Physicist and educator, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. After earning his BS at Carnegie Institute of Technology (1937) and his PhD at New York University (1941), he went to work as a research physicist for the Texas Co (1941–6) before joining the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a chief physicist (1946–55). In 1955 he became a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he took emeritus status in 1986. He began the work for which he is most famous, namely using neutron beams to probe the structure of atoms, while working at Oak Ridge. His experiments not only proved certain claims made by the theory of quantum mechanics but also provided a tool that has led to major developments in the electronics industry, superconductivity, and other important fields involving physics. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physics with Bertram N Brockhouse, a Canadian.