Norman Ramsey Jr.

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. (August 27, 1915 –

November 4, 2011) was an American physicist who Norman Foster Ramsey Jr.
was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for the
invention of the separated oscillatory field method (see
Ramsey interferometry), which had important
applications in the construction of atomic clocks. A
physics professor at Harvard University for most of his
career, Ramsey also held several posts with such
government and international agencies as NATO and
the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Among
his other accomplishments are helping to found the
United States Department of Energy's Brookhaven
National Laboratory and Fermilab.

Early life
Born August 27, 1915
Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. was born in Washington, Washington, D.C., U.S.
D.C., on August 27, 1915, to Minna Bauer Ramsey and Died November 4, 2011 (aged 96)
Norman Foster Ramsey. His mother was the daughter Wayland, Massachusetts,
of German immigrants and an instructor at the U.S.
University of Kansas.[1] His father, who was of Education Columbia University (BA,
Scottish descent, was a 1905 graduate of the United
PhD)
States Military Academy at West Point and an officer
University of Cambridge (BA)
in the Ordnance Department who rose to the rank of
brigadier general during World War II, commanding Known for Ramsey interferometry
the Rock Island Arsenal.[2] He was raised as an Army Relatives Anne Ramsey (cousin)
brat, frequently moving from post to post, and lived in Awards Ernest Orlando Lawrence
France for a time when his father was Liaison Officer Award (1960)
with the Direction d'Artillerie and Assistant Military
Davisson-Germer Prize
Attaché.[3] This allowed him to skip a couple of grades
(1974)
along the way, so that he graduated from Leavenworth
High School in Leavenworth, Kansas, at the age of IEEE Medal of Honor (1984)

15.[1] Rabi Prize (1985)

Rumford Prize (1985)
Ramsey's parents hoped that he would go to West
Oersted Medal (1988)
Point, but at 15, he was too young to be admitted. He
National Medal of Science
was awarded a scholarship to the University of Kansas,
(1988)
but in 1930 his father was posted to Governors Island,
New York.[1][4] Ramsey therefore entered Columbia Nobel Prize in Physics (1989)
University in 1931 and began studying engineering. He UNSW Dirac Medal (1990)
became interested in mathematics and switched to this Vannevar Bush Award (1995)
as his academic major. By the time he received his BA Scientific career
from Columbia in 1935, he had become interested in
Fields Physics
physics.[1][5] Columbia awarded him a Kellett
Fellowship to Cambridge University, where he studied Institutions Columbia University
physics at Cavendish Laboratory under Lord Harvard University
Rutherford and Maurice Goldhaber, and encountered
Doctoral Isidor Isaac Rabi
notable physicists, including Edward Appleton, Max
advisor
Born, Edward Bullard, James Chadwick, John
Doctoral William Nierenberg (1947)
Cockcroft, Paul Dirac, Arthur Eddington, Ralph
students
Fowler, Mark Oliphant and J. J. Thomson.[1] At Francis F. Chen (1954)
Cambridge, he took the tripos in order to study Noel Corngold (1954)
quantum mechanics, which had not been covered at Daniel Kleppner (1959)
Columbia, resulting in being awarded a second BA
Howard Berg (1964)
degree by Cambridge.[6]
David J. Wineland (1971)
A term paper Ramsey wrote for Goldhaber on Richard R. Freeman (1973)
magnetic moments caused him to read recent papers on Geoffrey L. Greene (1977)
[6]
the subject by Isidor Isaac Rabi, and this stimulated Blayne Heckel (1981)
an interest in molecular beams and in doing research
Other notable Sunney Chan (post doc)
for a PhD under Rabi at Columbia.[1][7] Soon after
Ramsey arrived at Columbia, Rabi invented molecular- students
beam resonance spectroscopy, for which he was
awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1944.[8] Ramsey was part of Rabi's team that also included Jerome
Kellogg, Polykarp Kusch, Sidney Millman and Jerrold Zacharias. Ramsey worked with them on the first
experiments making use of the new technique and shared with Rabi and Zacharias in the discovery that
the deuteron was a magnetic quadrupole.[9] This meant that the atomic nucleus was not spherical, as had
been thought.[10] He received his PhD in physics from Columbia in 1940[5] and became a fellow at the
Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., where he studied neutron–proton and proton–helium
scattering.[1]

