Lamb, Willis Eugene, Jr.

Lamb, Willis Eugene, Jr.,

1913–2008, American physicist, b. Los Angeles, Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1938. Lamb was a professor at Columbia (1938–51), Stanford (1951–56), Oxford (1956–62), Yale (1962–74), and the Univ. of Arizona (1974–2003). He shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp KuschKusch, Polykarp,
1911–93, American physicist, b. Blankenburg, Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Illinois, 1936. Kusch was a researcher, professor, and administrator at Columbia from 1937 to 1972 and a professor at the Univ. of Texas, Dallas, from 1972 until his retirement in 1982.
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 for his discovery of a phenomenon called the Lamb shift, a small but measurable difference in electron energy levels within the hydrogen atom from what had been predicted theoretically by Paul DiracDirac, Paul Adrien Maurice
, 1902–84, English physicist. He was educated at the Univ. of Bristol and St. John's College, Cambridge, and became professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1932.
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. The discovery led physicists to reexamine the basic concepts behind applying quantum theory to electromagnetism, and became a foundation of quantum electrodynamicsquantum electrodynamics
(QED), quantum field theory that describes the properties of electromagnetic radiation and its interaction with electrically charged matter in the framework of quantum theory.
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, a key piece of modern elementary particle physics. Lamb also did work on laser physics, including theoretical research that anticipated the development of the laser, and the quantum theory of measurement.