1. September10, 1892 – March 15, 1962
“To make the moral
achievement implicit in
science a source of
strength to civilization,
the scientist will have to
have the cooperation also
of the philosopher and
the religious teacher.”
2. Arthur Compton’s biggest accomplishment was
discovering The Compton Effect.
What is The Compton Effect?
• It is an increase in the wavelengths of X rays and gamma rays when
they collide with and are scattered from loosely bound electrons in
matter and provides strong verification of the quantum theory since
the theoretical explanation of the effect requires that one treat the X
rays and gamma rays as particles or photons (quanta of energy)
rather than as waves.
3. Arthur was a white male born in Wooster,
OH who came from a Baptist family.
His parents were Elias and Otelia and his
siblings Mary and Wilson Compton.
He married his college sweetheart, Betty
McCloskey and they had two sons; Arthur
Allen and John Joseph
4. Arthur was educated at Wooster College and at Princeton, where he obtained his PhD in
1916.
He began his career by teaching at the University of Minnesota.
In 1920, he was appointed Way man Crow Professor of Physics, and Head of the
Department of Physics at the Washington University, St. Louis; and in 1923 he moved to
the University of Chicago as Professor of Physics.
In 1941 Compton was appointed Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences
Committee to Evaluate Use of Atomic Energy in War.
Until his retirement in 1961 he was Distinguished Service Professor of Natural
Philosophy at the Washington University.
The main part of his career was spent at the University of Chicago where he served as
professor of physics from 1923 to 1945.
Compton returned to the University of Washington first as chancellor and then as
professor of natural philosophy.
During the war Compton was an important figure in the manufacture of the atomic
bomb as a member of the committee directing research on the Manhattan project.
He also set up at Chicago the Metallurgical Laboratory, which acted as a cover for the
construction of the first atomic pile under the direction of Enrico Fermi and took
responsibility for the production of plutonium.
Arthur wrote a full account of this work in his book Atomic Quest.
5. Compton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1927
(sharing this with C. T. R. Wilson who received the Prize for
his discovery of the cloud chamber method).
Feynman diagrams
s-channel
u-channel
