George Paget Thomson

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For other people named George Thomson, see George Thomson (disambiguation).

Sir George Paget Thomson FRS (May 3, 1892 – September 10, 1975) was a Nobel-Prize-winning, English physicist who discovered the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.

George Thomson was born in Cambridge, the son of Nobel Prize winning physicist J. J. Thomson and Rose Elisabeth Paget, the daughter of the Professor of Medicine at Cambridge. Thomson read mathematics and physics at Trinity College, Cambridge, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he joined the Queen's Regiment of Infantry. After a brief service in France, he worked on aerodynamics at Farnborough and elsewhere.

In 1924, Thomson married Kathleen Buchanan Smith, daughter of the Very Rev. Sir George Adam Smith. They had four children, two sons and two daughters. Kathleen died in 1941.

After briefly serving in the First World War Thomson became a Fellow at Cambridge and then moved to the University of Aberdeen. George Thomson was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for his work in Aberdeen in discovering the wave-like properties of the electron. The prize was shared with Clinton Joseph Davisson who had made the same discovery independently. Whereas his father had seen the electron as a particle (and won his Nobel Prize in the process), Thomson demonstrated that it could be diffracted like a wave, a discovery proving the principle of wave-particle duality which had first been posited by Louis-Victor de Broglie in the 1920s as what is often dubbed the de Broglie hypothesis.

In 1930 he was appointed Professor at Imperial College London. In the late 1930s and during the Second World War Thomson specialised in nuclear physics, concentrating on practical military applications. In particular Thomson was the chairman of the crucial MAUD Committee in 1940-1941 that concluded that an atomic bomb was feasible. In later life he continued this work on nuclear energy but also wrote works on aerodynamics and the value of science in society.

Thomson stayed at Imperial College until 1952, when he became Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1964, the college honoured his tenure with the George Thomson Building, an outstanding work of modernist architecture on the college's Leckhampton campus.

He was knighted in 1943.