George Paget Thomson

Sir George Paget Thomson (3 May 1892 – 10 September 1975) was a British experimental physicist who shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics with Clinton Davisson "for their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals." His father, J. J. Thomson, won the Nobel Prize in 1906 "for his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases". It has been said that the elder Thomson won the Nobel for showing the electron is a particle, the younger for showing it is a wave.

Education and military service

George Paget Thomson was born on 3 May 1892 in Cambridge, England, the son of physicist and Nobel laureate J. J. Thomson and Rose Elisabeth Paget, the daughter of George Edward Paget.

Thomson attended The Perse School, before going on to read mathematics and physics at Trinity College, Cambridge. After graduating in 1913, he went to the Cavendish Laboratory to do research under his father, until the outbreak of World War I the following year, when he was commissioned into the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment. After brief service in France, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps the following year to undertake research on aerodynamics at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and elsewhere. He resigned from his commission as a captain in 1920.

Career and research

In 1919, Thomson became a Fellow of and a lecturer at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1922, he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Whereas Thomson's father, J. J. Thomson (winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics), had seen the electron as a particle, the son demonstrated that the electron could be diffracted like a wave.