World War II

Radiation laboratory
In 1940, he married Elinor Jameson of Brooklyn, New York, and accepted a teaching position at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The two expected to spend the rest of their lives there, but
World War II intervened.[1] In September 1940 the British Tizard Mission brought a number of new
technologies to the United States, including a cavity magnetron, a high-powered device that generates
microwaves using the interaction of a stream of electrons with a magnetic field, which promised to
revolutionize radar. Alfred Lee Loomis of the National Defense Research Committee established the
Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop this technology.[11] Ramsey
was one of the scientists recruited by Rabi for this work.[12]
Initially, Ramsey was in Rabi's magnetron group. When Rabi
became a division head, Ramsey became the group leader.[6] The
role of the group was to develop the magnetron to permit a
reduction in wavelength from 150 centimetres (59 in) to 10
centimetres (3.9 in), and then to 3 centimetres (1.2 in) or X band.
Microwave radar promised to be small, lighter and more efficient
than older types.[13] Ramsey's group started with the design
produced by Oliphant's team in Britain and attempted to improve
it. The Radiation Laboratory produced the designs, which were
prototyped by Raytheon, and then tested by the laboratory. In June
The Northrop P-61 Black Widow
1941, Ramsey travelled to Britain, where he met with Oliphant,
night fighter was specifically
and the two exchanged ideas. He brought back some British designed to take advantage of the
components, which were incorporated into the final design. A new radar.
night fighter aircraft, the Northrop P-61 Black Widow, was
designed around the new radar. Ramsey returned to Washington in
late 1942 as an adviser on the use of the new 3 cm microwave radar sets that were now coming into
service,[7] working for Edward L. Bowles in the office of the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson.[6]

Manhattan Project
In 1943, Ramsey was approached by Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Bacher, who asked him to join the
Manhattan Project. Ramsey agreed to do so, but the intervention of the project director, Brigadier General
Leslie R. Groves Jr., was necessary in order to prise him away from the Secretary of War's office. A
compromise was agreed to, whereby Ramsey remained on the payroll of the Secretary of War and was
merely seconded to the Manhattan Project.[6][14][15] In October 1943, Group E-7 of the Ordnance
Division was created at the Los Alamos Laboratory with Ramsey as group leader, with the task of
integrating the design and delivery of the nuclear weapons being built by the laboratory.[15]

The first thing he had to do was determine the characteristics of

the aircraft that would be used. There were only two Allied aircraft
large enough: the British Avro Lancaster and the US Boeing B-29
Superfortress.[15] The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF)
wanted to use the B-29 if at all possible, even though it required
substantial modification.[16] Ramsey supervised the test drop
program, which began at Dahlgren, Virginia, in August 1943,
before moving to Muroc Dry Lake, California, in March 1944.
Ramsey signs the Fat Man used at Mock-ups of Thin Man and Fat Man bombs were dropped and
Nagasaki. tracked by an SCR-584 ground-based radar set of the kind that
Ramsey had helped develop at the Radiation laboratory. Numerous
problems were discovered with the bombs and the aircraft
modifications, and corrected.[17]

Plans for the delivery of the weapons in combat were assigned to the Weapons Committee, which was
chaired by Ramsey and answerable to Captain William S. Parsons.[18] Ramsey drew up tables of
organization and equipment for the Project Alberta detachment that would accompany the USAAF's
509th Composite Group to Tinian. Ramsey briefed the 509th's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul
W. Tibbets, on the nature of the mission when the latter assumed command of the 509th.[19] Ramsey went
to Tinian with the Project Alberta detachment as Parsons's
scientific and technical deputy. He was involved in the assembly
of the Fat Man bomb and relayed Parsons's message indicating the
success of the bombing of Hiroshima to Groves in Washington,
D.C.[20]

