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 cau ...

. He was a graduate student of

Willis Lamb Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (; July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp Kusch "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb was able to p ...

at Columbia Radiation Laboratory. Retherford and Lamb performed the famous experiment (now known as the ''Lamb–Retherford experiment'') revealing

Lamb shift In physics, the Lamb shift, named after Willis Lamb, is an anomalous difference in energy between two electron orbitals in a hydrogen atom. The difference was not predicted by theory and it cannot be derived from the Dirac equation, which pre ...

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 Theory of relativity, relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics. In essence, it describes how light and matter interact and is the first theory where full agreement between quant ...

References

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

See also

References