William Lawrence Bragg

William Lawrence Bragg

William L. Bragg in 1915
Born 31 March 1890(1890-03-31)
North Adelaide, South Australia
Died 1 July 1971(1971-07-01) (aged 81)
Waldringfield, Ipswich, Suffolk, England
Nationality Australian
Institutions University of Manchester
University of Cambridge
Alma mater University of Adelaide
University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor J. J. Thomson
W.H. Bragg
Doctoral students John Crank
Ronald Wilfried Gurney
Known for X-ray diffraction
Bragg's Law
Notable awards Nobel Prize in Physics (1915)
Copley Medal (1966)
Notes
At 25, the youngest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize. He was the son of W.H. Bragg. Note that the PhD did not exist at Cambridge until 1919, and so J. J. Thomson and W.H. Bragg were his equivalent mentors.

Sir William Lawrence Bragg CH OBE MC FRS (31 March 1890 – 1 July 1971) was an Australian born British physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915 with his father Sir William Henry Bragg. He is, to date, the youngest Nobel laureate. He was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, when the epochal discovery of the structure of DNA was made by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in February 1953.

Contents

Biography

Early years

Bragg was born in North Adelaide, South Australia. He was an impressionable boy and showed an early interest in science and mathematics. His father, William Henry Bragg, was Elder Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Adelaide. Shortly after starting school aged 5, William Lawrence Bragg fell from his tricycle and broke his arm. His father, who had read about Röntgen's experiments in Europe and was performing his own experiments, used the newly discovered X-rays and his experimental equipment to examine the broken arm. This is the first recorded surgical use of X-rays in Australia.

Bragg was a very able student. After beginning his studies at St Peter's College, Adelaide in 1904 he went to the University of Adelaide at age 14 to study mathematics, chemistry and physics, graduating in 1908. In the same year his father accepted the Cavendish chair of physics at the University of Leeds, and brought the family back to England. Bragg entered Trinity College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1909 and received a major scholarship in mathematics, despite taking the exam while in bed with pneumonia. After initially excelling in mathematics, he transferred to the physics course in the later years of his studies, and graduated with first class honours in 1911 and in 1914 Bragg was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College-a Fellowship at a Cambridge college would involve a submission of a thesis and the defence of the same.[1][2]

Career

Work on X-ray crystallography

Bragg is most famous for his law on the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. Bragg's law makes it possible to calculate the positions of the atoms within a crystal from the way in which an X-ray beam is diffracted by the crystal lattice. He made this discovery in 1912, during his first year as a research student in Cambridge. He discussed his ideas with his father, who developed the X-ray spectrometer in Leeds. This tool allowed many different types of crystals to be analyzed.

Work on sound ranging

Bragg's research work was interrupted by both World War I and World War II. During both wars he worked on sound ranging methods for locating enemy guns, in this work he was aided by William Sansome Tucker, Harold Roper Robinson and Henry Harold Hemming. For his work during WWI he was awarded the Military Cross (London Gazette, 1 January 1918) and appointed an Officer of the British Empire (London Gazette, 15 March 1918). He was also mentioned in dispatches on 16 June 1916, 4 January 1917 and 7 July 1919.[3]

In autumn 1915 his brother was killed at Gallipoli. At about the same time, William Lawrence Bragg received the news that he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, aged 25, making him the youngest ever winner of a Nobel Prize.

Between the wars, from 1919 to 1937, he worked at the Victoria University of Manchester as Langworthy Professor of Physics. After World War II, he returned to Cambridge, splitting the Cavendish Laboratory into research groups. He believed that "the ideal research unit is one of six to twelve scientists and a few assistants".

Work on proteins

In 1948 he became interested in the structure of proteins and was partly responsible for creating a group that used physics to solve biological problems. He played a major part in the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, in that he provided support to Francis Crick and James D. Watson who worked under his aegis at the Cavendish.

Bragg's original announcement of the discovery of the structure of DNA was made at a Solvay conference on proteins in Belgium on 8 April 1953 but went unreported by the press, he then gave a talk at Guys Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday 14 May 1953 which resulted in an article by Ritchie Calder in The News Chronicle of London, on Friday 15 May 1953, entitled "Why You Are You. Nearer Secret of Life."

