Everything about Ralph H Fowler totally explained
Sir Ralph Howard Fowler OBE FRS (
January 17 1889 –
July 28 1944) was a British
physicist and
astronomer.
Fowler was initially educated at home but then attended Evans' preparatory school at Horris Hill and the
Winchester College. Fowler then won a scholarship to
Trinity College, Cambridge and read mathematics becoming a
wrangler in Part II of the
Tripos.
In the
First World War he obtained a commission in the
Royal Marine Artillery and was seriously wounded in the shoulder at
Gallipoli. The wound caused him to be introduced to
Archibald Hill, who brought Fowler's abilities to the realm of physics. He worked as Hill's second in command working with the Experimental Department of
HMS Excellent on Whale Island and made a major contribution on the aerodynamics of spinning shells for which he was awarded the OBE in 1918.
In 1919 Fowler returned to Trinity and was eventually appointed college lecturer in mathematics in 1920. Here he worked on
thermodynamics and
statistical mechanics bringing a new approach to physical chemistry. With
Arthur Milne he also wrote a seminal work on stellar spectra, temperatures, and pressures. In 1925 he was made a Fellow of the
Royal Society. In 1926 he worked with
Paul Dirac on the statistical mechanics of
white dwarf stars. In 1932, he was elected to the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the
Cavendish Laboratory.
In 1939 when the
Second World War broke out, he resumed his work with the Ordnance Board, despite poor health, and was eventually chosen to become a scientific liaison to Canada and the United States. He knew America well having visiting professorships at
Princeton and the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. For his work as this liaison, he was knighted in 1942 (see
MAUD Committee). He returned to Britain later in the war and worked for the Ordnance Board and the Admiralty up a few weeks before his death in 1944.
Fifteen Fellows of the Royal Society and three Nobel Laureates were supervised by Fowler between 1922 and 1939. In addition to Milne, he worked with
Sir Arthur Eddington,
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar,
Paul Dirac,
Sir William McCrea. It was Fowler who introduced
Paul Dirac to quantum theory in 1923. Fowler also put Dirac and
Werner Heisenberg in touch with each other through
Niels Bohr. At Cambridge he supervised the doctoral studies of 64 students including
John Lennard-Jones,
Paul Dirac and
Garrett Birkhoff.
In 1921, Ralph married Eileen Mary (1901-1930), the daughter of
Ernest Rutherford, They had four children, two sons and two daughters. Eileen died after the birth of their last child.
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