Richard Davisson
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Professor Richard Joseph "Dick" Davisson (December 29, 1922 — June 15, 2004) was an American physicist.
Davisson was the son of Clinton Davisson, a Nobel laureate and his wife Charlotte. His maternal uncle, Sir Owen Richardson was also a Nobel laureate.
During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project as part of the Special Engineer Detachment. At Los Alamos, he met Professor Robert Williams (scientist) who later recruited him to teach at the University of Washington.
Davisson was a member of the University of Washington's team which designed a system for detecting subatomic particles known as muons. After the U.S. government pulled the funding on the Superconducting Supercollider project, the team was recruited by CERN to help build part of the muon detector of the ATLAS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, in which Davisson took part in, e.g., creating tools to test the detector tubes and as a liaison between the University of Washington's team and the rest of the collaborating group.
Davisson retired in 2000, at the age of 77.
[edit] Quotation
- "There are no physicists in the hottest parts of Hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of Hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible."
