Robert Curtis Retherford (1912–1981) was an American

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

. He was a graduate student of

Willis Lamb Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (; July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum." The Nobel Committee that year awarded hal ...

Columbia Radiation Laboratory Columbia may refer to: * Columbia (personification), the historical female national personification of the United States, and a poetic name for America Places North America Natural features * Columbia Plateau, a geologic and geographic region in ...

. Retherford and Lamb performed the famous experiment revealing

Lamb shift In physics, the Lamb shift, named after Willis Lamb, is a difference in energy between two energy levels 2''S''1/2 and 2''P''1/2 (in term symbol notation) of the hydrogen atom which was not predicted by the Dirac equation, according to which the ...

in the fine structure of hydrogen, a decisive experimental step toward a new understanding of

quantum electrodynamics In particle physics, quantum electrodynamics (QED) is the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics. In essence, it describes how light and matter interact and is the first theory where full agreement between quantum mechanics and spec ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Retherford, Robert 20th-century American physicists 1912 births 1981 deaths Columbia University alumni

See also

References