Philip Burton Moon
Philip Burton Moon (born May 17, 1907 in Lewisham , now part of London , † October 9, 1994 ) was a British physicist .
life and work
Moon was born in 1907 to Frederick Dolman Moon and his wife Clara Charlotte (née Burton). He received his education at Leyton County High School and studied at Cambridge University , where he graduated in 1928. This was followed by a position as a researcher in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge with Marcus Oliphant . In 1931 he got a position as an assistant and in 1934 a lecturer at Imperial College London . After the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick 1932 Moon specialized in George Paget Thomson to the newly developing field of neutron physics . In 1938 Oliphant was offered a call to Birmingham University and Moon followed his former teacher there. In Birmingham he worked with others on the development of nuclear physics there.
After the outbreak of war , work there concentrated on research on the newly developed radar, which is important for the war effort . In 1940/41 Moon was one of the members of the secret MAUD commission , which investigated the possibility of building an atomic bomb and recommended it to be built. He later also worked on the Tube Alloys project. From 1943 he worked in Los Alamos as a member of the British delegation on the construction of the first atomic bomb. After the war, he received a professorship in 1946 and, after Oliphant returned to his home country Australia in 1950, was his successor at the Chair of Physics in Birmingham, where he worked until his retirement in 1974. His main field of work was nuclear physics, the study of chemical reactions with molecular beams, and the development of powerful cyclotrons . In the 1930s he and JR Tillman proved the existence of “thermal” neutrons.
His estate is kept at the University of Birmingham.
Honors
- Member of the Royal Academy ( Fellow of the Royal Society ) 1947
- Rutherford Memorial Lecture 1975
- Hughes Medal 1991
Individual evidence
- ^ PB Moon, JR Tillman: Neutrons of Thermal Energies. In: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Vol. 153, no. 879, Jan. 1, 1936, pp. 476-492.
swell
- WE Burcham & GR Isaak: Philip Burton Moon. 17 May 1907-9 October 1994 Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 42, 1996, pp. 249-264
- Papers and correspondence of Philip Burton Moon, 1907-1994. In: University of Birmingham Staff Papers. jisc.ac.uk
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Moon, Philip Burton |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Moon, Philip |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 17, 1907 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lewisham , now part of London |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 9, 1994 |