Owen Chamberlain was an American physicist who shared with Emilio Segrè the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the antiproton, a sub-atomic antiparticle.
Occupation
physicist, university teacher
Citizenship
United States
Born
July 10, 1920
Died
February 28, 2006
Overview
Owen Chamberlain (July 10, 1920 – February 28, 2006) was an American physicist who shared with Emilio Segrè the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the antiproton, a sub-atomic antiparticle.
Biography
Born in San Francisco, California, Chamberlain graduated from Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia in 1937. He studied physics at Dartmouth College, where he was a member of Alpha Theta chapter of Theta Chi fraternity, and at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in school until the start of World War II, and joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, where he worked with Segrè, both at Berkeley and in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He married Beatrice Babette Copper (d. 1988) in 1943, with whom he had four children.
In 1946, after the war, Chamberlain continued with his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago under physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi acted as an important guide and mentor for Chamberlain, encouraging him to leave behind theoretical physics for experimental physics, for which Chamberlain had a particular aptitude. Chamberlain received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1949.
