William Fowler
Born on 9 August 1911 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, William Fowler was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and pioneer in the field of nuclear astrophysics. Raised in Lima, Ohio, Fowler earned his BS in engineering physics at Ohio State University in 1933 and his PhD in physics at Caltech in 1936. He then joined the faculty of Caltech, where he would remain for the next 60 years. One of Fowler’s first projects was the construction of a particle accelerator to study nuclear reactions of light nuclei. That work was interrupted by World War II, during which Fowler worked on various projects for the war effort, including proximity fuses and solid-fueled rockets, and spent time in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. After the war, Fowler returned to his research on nuclear astrophysics, working with Fred Hoyle, Margaret Burbidge, and Geoffrey Burbidge on stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis. Their famous 1957 paper on the creation of heavy elements in stars, which was published in Reviews of Modern Physics, would become known as B2FH. In the 1960s Fowler and Hoyle collaborated on the study of the energy sources for radio galaxies and the nature of supernovae. In the 1970s and 1980s, Fowler turned his attention to compiling the thermonuclear reaction rates important for stellar nucleosynthesis. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his studies of the “physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars.” In addition to the Nobel, Fowler received the Presidential Medal for Merit in 1948, the American Physical Society’s Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics in 1970, the National Medal of Science in 1974, and the French Legion of Honor in 1989. Fowler was also active in public service, serving on the National Science Board (1968–74), the Space Science Board (1970–73; 1977–80), the Council of the National Academy of Sciences (1974–77), and as president of the American Physical Society (1976). He died in 1995 at age 83; here is the obituary that appeared in Physics Today. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)
Date in History: 9 August 1911
