Owen Chamberlain

Physicist, born in San Francisco, California, USA. He studied at Dartmouth College (1941) and then entered graduate school in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, but his studies were interrupted by World War 2 and he finally gained his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1949. He worked on the Manhattan atomic bomb project (1942–6) and at the Argonne National Laboratory, then joined the University of California, Berkeley (1948), becoming a full professor in 1958. In 1959 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with his colleague Emilio Segrè for their 1955 discovery of the antiproton.

Owen Chamberlain (July 10, 1920 – February 28, 2006) was a prominent American physicist.

Born in San Francisco, Chamberlain graduated from Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia in 1937. He later joined the "Manhattan Project" in 1942, where he worked with Segrè, both at Berkeley and in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

In 1946, after the war, Chamberlain continued with his doctorate work at the University of Chicago under legendary physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi acted as an important guide and mentor for Chamberlain, encouraging him to leave behind the more prestigious theoretical physics for experimental physics, for which Chamberlain had a particular aptitude. Chamberlain officially received his Ph.D.

In 1948, having finished his experimental work, Chamberlain returned to Berkeley as a member its faculty (promoted to professor of physics in 1958), where he, Segrè, and other physicists investigated proton-proton scattering. Chamberlain's later research work included the Time projection chamber (TPC), and work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

Chamberlain was also politically active on issues of peace and social justice, and spoke out against the Vietnam War.

Chamberlain was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1985, and retired from teaching in 1989.