H. Richard Crane

Horace Richard Crane ( * November 4, 1907 in Turlock, California, † 19 April 2007) was an American experimental physicist.

Crane studied at Caltech (Bachelor 1930), where he received his doctorate in 1934. After that, he was from 1935 Instructor at the University of Michigan, Assistant Professor from 1938 and from 1946 professor. 1965-1972 he stood there in front of the Faculty, and in 1978 he became Professor Emeritus.

During World War II he was first at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then at the Proximity Fuse Project of development of fuzes for rockets at the Carnegie Institution.

Crane was used for the measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment (g- 2 factor) of the free electron in the early 1950s about the precession of the spins in a magnetic field, a precision test of quantum electrodynamics known.

In the early 1950s he developed with the other Racetrack -Synchrotron, the model for many future accelerator was (the name comes from the shape where the two semicircles connected by two straight lines ).

Later he focused on biophysics ( theoretical analysis of the double-helix structure in biomolecules ) and radiocarbon dating.

In 1967 he was awarded the Davisson -Germer Prize in Atomic Physics and 1986, the National Medal of Science. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1965 he was president of the American Association of Physics Teachers, for their journal The Physics Teacher, he was a columnist. This resulted in a book and exhibition Experiments in Hands on Museum in Ann Arbor. 1971 to 1975 he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the American Institute of Physics.