Word: cavendishe
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...there was an unwonted scurry and bustle on the top floors of King William's palace. The reason was not the war panic swirling over Europe, but the fact that William Lawrence Bragg, having hardly settled down at Teddington, had been appointed to a newer and loftier post: Cavendish Professor at Cambridge University. "Cavendish Professor" means director of the Cavendish Laboratory for experimental physics. This post, which Bragg takes over this week, is regarded- in England at least-as the world's top scientific...
...Mecca." Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory is not only unique in England; it has no parallel in the world. To create its like, it would be necessary to snatch two or three top-flight experimental physicists from each of four or five U. S. universities-say Harvard. M. I. T., Caltech, Columbia, Chicago-put them to work together and then miraculously endow the new institution with the tradition and prestige of 68 years of brilliant achievement. Cambridge's Arthur Stanley Eddington, an astronomer and no Cavendish man himself, has described the laboratory as a "Mecca of physics...
...Record. A list of achievements at Cavendish would include the following...
Most other British universities where experimental physics holds high rank have onetime Cavendish men as department heads. Three men (Thomson, Aston and Wilson) were awarded Nobel Prizes while working at Cavendish. Rutherford was already a Nobel Laureate when he went from Manchester to Cavendish. Chadwick got his Nobel Prize a month after he had left Cavendish for Liverpool. Among the foreign bigwigs who have studied at Cavendish are two other Nobelists: Niels Bohr of Denmark and Arthur Holly Compton of Chicago. This bombardment of laurels seems exceedingly likely to continue...
Free School Lane. The Cavendish Laboratory came to birth in 1870 when the Seventh Duke of Devonshire (whose family name was Cavendish) gave Cambridge $31,500 to start a physics department. First building was a three-story, L-shaped affair which is still standing, though its once-white stone is now black with age. First director was James Clerk Maxwell, a Scotsman who as a schoolboy wore lace frill collars, a tunic and square-toed shoes, was considered peculiar by his mates. They were quite right. When he was hardly past 30, Maxwell invented electro-magnetic waves (e.g., wireless waves...