Leo James Rainwater was an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei.
17 Facts About James Rainwater
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James Rainwater's ideas were later tested and confirmed by Aage Bohr's and Ben Mottelson's experiments.
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James Rainwater contributed to the scientific understanding of X-rays and participated in the United States Atomic Energy Commission and naval research projects.
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James Rainwater received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for Physics in 1963 and in 1975 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection".
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Leo James Rainwater was born on December 9,1917, in Council, Idaho, the son of a former civil engineer who ran the local general store, Leo Jaspar Rainwater and his wife Edna Eliza nee Teague.
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James Rainwater never used his first name and was always referred to as James or Jim.
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James Rainwater's father died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918 and Rainwater and his mother moved to Hanford, California, where she married George Fowler, a widower with two sons, Freeman and John.
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James Rainwater received his Bachelor of Science degree as a physics major in 1939.
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James Rainwater then chose to undertake postgraduate studies at Columbia University.
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At Columbia Rainwater studied under Isidor Isaac Rabi, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and John R Dunning.
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James Rainwater remained at Columbia, where he joined the Manhattan Project's Substitute Alloy Materials Laboratories.
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James Rainwater became a full professor in 1952 and was the director of Nevis Laboratories from 1951 to 1954 and again from 1957 to 1961.
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James Rainwater worked with his student Val Fitch on studies of muonic atoms, atoms where an electron is replaced by a muon.
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James Rainwater was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the New York Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics, the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Optical Society of America.
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James Rainwater collapsed after a lecture at the Pupin Laboratories in 1985 but was revived by a student who knew how to administer CPR.
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James Rainwater died from cardiopulmonary arrest at St John's Riverside Hospital in Yonkers, New York on May 31,1986.
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James Rainwater was survived by his wife, three sons and half-brother George.