William Alfred Fowler

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William Alfred Fowler

William Alfred "Willy" Fowler (born August 9, 1911 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † March 14, 1995 in Pasadena (California) ) was an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner .

Fowler began studying physics at Ohio State University (Bachelor of Physics Engineer in 1933). He received his doctorate in nuclear physics in 1936 from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His dissertation dealt with nuclear reactions of protons with light elements, which are important for energy production in stars using the CNO cycle . He stayed at the WK Kellog Radiation Laboratory at CalTech until the end of his life. His most important work, Synthesis of the Elements in Stars ( Reviews of Modern Physics , vol. 29, Issue 4, pp. 547-650), together with Margaret Burbidge , Geoffrey Burbidge and Fred Hoyle , appeared in 1957. The theory represented therein is known as B2FH theory after the first letter of the author's name. The article explains the formation and distribution of the chemical elements , the nucleosynthesis , by nuclear reactions in stars (with the exception of the very lightest, which were formed in the Big Bang ).

In 1939 he became Assistant Professor, 1942 Associate Professor and 1946 Professor at Caltech. In 1970 he became an institute professor there. From 1985 he was Professor Emeritus. In 1954/55 and 1961/62 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at Cambridge University . In 1966 he was visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1963 at the University of Washington .

Fowler received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions that are crucial for the distribution of chemical elements in the universe .

Fowler grew up in Lima, Ohio , a railroad hub that also houses the LIMA Locomotive Works . Throughout his life he was enthusiastic about steam-powered locomotives and traveled on the last of the steam-hauled trains such as the Trans-Siberian . For his 60th birthday, colleagues and former students gave him a model locomotive.

Honors

He had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1956 (whose physics department he headed from 1971 to 1974) and since 1946 a fellow of the American Physical Society , of which he was president in 1976. In 1962 he was accepted into the American Philosophical Society and in 1965 into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. photography
  2. Minor Planet Circ. 61267