Maurice Pryce

Maurice Henry Lecorney Pryce (born January 24, 1913 in Croydon , † July 24, 2003 in Vancouver ) was a British physicist .

Life

Pryce was in Heidelberg for a short time and learned German there and later he was at Trinity College (Cambridge) . There he excelled in the Tripos exams and was a research student of Ralph Fowler and Max Born . In 1935 he went to Princeton and received the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship (now the Harkness Fellowship). He worked at Princeton a. a. with Wolfgang Pauli and John von Neumann and received his doctorate in 1937 ( The wave mechanics of the photon ). He then returned to England in 1937 as a fellow at Trinity College and a lecturer in Cambridge. In 1938 he refuted the two neutrino theory of photons, which earned him recognition from Paul Dirac . In 1939 he became a reader at the University of Liverpool with James Chadwick . There he began to deal with nuclear physics and also repeated the calculations of Rudolf Peierls and Otto Robert Frisch about the possibility of building nuclear weapons with more precise data. The result was frightening for him and he turned instead to radar research during World War II - among other things, he theoretically proved that the bomber routing used by the German Air Force was possible with radio waves as far as the Central England with transmitters on the Channel coast - and that Development of civil nuclear reactors. In 1944 he went to Canada in this context and designed the first British nuclear reactor (code name BEPO) with Edward Armand Guggenheim . In 1946 he became Wykeham Professor of Physics at Oxford and a Fellow of New College. Even after Klaus Fuchs was arrested in 1950, he was interim head of the theoretical department of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) in Harwell. His graduate and graduate students at Oxford included Anatole Abragam (1950), John Clive Ward , Roger Elliott , John Ziman, and nuclear physicists Roger Blin-Stoyle and David Brink . In addition to nuclear physics, he also dealt with solid state physics (magnetism). Since he was dissatisfied with the management of the Clarendon Laboratory under Lord Cherwell , he moved in 1954 as head of the physics faculty and successor to Nevill Mott at the University of Bristol . Here he was concerned with the Jahn-Teller effect . In 1964 he went to the USA at the University of Southern California before moving to Vancouver at the University of British Columbia in 1968 . From 1968 to 1978 he was an advisor to Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd on dealing with radioactive waste.

Pryce had been a member of the Royal Society (FRS) since 1951 .

In 1939 he married one of Max Born's daughters (Susanne Margarethe), with whom he had a son and three daughters. The marriage was later divorced and he was married to Freda Kinsey in 1961 in second marriage.

Awards and memberships

1935 Fellow, Cambridge Philosophical Society
1936 member of the American Physical Society
1938 Fellow, Royal Astronomical Society
1946 Fellow, Physical Society (London); Member of Council 1959-61
1951 Fellow of the Royal Society
1957 Member of the Radar and Signals Advisory Board, Ministry of Supply
1958 Member of the Electronics Research Council, Ministry of Aviation
1959 member and temporarily Chairman of the Advisory Council, Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham
1960 Honorary member of the Council of the Société de Physique, Paris
1965 Fellow of the American Physical Society

Web links

Obituary in The Independent

Individual evidence

^ Professor Maurice Pryce Physicist who strove to make nuclear power safe was , obituary in the Times
^ Roger Elliott, JH Sanders Maurice Henry Lecorney Pryce. 24 January 1913 - 24 July 2003 (PDF; 546 kB), Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, Volume 51, 2005, pp. 355-366
^ Pryce Neutrino theory of light , Proc. Roy. Soc., A, Vol. 165, 1938, pp. 257-271
^ Published after the war as Pryce Diffraction of radio waves by the curvature of the Earth , Adv. Phys., 2, 1953, 67-95. He worked with Cyril Domb on this. Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), Churchill's scientific advisor, was of the opposite opinion at the time. Fred Hoyle described Pryce's work in his 1997 memoir as the most awsome piece of mathematical virtuosity I ever saw .

personal data
SURNAME	Pryce, Maurice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Pryce, Maurice Henry Lecorney (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 24, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH	Croydon
DATE OF DEATH	July 24, 2003
Place of death	Vancouver

[1] Professor Maurice Pryce Physicist who strove to make nuclear power safe was , obituary in the Times

[2] Roger Elliott, JH Sanders Maurice Henry Lecorney Pryce. 24 January 1913 - 24 July 2003 (PDF; 546 kB), Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, Volume 51, 2005, pp. 355-366

[3] Pryce Neutrino theory of light , Proc. Roy. Soc., A, Vol. 165, 1938, pp. 257-271

[4] Published after the war as Pryce Diffraction of radio waves by the curvature of the Earth , Adv. Phys., 2, 1953, 67-95. He worked with Cyril Domb on this. Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), Churchill's scientific advisor, was of the opposite opinion at the time. Fred Hoyle described Pryce's work in his 1997 memoir as the most awsome piece of mathematical virtuosity I ever saw .