My topic was inspired by Professor Gosta Ekspong's talk to the July Branch Meeting "How and Why Compton Got His Nobel Prize". Professor Ekspong, a member of the Swedish Academy and for many years of the Nobel Committee, talked about the fascinating gossip that is now available, since the Nobel Committee "de-classified" its old archives. In the case in point, there was complete agreement, in 1927, that AH Compton's famous experiment deserved the Nobel Prize, but they had trouble with the citation. The Compton effect was, and is, supposed to show that x-rays, when interacting with electrons, behave like particles. That was what the citation was supposed to say. However, the Professor of Physics at the University of Stockholm, Oscar Klein, a member of the Committee, had recently done some very interesting work on the subject (which led to the famous Klein-Nishina Formula). He had, in effect, shown that the Compton Effect was also completely explainable by treating the x-rays as waves (i.e. the momentum carried by electromagnetic waves)! Eventually, a sneaky verbal compromise was found. The citation for the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics reads: "Half each to Professor AH Compton, Chicago, for his discovery of the effect named after him, and to Professor CTR Wilson, Cambridge, England, for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapour." That was the conclusion of Ekspong's delightful talk and I shall have occasion to return to him later.
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