Norman Foster Ramsey
Ramsey, Norman Foster (1915-) is an American physicist who did important research into electrical and magnetic properties of atoms and molecules. Ramsey received the 19S9 Nobel Prize in physics, which he shared with Hans George Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul.
Ramsey was born on Aug. 27, 1915, in Washington, D.C. He graduated from high school at age 15 and entered Columbia University in New York City in 1931. When he graduated in 1935, Columbia awarded him the Kellett Fellowship to Cambridge University, England, where he earned a second bachelor's degree, this time in physics.
Returning to Columbia in 1937, Ramsey worked with Austrian-born American physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi in molecular beam magnetic resonance. A molecular beam is a stream of molecules moving in about the same direction and at approximately the same speed. When it strikes surfaces of materials, it reveals detailed information about the molecular structure of atoms in the beam or the surface.
From 1940 to 1942, Ramsey developed radar technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory. In 1943, Ramsey moved to Los Alamos. New Mexico, to work on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb.
Ramsey then returned to Columbia. He and Rabi revived the molecular beam laboratory at Columbia. From 1947 to 1987, Ramsey taught at Harvard University.
In working with molecular beams, Ramsey had difficulty obtaining uniform magnetic fields—fields that have constant strength and direction. He devised the separated oscillatory field method for obtaining uniform magnetic fields, which he used to measure electrical and magnetic properties of atoms and molecules. With Daniel Kleppner, a former student, Ramsey invented the atomic hydrogen maser, which made very fine measurements. A by-product of this research was a new type of atomic clock, which measures time by measuring atomic vibrations. Ramsey received the Nobel Prize for this body of work.