Bragg was gratified to see that the X-ray method that he developed forty years before was at the heart of this profound insight into the nature of life itself. At the same time at the Cavendish Max Perutz was also doing his Nobel Prize winning work on the structure of hemoglobin. Bragg subsequently successfully lobbied for and nominated Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Wilkins' share recognized the contribution made by researchers (using X-ray crystallography) at King's College London to the determination of the structure of DNA. Among those researchers was Rosalind Franklin, whose "photograph 51" showed that DNA was a double helix, not a triple helix as Linus Pauling had proposed. Franklin died before the prize (which only goes to living people) was awarded. The 3_{10} helix was found for the first time in lysozyme by D C Phillips et al.(1965) [4] under the directorship of Lawrence Bragg at the Royal Institution,London. The crystals of hen egg white lysozyme chloride are tetragonal a = b = 9.1,c = 37.9 angstroms and space group P4_32_12. A turn of 3_{10} helix,as opposed to Pauling's alpha helix, was discovered in an enzyme, lysozyme . Apparently many workers failed to mention the discovery of the 3_{10} helix and failed to acknowledge the part it plays in the lysozyme structure! Pauling never acknowledged that a least part of the 1950 paper by Bragg W L,Kendrew J C & Perutz M F [5] made sense!

Unlike myoglobin in which nearly 80 per cent of the amino-acid residues are in the alpha-helix conformation, in the lysozyme protein the alpha-helix content is only about 40 per cent of the amino-acid residues in four main stretches. The 3_{10} helix is an earlier proposal for the structure of polypeptides made by Bragg W L,Kendrew J C & Perutz M F in 1950. It is based on the crystallographic idea of an integral number of residues per turn of the helix. In this conformation every third peptide is hydrogen -bonded back to the first peptide, thus forming a ring containing ten atoms.[6].

Personal life

He married Alice Hopkinson in 1921. They had four children, Stephen Lawrence, David William, Margaret Alice and Patience Mary. He died at a hospital near his home at Waldringfield, Ipswich, Suffolk. Bragg's hobbies included painting, literature and a life-long interest in gardening. When he moved to London, he missed having a garden and so worked as a part-time gardener, unrecognised by his employer, until a guest at the house expressed surprise at seeing him there.

Honours and awards

He was made an FRS in 1921- "a qualification that makes other ones irrelevant".[7] He was knighted by King George VI in 1941[8] and received both the Copley Medal and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. Although Hunter in his book on Bragg "Light is a Messenger" argued that he was more a crystallographer than a physicist, Bragg's lifelong activity showed otherwise- he was more of a physicist than anything else-thus between 1939 and 1943 he served as President of the Institute of Physics,London.[9].In 1967 was made a Companion of Honour by the Queen Elizabeth II.

Since 1992 the Australian Institute of Physics has awarded the Bragg Gold Medal for Excellence in Physics to commemorate Sir Lawrence Bragg (in front on the medal) and his father Sir William Bragg for the best PhD thesis by a student at an Australian university.

Quotations

“The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about … It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.”[10]

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. [11]

See also

References

  1. Cambridge physicists www.cambridgephysics.org
  2. See Fred Hoyle's remarks regarding Hutchinson in 1965 “Galaxies , Nuclei and Quasers” p38 London:Heinemann and also R J N Phillips 1987 "Some Words from a Former Student" in "Tribute to Paul Dirac"p31 Bristol:Adam Hilger
  3. William Van der Kloot, Lawrence Bragg's role in the development of sound-ranging in World War I, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 22 September 2005, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 273-284.
  4. CCF Blake,DF Keonig,GA Mair, ACT North,DC Phillips & VR Sarma 1965 Nature,London,296,p757
  5. 1950 "Polypeptide chain configurations in crystalline proteins" Proc Roy A 203,p321
  6. L N Johnson 1966“The structure and function of lyszoyme” Sci Prog 54,p367
  7. G K Hunter 2004"Light is a Messenger" Oxford:OUP
  8. [http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/ViewPDF.aspx? London Gazette January 1941
  9. www.cambridgephysics.org
  10. Gowers, E., The Complete Plain Words, Godine, 1988. ISBN 1-56792-203-1.
  11. http://quotationsbook.com/quote/20045/

Further reading

External links