Owen Chamberlain
Owen Chamberlain (1920-), was an American physicist. He and fellow American physicist Emilio Segré devised an experimental method and system of analysis that made it possible to discover the antiproton. Chamberlain and Segré shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1959.
In the mid-1950's, Chamberlain and his longtime colleague Segré discovered the antiproton, a particle that is the mirror image of the proton but with an opposite electric charge. The two scientists used the bevatron particle accelerator to detect and analyze the new particle. Scientists had predicted the existence of antiparticles based on a theory that British theoretical physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac proposed in 1930, and in 1932 the positron, the twin of the negatively charged electron, was discovered.
Chamberlain graduated from Dartmouth College in 1941. He then enrolled in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. He interrupted his studies when the United States entered World War II (1939-1945). From 1942 through the end of the war, he participated in atomic research for the Manhattan Project. He was transferred to Los Alamos in 1943 and two years later witnessed the first test of the bomb.
Following the war, Chamberlain worked at Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago. At the same time, he attended the University of Chicago, studying under Enrico Fermi. In 1949, he earned a doctorate and returned to Berkeley as an instructor and became a full professor in 1958. In the late 1950's, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship working in the physics department of the University of Rome. He also spent a semester as a Loeb lecturer in physics at Harvard University. He was named emeritus professor at Berkeley in 1989.
Chamberlain married Beatrice Babette Cooper in 1943. The couple had three children before divorcing in 1978. Chamberlain married again in 1980 to June Steingart. He died in 2006, in Berkeley, California, at age 85.