George Paget Thomson

George Paget Thomson married Kathleen Buchanan Smith in 1924.The couple had four children; two sons and two daughters. Kathleen died in 1941.

His eldest son, John Adam Thomson, was a United Nations diplomat while his younger son, David Paget Thomson, was a businessman.

Thomson died a natural death on September 10, 1975, in Cambridge, England, at the age of 83.

George Paget Thomson was born on May 3, 1892 in Cambridge, England. His father, Sir Joseph John Thomson, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron. At the time of George’s birth Thomson (Sr.) was working as a Professor of Experimental Physics in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge.

George’s mother, Rose Elisabeth Paget, also came from an academically distinguished family. Her father, Sir George Edward Paget, was a physician and Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge. In addition, she was also a student of physics at Cambridge.

Apart from George, couple had another child, a daughter named Joan Paget Thomson. She was almost eleven years junior to him and so he was effectively the only child for long.

George had his secondary education at The Perse School in Cambridge. In school, George developed a passion for boats. While he was still a boy, he made working models of boats and submarines, which he used to float on pools. He also made cannons and cartridges.

After passing out from school, he entered Trinity College in 1910. There, he studied mathematics for first two years and took up physics in the third year. After graduation, he entered Cavendish Laboratory for his post graduate degree and finally passed out in 1914.

In 1920, George Pager Thomson resigned from his commission as a captain and rejoined Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as Fellow and Lecturer. Along with teaching, he also concentrated on research work. However, his major works were done at Aberdeen.

He joined University of Aberdeen as Professor of Natural Philosophy (Physics in Scotland is known as Natural Philosophy), in 1922 and served in this position till 1930. While working there, he carried on experiments on electrons, which his father, Sir J. J. Thomson had identified as particles.

In 1927, George Paget Thomson found that the electrons could be diffracted like a wave. He had them moved through very thin films of metals and found that in spite of being particles, electrons behaved as waves. Later this behavior came to be known as ‘electron diffraction’ and earned him Nobel Prize.

In 1929 and 1930, Thomson worked as a non resident lecturer at the Conwell University, New York. Then in 1930, he joined Imperial College, London. Here too he continued his experiment on electrons. It led to the development of electron microscope.

At the same time, Thomson started taking interest in nuclear physics. When the process for fission of uranium was discovered in the beginning of 1939, he became more interested in its military use. He then persuaded the British Air Ministry to procure one ton uranium oxide; but the Second World War broke out before he could complete his experiment.

Although Thomson had worked on various projects his work on diffraction of electrons is the most important one. It proved the principle of ‘wave-particle duality’ as proposed by French Physicist Louis de Broglie. Such discovery made examination of the atomic structure of solid surfaces feasible.

George Paget Thomson also wrote a number of books. Among them, ‘Theory and Practice of Electron Diffraction’ (1939), ‘The Atom and The Foreseeable Future’ (1955), ‘The Inspiration of Science’ (1962) and ‘J.J. Thomson and the Cavendish Laboratory in His Day’ (1965) are especially noteworthy.