Derek Jackson

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Derek Ainslie Jackson (born June 23, 1906 in the Hampstead district of London , † February 20, 1982 in Lausanne in western Switzerland) was a British physicist who dealt with atomic spectroscopy .

Life

Jackson was the son of the Welsh politician, landowner, newspaper publisher and collector Charles James Jackson (1849-1923), who was an expert on antiques made of gold and silver, about which he wrote several books.

Derek Jackson studied at Trinity College in Cambridge and then worked at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford under Frederick Lindemann . There he carried out early work on hyperfine structure (influence of nuclear spin on the optical spectrum) and in 1924 observed the hyperfine structure in the cesium atom. In 1928 he achieved the first quantitative determination of a nuclear moment from spectra. In Oxford he later worked closely with the German emigrant Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn . He received his doctorate in Oxford in 1934 and became a lecturer in 1934 and professor in Oxford in 1945. After the Second World War he went abroad (for tax reasons) and continued his spectroscopic work in Paris in the Aimé Cotton research laboratory of the Center national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (with a research professorship in the 1970s).

In 1947 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . He was a Knight of the Legion of Honor . In 1950 he was visiting professor at Ohio State University in Columbus . From 1952 to 1953 he was Honorary Assistant at the Dunsink Observatory in Ireland.

In addition to his work as a physicist, he was a jockey in the steeplechase race. In 1935 he took part in the Grand National for the first time , most recently in 1946. He was married six times, including a daughter of the Welsh painter Augustus John , with Pamela Mitford (a sister of Nancy Mitford ) and from 1966 with the writer and socialite Barbara Skelton (1916 -1996). In the 1930s, Derek Jackson, like his then wife Pamela Mitford, sympathized with the fascists and attracted attention with anti-Semitic remarks.

In the Second World War he was used in the Royal Air Force, among other things as a navigator in night fighters. For his services he was honored with the Order of the British Empire , the Air Force Cross and the Distinguished Flying Cross . It also played a role in the tests of film strips for radar deception that were eventually used by the Royal Air Force. He also invented a modified form of this deception strategy in order to simulate a second invasion fleet on the radar of the Wehrmacht on the day of the invasion of Normandy . In addition, he demonstrated the dangerousness of the passive radar Monica due to a captured German detector Flensburg set on it, whereupon the use of Monica in British bombers was stopped.

literature

  • Heinrich Gerhard Kuhn, Christopher Hartley, Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society, Volume 29, 1983, p. 268
  • Simon Courtault As I Was Going to St. Ives: A Life of Derek Jackson , Norwich, Michael Russell 2007, Review by Ferdinand Mound , London Review of Books
  • Diana Mosley (Diana Mitford) Loved Ones , Sidgwick and Jackson 1985

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Based on the memoirs of Nancy Mitford. Paul Reynolds Nancy Mitford spied on sisters , BBC News Online, November 14, 2003

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Jackson, Derek
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jackson, Derek Ainslie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Hampstead (London)
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1982
Place of death Lausanne