Willis Lamb

Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who was able to precisely determine a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom, known as the Lamb shift. For this work, Lamb shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp Kusch.^[2] He was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.

Education and career

Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was born on July 12, 1913 in Los Angeles, California, the son of Willis Eugene Lamb Sr., a telephone engineer, and Marie Helen Metcalf. First admitted in 1930, he obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lamb received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1938.^[3][4] Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Rudolf Mössbauer.^[5] He worked on nuclear theory, laser physics, and verifying quantum mechanics.

In 1938, Lamb became Instructor in Physics at Columbia University, where he was promoted to Professor of Physics in 1948. In 1951, he was appointed Professor of Physics at Stanford University. From 1956 to 1962, he was Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, where he was also a Fellow of New College. In 1962, he was appointed Henry Ford II Professor of Physics at Yale University.^[3] In 1974, he became Professor of Physics and Optical Science at the University of Arizona, where he remained until his retirement in 2003.^[6]

Quantum physics

In addition to his crucial and famous contribution to quantum electrodynamics via the Lamb shift, in the latter part of his career he paid increasing attention to the field of quantum measurements.^[7][8][9] In one of his writings Lamb stated that "most people who use quantum mechanics have little need to know much about the interpretation of the subject."^[9] Lamb was also openly critical of many of the interpretational trends on quantum mechanics^[10] and of the use of the term photon.^[11]

Personal life and death

In 1939, Lamb married Ursula Schäfer (1914–1996), a German student who became a distinguished historian of Latin America (and assumed his last name).^[12][13]

Lamb died on May 15, 2008, at the age of 94,^[5] due to complications of a gallstone disorder.

Lamb is remembered as a "rare theorist turned experimentalist" by D. Kaiser.^[14]

Recognition

Awards

Memberships

National awards

References

1. ^ "Willis lamb, Jr. - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu
2. ^ "Nobel Prize in Physics 1955". Nobel Foundation. Archived 2008-12-01 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2008-10-09.
3. ^ "Willis E. Lamb – Biographical". Nobel Foundation. Archived 2026-03-12 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2026-05-01.
4. ^ Stiles, Lori (May 16, 2008). "Willis E. Lamb Jr., 1955 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Dies at 94". The University of Arizona News. Archived from the original on August 28, 2008. Retrieved September 27, 2012.
5. ^ Holley, Joe (May 19, 2008). "Willis E. Lamb Jr., 94; Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist". The Washington Post. Retrieved September 27, 2012.
6. ^ "Willis E. Lamb". American Institute of Physics. Archived from the original on 2025-07-03. Retrieved 2026-05-01.
7. ^ Lamb, W. E. Jr. & Retherford, R. C. (1947). "Fine Structure of the Hydrogen Atom by a Microwave Method". Physical Review. 72 (3): 241–243. Bibcode:1947PhRv...72..241R. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.72.241
8. ^ W. E. Lamb, Quantum theory of measurement, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 480, 407-416 (1986).
9. ^ W. E. Lamb, Quantum theory of measurement, in Noise and Chaos in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1990) pp. 1-14.
10. ^ W. E. Lamb, Super classical quantum mechanics: the best interpretation of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, Am. J. Phys. 69, 413-421 (2001)
11. ^ Lamb, Willis E. "Anti-photon." Applied Physics B 60 (1995): 77-84.
12. ^ Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James Sheehan (eds.), The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9, 12, 34, 36, 398‒99.
13. ^ "Ursula Lamb, UA historian, dies at 82". Archived from the original on 2015-04-05. Retrieved 2015-03-22. accessed 5 July 2016.
14. ^ D. Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams (University of Chicago, Chicago, 2005).
15. ^ "Rumford Prize Recipients". www.amacad.org. Archived 2025-10-11 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-12-04.
16. ^ "Willis E. Lamb Jr.". www.nasonline.org. Archived 2026-02-19 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2026-05-01.
17. ^ "Willis Eugene Lamb". www.amacad.org. Archived 2025-12-17 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2026-05-01.
18. ^ "Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr.". www.optica.org. Archived 2026-02-09 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2024-07-17.
19. ^ "Willis E. Lamb Jr.". nationalmedals.org. Archived 2026-01-24 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2026-05-01.

External links

• Obituary, University of Arizona, 16 May, 2008.
• Hans Bethe talking about Willis Lamb (video)
• Willis E Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics.
• including his Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1955 Fine Structure of the Hydrogen Atom
• Collection of articles and group photograph (This photograph taken at Lasers '92 includes, right to left, Marlan Scully, W. E. Lamb, John L. Hall, and F. J. Duarte).
• Obituary:Willis E. Lamb Jr., 94; Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist
• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir

1. ^ Shared with Enrico Fermi and Lars Onsager.
2. ^ Shared with Polykarp Kusch.