Research
At the end of the war, Ramsey returned to Columbia as a professor
and research scientist.[1] Rabi and Ramsey picked up where they
had left off before the war with their molecular-beam experiments.
Ramsey and his first graduate student, William Nierenberg,
measured various nuclear magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole
moments. With Rabi, he helped establish the Brookhaven National Ramsey's Los Alamos badge
Laboratory on Long Island. In 1946, he became the first head of
the Physics Department there. His time there was brief, for in
1947, he joined the physics faculty at Harvard University, where he would remain for the next 40 years,
except for brief visiting professorships at Middlebury College, Oxford University, Mt. Holyoke College
and the University of Virginia. During the 1950s, he was the first science adviser to NATO and initiated a
series of fellowships, grants and summer school programs to train European scientists.[1][6][21]

Ramsey's research in the immediate post-war

years looked at measuring fundamental
properties of atoms and molecules by use of
molecular beams. On moving to Harvard, his
objective was to carry out accurate molecular-
beam magnetic-resonance experiments, based on
the techniques developed by Rabi. However, the
accuracy of the measurements depended on the
uniformity of the magnetic field, and Ramsey
found that it was difficult to create sufficiently
uniform magnetic fields. He developed the
separated oscillatory field method in 1949 as a
The Harvard cyclotron during construction in 1948.
means of achieving the accuracy he wanted.[1] Shown are Ramsey (left) and Lee Davenport (right).

Ramsey and his PhD student Daniel Kleppner

developed the atomic-hydrogen maser, looking to increase the accuracy with which the hyperfine
separations of atomic hydrogen, deuterium and tritium could be measured, as well as to investigate how
much the hyperfine structure was affected by external magnetic and electric fields. He also participated in
developing an extremely stable clock based on a hydrogen maser. From 1967 until 2019, the second has
been defined based on 9,192,631,770 Hz hyperfine transition of a cesium-133 atom; the atomic clock
which is used to set this standard is an application of Ramsey's work.[22] He was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Physics in 1989 "for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the
hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks".[23] The Prize was shared with Hans Georg Dehmelt and
Wolfgang Paul.[23]
In collaboration with the Institut Laue–Langevin, Ramsey also worked on applying similar methods to
beams of neutrons, measuring the neutron magnetic moment and finding a limit to its electric dipole
moment.[1] As president of the Universities Research Association during the 1960s he was involved in the
design and construction of the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.[1][21][24] He also headed a 1982 National
Research Council committee that concluded that, contrary to the findings of the House of Representatives
Select Committee on Assassinations, acoustic evidence did not indicate the presence of a second
gunman's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.[24]

Later life
Ramsey eventually became the Eugene Higgins professor of physics at Harvard and retired in 1986.
However, he remained active in physics, spending a year as a research fellow at the Joint Institute for
Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at the University of Colorado. He also continued visiting professorships
at the University of Chicago, Williams College and the University of Michigan. In addition to the Nobel
Prize in Physics, Ramsey received a number of awards, including the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in
1960, Davisson–Germer Prize in 1974, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1984, the Rabi Prize in 1985, the
Rumford Premium Prize in 1985, the Compton Medal in 1986, and the Oersted Medal and the National
Medal of Science in 1988.[1] In 1990, Ramsey received the Golden Plate Award of the American
Academy of Achievement.[25] He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences,[26] the United States National Academy of Sciences,[27] and the American Philosophical
Society.[28] In 2004, he signed a letter along with 47 other Nobel laureates endorsing John Kerry for
President of the United States as someone who would "restore science to its appropriate place in
government".[29]

