Nobel Prize: All in the Family Edition
Photos of the Month — October 2014
This month, the Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced October 7th and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the day after. Did you know that there have been five sets of families who have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, either together or separately? We are celebrating the upcoming announcement by highlighting these familial ties. The Curies — Marie and Pierre — won in 1903. Father and son teams include William & Lawrence Bragg (1915); Niels Bohr (1922) & Aage Bohr (1975); Manne Siegbahn (1924) & Kai M. Siegbahn (1981); J. J. Thomson (1906) & George Paget Thomson (1937). Thanks to the photographic donation from William F. Meggers given to the American Institute of Physics in 1958, we’re able to display all of these winners and many more in our online gallery. Every year we add photographs of newly announced winners to our 25,000+ historical image collection. To see them, type the word “Nobel” in the search engine.
L–R: Aage Bohr and his father, Niels Bohr, inspect a camera in Israel. 1953.
Niels Bohr Archive, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
William Henry Bragg working with equipment.
Photo by Ed Hoppe, Cambridge University Press, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.
J.J. Thomson sits at home in his study in 1899. He is sitting in a chair that had belonged to James Clerk Maxwell, whose theory of electromagnetism is still regarded as one of physics’ most remarkable achievements.
Sir George Thomson, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
Manne Siegbahn, winner of the 1924 Nobel Prize in Physics.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, E. Scott Barr Collection.
George Paget Thomson giving a lecture.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.
