Dr Owen Chamberlain

Nobel Prize Recipient. Owen Chamberlain, an American physicist, received worldwide recognition after being awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared the coveted award with an Italian-American physicist Emilio Segre . According to the Nobel Prize committee, these two scientists received the award "for their discovery of the antiproton." Both held positions at University of California at Berkeley at the time of the discovery. Since 1957, he received 8 nominations for the Nobel candidacy. In a 1955 experiment with a powerful particle accelerator, he and Segrè confirmed the existence of the proton's antiparticle, the antiproton. Born the son of a prominent radiologist, Dr. William Edward Chamberlain, the family relocated from California to Philadelphia in 1930, where his father taught at Temple University. He graduated with a BS from Dartmouth College in 1941 and entered graduate school at the University of California, his father's alma mater, majoring in physics. With the outbreak of World War II, he joined early in 1942 the Manhattan Project, the United States Government organization for the construction of the atomic bomb. While there and in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he worked under Segre, investigating nuclear cross sections for intermediate-energy neutrons and the spontaneous fission of heavy elements. After the war, he attended the University of Chicago, studying under the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient, Enrico Fermi and earning his doctorate degree in 1949. In 1948 he accepted a teaching position at the University of California in Berkeley and doing research with Segre and other scientists. In 1957 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the purpose of doing studies in the physics of antinucleons at the University of Rome in Italy. In 1958 he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and served as Loeb Lecturer at Harvard University in 1959. During the 1960s, he and his colleagues studied the interactions of antiprotons with hydrogen, deuterium and other elements, using antiprotons to produce antineutrons. These and other similar experiments were his main activity for the next 20 years. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He published several papers about his discoveries. After the end of World War II, at the age of twenty-five years old, he traveled to Hiroshima, Japan and was profoundly disturbed by the experience after viewing the outcome of the August 9, 1945 detonating of a nuclear weapon. This trip led him to an interest in causes including human rights, nonviolence, and free speech. His signature was one of the 22 signatures belonging to Nobel Prize laureates on the 2003 "Humanist Manifesto III." In the late 1980s, he was invited to Japan for a lecture tour, and during the trip, he insisted on visiting Hiroshima to offer his personal apologies in its Peace Memorial Park. Along with many of his students, he protested the United States participation in the Vietnam War. He was the cofounder and longtime cochairman of the Special Opportunities Scholarship (SOS) program to help talented but socially and economically deprived high school students to attend the University of California. He married three times. He and his first wife Beatrice Babette Copper, who he married in 1943, had three daughters and one son before her 1988 death. He remarried as a widower for the next two marriages. In 1985, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, but did not retire from teaching until 1989. Upon his retirement from University of California at Berkeley, he received the campus's highest honor, the Berkeley Citation. He died from the complications of Parkinson's Disease. He and his sister are buried in their mother's Owen family plot. All his professional papers were donated to the University of California for the Bancroft Library. Upon his retirement, it was published, "He's the last of the Nobel generation at UC Berkeley that emerged from the Manhattan Project and, with E. O. Lawrence's cyclotron, changed the face of physics."