His first wife, Elinor, died in 1983, after which he married Ellie Welch of Brookline, Massachusetts.
Ramsey died on November 4, 2011. He was survived by his wife Ellie, his four daughters from his first
marriage, and his stepdaughter and stepson from his second marriage.[7][24]

Bibliography
Ramsey, N. F.; Birge, R. W.; Kruse, U. E.. "Proton–Proton Scattering at 105 MeV and 75
MeV" (https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4425276-proton-proton-scattering-mev-mev), Harvard
University, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the United
States Atomic Energy Commission), (January 31, 1951).
Ramsey, N. F.; Cone, A. A.; Chen, K. W.; Dunning, J. R. Jr.; Hartwig, G.; Walker, J. K.;
Wilson, R. "Inelastic Scattering Of Electrons By Protons" (https://www.osti.gov/biblio/437565
4-inelastic-scattering-electrons-protons), Department of Physics at Harvard University,
United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the United States Atomic
Energy Commission), (December 1966).
Greene, G. L.; Ramsey, N. F.; Mampe, W.; Pendlebury, J. M.; Smith, K.; Dress, W. B.; Miller,
P. D.; Perrin, P. "Determination of the Neutron Magnetic Moment" (https://www.osti.gov/bibli
o/6190868-determination-neutron-magnetic-moment), Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
Harvard University, Institut Laue–Langevin, Astronomy Centre of Sussex University, United
States Department of Energy, (June 1981).
 Ramsey, N. F. "Molecular Beams", Oxford University Press (First edition 1956, Reprinted
1986).

Notes
1. "Norman F. Ramsey – Autobiography" (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1989/rams
ey/auto-biography/). The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
2. Cullum 1950, p. 101.
3. Cullum 1930, pp. 669–670.
4. Cullum 1940, pp. 167–168.
5. "Norman F. Ramsey" (http://www.nndb.com/people/028/000099728/). Soylent
Communications. Retrieved June 11, 2013.
6. "Norman F. Ramsey, an oral history conducted in 1991 by John Bryant" (http://www.ieeeghn.
org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Norman_F._Ramsey_%281991%29). IEEE History Center.
Retrieved June 11, 2013.
7. Tucker, Anthony (November 18, 2011). "Norman Ramsey obituary" (https://www.theguardia
n.com/world/2011/nov/18/norman-ramsey). The Guardian. Retrieved February 13, 2010.
8. "Isidor Isaac Rabi" (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1944/rabi.ht
ml). Nobel Media. Retrieved August 17, 2012.
9. Kellogg, J. M. B.; Rabi, I. I.; Ramsey, N. F. Jr.; Zacharias, J. R. (October 1939). "The
Magnetic Moment of the Proton and the Deuteron. The Radiofrequency Spectrum of 2H in
Various Magnetic Fields". Physical Review. 56 (8): 728–743. Bibcode:1939PhRv...56..728K
(https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1939PhRv...56..728K). doi:10.1103/PhysRev.56.728 (http
s://doi.org/10.1103%2FPhysRev.56.728).
10. Wineland, D. (2011). "Norman Ramsey (1915–2011)" (https://doi.org/10.1038%2F480182a).
Nature. 480 (7376): 182. Bibcode:2011Natur.480..182W (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/
2011Natur.480..182W). doi:10.1038/480182a (https://doi.org/10.1038%2F480182a).
PMID 22158235 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22158235).
11. Conant 2002, pp. 209–213.
12. Conant 2002, p. 204.
13. Rigden 1987, pp. 135–135.
14. Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 59.
15. Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 378–379.
16. Groves 1962, p. 254.
17. Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 380–382.
18. Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 248.
19. Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 387–388.
20. Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 392–393.
21. "The Passing of a Scientific Giant: Norman F. Ramsey (1915–2011)" (https://web.archive.or
g/web/20111112135932/http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/11/08/the-passing-
of-a-scientific-giant-norman-f-ramsey-1915-2011/). National Geographic. Archived from the
original (http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/11/08/the-passing-of-a-scientific-gia
nt-norman-f-ramsey-1915-2011/) on November 12, 2011. Retrieved June 11, 2013.
22. "Nobel Prize press release" (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/198
9/press.html). The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
23. "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1989" (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureat
es/1989/). The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
24. "Norman Ramsey Dies at 96; Work Led to the Atomic Clock" (https://www.nytimes.com/201
1/11/07/us/norman-ramsey-dies-at-96-work-led-to-the-atomic-clock.html?ref=obituaries).
New York Times. November 6, 2011. Retrieved November 7, 2011.
25. "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement" (https://achievement.or
g/our-history/golden-plate-awards/#science-exploration). www.achievement.org. American
Academy of Achievement.
26. "Norman Foster Ramsey" (https://www.amacad.org/person/norman-foster-ramsey).
American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
27. "Norman F. Ramsey" (http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/deceased-members/5139
9.html). www.nasonline.org. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
28. "APS Member History" (https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Norman+Ra
msey&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=adva
nced). search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
29. "48 Nobel Winning Scientists Endorse Kerry-June 21, 2004" (http://www.gwu.edu/~action/20
04/kerry/kerrynobel062104.html). George Washington University. Retrieved July 6, 2013.

