Willis Lamb

Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp Kusch "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb was able to precisely determine a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom, known as the Lamb shift. He was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.

Lamb was born in Los Angeles, California, and attended Los Angeles High School. First admitted in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Rudolf Mössbauer. He worked on nuclear theory, laser physics, and verifying quantum mechanics.

Lamb was a physics professor at Stanford from 1951 to 1956. He was the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1962, and also taught at Yale, Columbia and the University of Arizona. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. In 2000, The Optical Society elected him an Honorary member.

Lamb is remembered as a "rare theorist turned experimentalist" by D. Kaiser.

In addition to his crucial and famous contribution to quantum electrodynamics via the Lamb shift, in the latter part of his career he paid increasing attention to the field of quantum measurements. In one of his writings Lamb stated that "most people who use quantum mechanics have little need to know much about the interpretation of the subject." Lamb was also openly critical of many of the interpretational trends on quantum mechanics and of the use of the term photon.

In 1939 Lamb married his first wife, Ursula Schäfer, a German student, who became a distinguished historian of Latin America (and assumed his last name). After her death in 1996, he married physicist Bruria Kaufman in 1996, whom he later divorced. In 2008 he married Elsie Wattson.

Lamb died on May 15, 2008, at the age of 94, due to complications of a gallstone disorder.

• @media screen{html.skin-theme-clientpref-night .mw-parser-output .sister-inline-image img[src*="Wiktionary-logo-en-v2.svg"]{filter:invert(1)brightness(55%)contrast(250%)hue-rotate(180deg)}}@media screen and (prefers-color-scheme:dark){html.skin-theme-clientpref-os .mw-parser-output .sister-inline-image img[src*="Wiktionary-logo-en-v2.svg"]{filter:invert(1)brightness(55%)contrast(250%)hue-rotate(180deg)}} Media related to Willis Lamb at Wikimedia Commons

• Obituary, University of Arizona, 16 May, 2008.

• Hans Bethe talking about Willis Lamb (video)

• Willis E Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics.

• Willis Lamb on Nobelprize.org including his Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1955 Fine Structure of the Hydrogen Atom

• Collection of articles and group photograph (This photograph taken at Lasers '92 includes, right to left, Marlan Scully, W. E. Lamb, John L. Hall, and F. J. Duarte).

• Obituary:Willis E. Lamb Jr., 94; Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist

• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir