Sir Lawrence Bragg (1890–1971,) fully William Lawrence Bragg, was a British physicist. He won, along with his father, the physicist William Bragg, the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics for their developing the technique of X-ray crystallography, which is used to determine the atomic structure of crystals.
Born in Adelaide, Australia, Bragg was educated at Adelaide University and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he discovered the Bragg Law (1912,) which describes the conditions for X-ray diffraction by crystals. He worked with his father to study crystals by X-ray diffraction.
Bragg was a professor at Manchester University, returned to Cambridge in 1938, and led the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge 1938–53. In that role, he supported Francis Crick and James Watson in using X-ray crystal studies to deduce the helical structure of DNA. In 1953, he became Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution in London, and later its director.
Bragg played a significant role in the popularization of science, writing such books as Ideas and Discoveries in Physics (1970.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Lawrence Bragg
From religion comes a man’s purpose; from science, his power to achieve it. Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hand are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.
—William Lawrence Bragg
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
—William Lawrence Bragg
Topics: Thinking, Science
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