References
Conant, Jennet (2002). Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of
Science That Changed the Course of World War II (https://archive.org/details/tuxedopark00j
enn). New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-87287-0. OCLC 48966735 (https://search.w
orldcat.org/oclc/48966735).
Cullum, George W. (1930). Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the US
Military Academy at West Point New York Since Its Establishment in 1802: Supplement
Volume VII 1920–1930 (http://digital-library.usma.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p1691
9coll3/id/24660/rec/8). Chicago: R. R. Donnelly and Sons, The Lakeside Press. Retrieved
October 6, 2015.
Cullum, George W. (1940). Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the US
Military Academy at West Point New York Since Its Establishment in 1802: Supplement
Volume VIII 1930–1940 (http://digital-library.usma.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p169
19coll3/id/19424/rec/9). Chicago: R. R. Donnelly and Sons, The Lakeside Press. Retrieved
October 6, 2015.
Cullum, George W. (1950). Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the US
Military Academy at West Point New York Since Its Establishment in 1802: Supplement
Volume IX 1940–1950 (http://digital-library.usma.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p1691
9coll3/id/22314/rec/10). Chicago: R. R. Donnelly and Sons, The Lakeside Press. Retrieved
October 6, 2015.
Groves, Leslie (1962). Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (https://archi
ve.org/details/nowitcanbetolds00grov). New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-306-70738-1.
OCLC 537684 (https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/537684).
Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993).
Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–
1945 (https://archive.org/details/criticalassembly0000unse). New York: Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 0-521-44132-3. OCLC 26764320 (https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/26
764320).
 Rigden, John S. (1987). Rabi, Scientist and Citizen (https://archive.org/details/rabiscientistcit
00rigd). Sloan Foundation Series. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-06792-1.
OCLC 14931559 (https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/14931559).

External links
Group photograph (http://www.tunablelasers.com/ramsey.htm) taken at Lasers '93 including
(right to left) Norman F. Ramsey, Marlan Scully, and F. J. Duarte.
Norman Ramsey, an oral history conducted in 1995 by Andrew Goldstein, IEEE History
Center, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. (http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Norm
an_Ramsey_%281995%29)
Papers relating to the Manhattan Project, 1945–1946, collected by Norman Ramsey (http://s
iris-libraries.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=all&source=~!silibraries&uri=full=3100001~!477
640~!0#focus). Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian
Libraries, from SIRIS
Norman F. Ramsey (https://www.nobelprize.org/laureate/135) on Nobelprize.org including
the Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1989 Experiments with Separated Oscillatory Fields and
Hydrogen Masers

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