Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who was able to precisely determine a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom, known as the Lamb shift. For this work, Lamb shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp Kusch. He was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was born on July 12, 1913 in Los Angeles, California, the son of Willis Eugene Lamb Sr., a telephone engineer, and Marie Helen Metcalf. First admitted in 1930, he obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lamb received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Rudolf Mössbauer. He worked on nuclear theory, laser physics, and verifying quantum mechanics.
In 1938, Lamb became Instructor in Physics at Columbia University, where he was promoted to Professor of Physics in 1948. In 1951, he was appointed Professor of Physics at Stanford University. From 1956 to 1962, he was Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, where he was also a Fellow of New College. In 1962, he was appointed Henry Ford II Professor of Physics at Yale University. In 1974, he became Professor of Physics and Optical Science at the University of Arizona, where he remained until his retirement in 2003.
In addition to his crucial and famous contribution to quantum electrodynamics via the Lamb shift, in the latter part of his career he paid increasing attention to the field of quantum measurements. In one of his writings Lamb stated that "most people who use quantum mechanics have little need to know much about the interpretation of the subject." Lamb was also openly critical of many of the interpretational trends on quantum mechanics and of the use of the term photon.
In 1939, Lamb married Ursula Schäfer (1914–1996), a German student who became a distinguished historian of Latin America (and assumed his last name).
Lamb died on May 15, 2008, at the age of 94, due to complications of a gallstone disorder.
Lamb is remembered as a "rare theorist turned experimentalist" by D. Kaiser.
Media related to Willis Lamb at Wikimedia Commons
Obituary, University of Arizona, 16 May, 2008.
Hans Bethe talking about Willis Lamb (video)
Willis E Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics.
Willis Lamb on Nobelprize.org including his Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1955 Fine Structure of the Hydrogen Atom
Collection of articles and group photograph (This photograph taken at Lasers '92 includes, right to left, Marlan Scully, W. E. Lamb, John L. Hall, and F. J. Duarte).
Obituary:Willis E. Lamb Jr., 94; Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir