Robert Hofstadter · Science & Medicine
Physicist; electron scattering revealing the size and structure of nuclei and nucleons, Nobel Prize in Physics 1961; thallium-activated sodium iodide gamma-ray detector
5 February 1915, New York City, New York, United States — 17 November 1990, Stanford, California, United States
New York · Princeton · Stanford
Robert Hofstadter is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Physicist; electron scattering revealing the size and structure of nuclei and nucleons, Nobel Prize in Physics 1961; thallium-activated sodium iodide gamma-ray detector
Origins and early life
Robert Hofstadter was born in New York City on 5 February 1915, one of the four children of Louis Hofstadter, a cigar-store owner and salesman, and of Henrietta Koenigsberg. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, and when his Nobel Prize was announced the Jewish Telegraphic Agency described him as a New York-born Jewish scientist. He graduated magna cum laude from the City College of New York in 1935, at twenty, and took his doctorate at Princeton in 1938, where he studied quantum mechanics with Eugene Wigner.
Work and career
Back at Princeton after war work on fuses and altimeters, he found in 1948 that thallium-activated sodium iodide made an excellent gamma-ray detector, a crystal still used across physics, medicine and astronomy. In 1950 he moved to Stanford, whose new linear accelerator let him fire high-energy electrons at thin targets and measure their scattering, as Ernest Rutherford had probed the atom with alpha particles. His first experiments, on gold, showed that the nucleus had a measurable size, and later ones that even the proton is not a point but has a structure; in 1956 he named the unit of nuclear size the fermi, after Enrico Fermi.
Recognition
In 1961 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Rudolf Mössbauer, for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons. He also pressed for a far larger accelerator, an idea that led to the two-mile Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where similar experiments later revealed quarks inside the proton.
Personal life
He married Nancy Givan in 1942, and their three children include the writer Douglas Hofstadter; later he worked on imaging the heart with synchrotron X-rays and on the gamma-ray telescope EGRET. He died at Stanford on 17 November 1990, at seventy-five, months before EGRET was launched aboard the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
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Source: Wikipedia — Robert Hofstadter
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Physicist; electron scattering revealing the size and structure of nuclei and nucleons, Nobel Prize in Physics 1961; thallium-activated sodium iodide gamma-ray detector
Source: Wikipedia — Robert Hofstadter
