, 1974)
Anthony Hewish (Physics, 1974)
Sir Nevill Mott (Physics, 1977)
Philip Anderson (Physics, 1977)
Pjotr Kapitsa (Physics, 1978)
Allan Cormack (Physiology or Medicine, 1979)
Sir Aaron Klug (Chemistry, 1982)
Norman Ramsey (Physics, 1989)Further Information
Get more info on 'Cavendish Laboratory'.
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