Rainwater, James
Rainwater, James,
1917–86, American physicist, Ph.D. Columbia, 1946. After working on the Manhattan ProjectManhattan Project,the wartime effort to design and build the first nuclear weapons (atomic bombs). With the discovery of fission in 1939, it became clear to scientists that certain radioactive materials could be used to make a bomb of unprecented power. U.S.
..... Click the link for more information. as a student during World War II, he became a professor of physics at Columbia in 1952. His theory that not all atomic nuclei are spherical was verified experimentally by Danish physicists Aage N. BohrBohr, Aage Niels
, 1922–2009, Danish physicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Copenhagen, 1954. He worked with his father Niels Bohr (who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922) in the 1940s on the development of the atomic bomb, became a professor of physics in 1956, and succeeded
..... Click the link for more information. and Benjamin R. MottelsonMottelson, Benjamin Roy,
1926–, Danish physicist, b. Chicago, Ph.D. Harvard, 1950. Raised and educated in the United States, he moved to Denmark, where he began work as a nuclear physicist.
..... Click the link for more information. . For their work the three researchers shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics. Rainwater also received the Atomic Energy Commission's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Prize for Physics in 1963.