Owen Chamberlain
was born in San Francisco on July 10, 1920. His father, W.
Edward Chamberlain, a former instructor at the University of
California, was a radiologist on the staff of the Stanford
University Hospital when his son was born. The family moved to
Philadelphia when Chamberlain was 10 years old, and he received
his early education in the public schools there. He earned his
undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College with the last
pre-World War II graduating class, in June 1941.
That fall,
Chamberlain came to the Berkeley campus to do graduate work in
physics. But within a year the United States had entered the
war, and the government had embarked on a crash research
program. Chamberlain abandoned his own studies in 1942 to join a
group of scientists investigating uranium isotopes for the
Manhattan Project under the direction of Ernest O. Lawrence. In
the middle of 1943, Chamberlain transferred to Los Alamos, where
he continued his atomic research and participated in the firing
of the first atomic bomb test in 1945. (Chamberlain lost a $5
bet on the test: "There were just too many possibilities it
wouldn't work," he thought, incorrectly, at the time.)
At the end of the
war, Chamberlain continued his work in atomic physics in
Chicago, earning his Ph.D. under Professor Enrico Fermi at the
University of Chicago in 1948. He was invited to the Berkeley
campus as an instructor in physics. He became an assistant
professor in 1950 and an associate professor four years later.
When Chamberlain
returned to the University of California, he began a series of
scientific investigations that laid the foundation for the work
that later brought him fame. Using the giant cyclotron on the
hill above the campus, Chamberlain concentrated on the study of
the scattering of high-energy protons and neutrons. He was
particularly successful with proton polarization experiments,
including the first triple-scattering experiments with polarized
protons.
His work with
protons, which have a positive charge, was superseded by a study
of their opposite, the anti-protons. Anti-protons had been the
object of scientific discussion since their existence was first
suggested in the 1920s. Though stable in a vacuum, anti-protons
could not exist with ordinary matter and were extremely elusive.
Scientists had not been able to establish their existence in
atomic nuclei despite involved experiments with cosmic rays.
During the early
1950s, Chamberlain entered into a fruitful scientific
collaboration with Emilio Segrč, Italian-born physicist and
fellow member of the Berkeley faculty who was conducting
research of a similar nature. In 1955, using the Berkeley
Bevatron---then the most powerful "atom-smasher" in the
world---the Chamberlain-Segrč team created anti-protons
artificially which stayed alive long enough to be identified.
Their findings indicated that all particles in the atom's
nucleus have twins of opposite polarities.
Ernest Lawrence
compared the discovery of the anti-proton with the discovery of
the positive electron, which initiated the remarkable
developments that followed in nuclear physics. In recognition of
his outstanding work in discovering the anti-proton, Chamberlain
shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics with his co-worker,
Emilio Segrč.
__________
Schoch,
Russell. "Owen Chamberlain: Physics, 1959." The Nobel
Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 16.