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Nobel Prize winner Norman Ramsey to speak at St. Olaf College March 28

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March 16, 2001

NORTHFIELD, Minn. ? Nobel Prize winner Norman Ramsey, Harvard University physics professor, will speak at the St. Olaf College on Wednesday, March 28.

Ramsey?s lecture, part of the St. Olaf physics seminar, will be at 2 p.m. in Room 170 of the St. Olaf Science Center, and is free and open to the public. He will discuss "Exploring the Universe with Atomic Clocks." Refreshments will be served before the event.

In 1989 Ramsey received the Nobel Prize for Physics, ""for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks."

As a student at Columbia University, Ramsey began studying engineering, then mathematics, and, by the time he graduated, "discovered that physics was a possible profession and was the field that most excited my curiosity and interest." Columbia gave him a Kellett Fellowship to Cambridge University, England, where he enrolled as a physics undergraduate.

"The Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge was an exciting world center for physics, with a stellar array of physicists: J.J. Thomson, Rutherford, Chadwick, Cockcroft, Eddington, Appleton, Born, Fowler, Bullard, Goldhaber and Dirac.

Ramsey returned to Columbia to do research with Rabi, who shortly afterward invented the molecular beam magnetic resonance method that became a potent source for new fundamental discoveries in physics. Ramsey was involved in these first experiments, including one that revealed an electric quadrupole moment of the nucleus of deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen. This proved that the force binding the neutron and the proton together in the deuterium nucleus could not be a simple scalar interaction as had been previously thought.

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Norman Ramsey ? 2

Following completion of his Columbia thesis, he moved through a rapid succession of positions, including the Carnegie Institution in Washington, the University of Illinois, the wartime radar development project, the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, back to Columbia, Brookhaven National laboratory, and ending in 1947 with his appointment to the faculty position at Harvard where he still remains following his official retirement in 1986.

At Harvard he invented the "separated oscillatory field method" of producing magnetic resonance transitions in molecular beams, and also the hydrogen maser, which still serves as the most precise clock available for use in applications such as satellite global positioning systems. He supervised 84 Ph.D. thesis students, including Paul Fjelstad and St. Olaf Prof. Jim Cederberg of Northfield, and several graduates of St. Olaf and Carleton. He also has been involved with nuclear and particle physics projects.

For 16 years he served as president of Universities Research Association which exercised management responsibilities for the construction and operation of the Fermilab accelerator.

St. Olaf College prepares students to become responsible citizens of the world, fostering development of mind, body and spirit. A four-year, coeducational liberal arts college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), St. Olaf has a student enrollment of 2,950 and a full-time faculty complement of approximately 300. It is one of Money Guide?s top 100 "elite values in college education today," and it leads the nation?s colleges in percentage of students who study abroad.

Contact Michael Cooper at 507-786-3315 or cooperm@stolaf.edu.