The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the university's School of Physical Sciences. It was opened in 1874 as a teaching laboratory.
The Department is named after William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, who was Chancellor of the University and donated money for the construction of the laboratory.[1] Professor James Clerk Maxwell, the developer of electromagnetic theory, was a founder of the lab and became the first Cavendish Professor of Physics.[2]
As of 2006[update], 29 Cavendish researchers have won Nobel Prizes.[3]
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The Cavendish Laboratory was initially located on the New Museums Site, Free School Lane, in the centre of Cambridge. After perennial space problems, it moved to its present site in West Cambridge in the early 1970s. Physical Chemistry (originally the department of Colloid Science under Eric Rideal) left the Cavendish site earlier, subsequently locating as the Department of Physical Chemistry (under RG Norrish) in the then new chemistry building with the Department of Chemistry (under Lord Todd) in Lensfield Road: both chemistry departments merged in the 1980s.
The current head of the Cavendish is James Stirling. The Cavendish Professorship of Physics is currently held by Sir Richard Friend.
In World War II the laboratory carried out research for the MAUD Committee, part of the British Tube Alloys project of research into the Atomic Bomb. Researchers included Nicholas Kemmer, Allan Nunn May, Anthony French, Samuel Curran and the French scientists including Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban. Several transferred to Canada in 1943; the Montreal Laboratory and some later to the Chalk River Laboratories.
The production of plutonium and neptunium by bombarding uranium-238 with neutrons was predicted in 1940 by two teams working independently: Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather at the Cavendish and Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Cavendish Laboratory has had an important influence on biology, mainly through the application of X-ray crystallography to the study of structures of biological molecules. Francis Crick already worked in the Medical Research Council Unit, headed by Max Perutz and housed in the Cavendish Laboratory, when James Watson came from the United States and they made a breakthrough in discovering the structure of DNA. For their work while in the Cavendish Laboratory, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, together with Maurice Wilkins of King's College London, himself a graduate of St. John's College, Cambridge.
Areas in which the Laboratory has been very influential since 1950 include:-
The Cavendish Professors were the Heads of the Department up to Professor Pippard, when the roles were made separate.