Norman Ramsey was raised as an Army brat, frequently moving from post to post, and lived in France for a time when his father was Liaison Officer with the Direction d'Artillerie and Assistant Military Attache.
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29 Facts About Norman Ramsey
2.
Norman Ramsey's parents hoped that he would go to West Point, but at 15, he was too young to be admitted.
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3.
Norman Ramsey was awarded a scholarship to the University of Kansas, but in 1930 his father was posted to Governors Island, New York.
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4.
Norman Ramsey therefore entered Columbia University in 1931, and began studying engineering.
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5.
Norman Ramsey became interested in mathematics, and switched to this as his academic major.
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7.
Norman Ramsey was part of Rabi's team that included Jerome Kellogg, Polykarp Kusch, Sidney Millman and Jerrold Zacharias.
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8.
Norman 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.
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9.
Norman Ramsey received his PhD in physics from Columbia in 1940, and became a fellow at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, where he studied neutron-proton and proton-helium scattering.
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10.
Norman Ramsey was one of the scientists recruited by Rabi for this work.
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11.
Norman Ramsey's group started with the design produced by Oliphant's team in Britain, and attempted to improve it.
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12.
In June 1941, Norman Ramsey travelled to Britain, where he met with Oliphant, and the two exchanged ideas.
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13.
Norman Ramsey brought back some British components which were incorporated into the final design.
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14.
In 1943, Norman Ramsey was approached by Robert Oppenheimer and Robert Bacher, who asked him to join the Manhattan Project.
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15.
Norman Ramsey supervised the test drop program, which began at Dahlgren, Virginia, in August 1943, before moving to Muroc Dry Lake, California, in March 1944.
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16.
Norman Ramsey drew up tables of organization and equipment for the Project Alberta detachment that would accompany the USAAF's 509th Composite Group to Tinian.
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17.
Norman Ramsey went to Tinian with the Project Alberta detachment as Parsons's scientific and technical deputy.
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18.
Norman Ramsey 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, DC.
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19.
Rabi and Norman Ramsey picked up where they had left off before the war with their molecular beam experiments.
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20.
However, the accuracy of the measurements depended on the uniformity of the magnetic field, and Norman Ramsey found that it was difficult to create sufficiently uniform magnetic fields.
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21.
Norman Ramsey developed the separated oscillatory field method in 1949 as a means of achieving the accuracy he wanted.
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22.
Norman Ramsey participated in developing an extremely stable clock based on a hydrogen maser.
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23.
Norman Ramsey 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".
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24.
In collaboration with the Institut Laue–Langevin, Norman Ramsey worked on applying similar methods to beams of neutrons, measuring the neutron magnetic moment and finding a limit to its electric dipole moment.
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25.
Norman Ramsey 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.
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26.
Norman Ramsey eventually became the Eugene Higgins professor of physics at Harvard and retired in 1986.
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27.
Norman Ramsey continued visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, Williams College and the University of Michigan.
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28.
In 1990, Norman Ramsey received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
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29.
Norman Ramsey was survived by his wife Ellie, his four daughters from his first marriage, and his stepdaughter and stepson from his second marriage.
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