Ben Mottelson · Science & Medicine
Nobel laureate in physics (1975) for nuclear structure; Atoms for Peace Award (1969)
9 July 1926, Chicago — 13 May 2022
Chicago, Copenhagen
Ben Mottelson is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Nobel laureate in physics (1975) for nuclear structure; Atoms for Peace Award (1969)
Origins and early life
Ben Mottelson (1926-2022) was born in Chicago to a Jewish family, the son of Georgia Blum and Goodman Mottelson, an engineer. The Navy sent him to officer training at Purdue, where he took his degree in 1947, and he earned his doctorate in nuclear physics at Harvard in 1950 under Julian Schwinger.
Work and career
A travelling fellowship brought him to the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen — the future Niels Bohr Institute — and he stayed: he joined CERN's theoretical study group, based in that city, in 1953, became a professor at the new Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957, and took Danish citizenship in 1971. With Aage Bohr he showed that atomic nuclei are not always spherical but can deform, vibrate and rotate as a whole, reconciling the collective picture of the nucleus with the shell model of independent particles.
In 1975 Bohr, Mottelson and James Rainwater shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jewish Nobel Prize winners in Physics
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Nobel laureate in physics (1975) for nuclear structure; Atoms for Peace Award (1969)
Source: Jinfo.org — Jewish Nobel Prize winners in Physics
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