Cavendish Laboratory

The Cavendish Laboratory (English Cavendish Laboratory) was founded in 1873. It is the Department of Physics at the English elite Cambridge University.

The laboratory was initially in the center of Cambridge in the Free School Lane, but moved due to cramped conditions in the early 1970s to West Cambridge. The Physical Chemistry moved to earlier.

It is named after William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, the former Chancellor of the University, named ( therefore initially known as Devonshire laboratory) and in memory of his famous relative, the experimental physicist Henry Cavendish. For the naming of the first Cavendish Professor James Clerk Maxwell was responsible.

History

Due to the sudden development of science in the course of industrialization emerged in the second half of the 19th century an increasing need for university research and training institutions in this area. One of the first universities in the UK with a physics laboratory was the University of Glasgow ( established by Lord Kelvin in the 1840s ).

In the 1860s the two major elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge felt obliged to own steps and so the Clarendon Laboratory and a year later was born in 1872 in Oxford the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Founders and funders was the then Chancellor of the University, William Cavendish. First professor of experimental physics was the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

Famous scientists

Cavendish professors of physics:

Up to Pippard the Cavendish professors were also the head of the laboratory, then the functions separated.

Currently Andy Parker is head of the laboratory.

Other well-known scientists who worked at the lab, were the Nobel laureate Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, CTR Wilson, Arthur Holly Compton, Owen Richardson, James Chadwick, George Paget Thomson, Patrick Blackett, Edward Victor Appleton, John Cockcroft, Ernest Walton, Max Perutz James Watson, Francis Crick, John Kendrew, Dorothy Hodgkin, Brian Josephson, Martin Ryle, Antony Hewish, Pyotr Kapitsa, Philip Anderson, Allan Cormack.

Research

To date, 28 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to researchers who have worked in the Cavendish Laboratory. The main research fields were present Nuclear Physics ( prominently represented by Lord Rutherford and his school ), atomic physics, molecular physics and crystallography, solid state physics (eg superconductivity), electron microscopy and radio astronomy.

Among other things, here succeeded 1953, the representation of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid by James Watson and Francis Crick.