Now aged 84, Irishman Walton still drives over from his home in Dublin for seminars at Trinity College, from which he retired as Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy 14 years ago. He is principally famed for his work on the structure of the atom, for which he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize with Cockcroft. But Walton’s eclectic career also includes important work in fields as diverse as microwaves and hydrodynamics.
Here he describes his exciting early days in Ernest Rutherford’s laboratory.
After graduating in physics and mathematics at Dublin’s Trinity College in 1926, it was natural that I should want to go to the University of Cambridge, England, which was noted for its preeminence in both of these subjects. Ernest Rutherford was director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Caimbridge and the world leader in studying radioactivity which had been discovered in 1896. Physicists from many other countries ...
