Professor Richard Joseph "Dick" Davisson (December 29, 1922 — June 15, 2004) was an American physicist. December 29 is the 363rd day of the year (364th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 2 days remaining. ... 1922 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... June 15 is the 166th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (167th in leap years), with 199 days remaining. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The willingness to question previously held truths and search for new answers resulted in a period of major scientific advancements, now known as the Scientific Revolution. ...

Davisson was the son of Clinton Davisson, a Nobel laureate and his wife Charlotte. His maternal uncle, Sir Owen Richardson was also a Nobel laureate. Clinton Joseph Davisson (22 October 1881–1 February 1958), was an American physicist. ...

During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project as part of the Special Engineer Detachment. At Los Alamos, he was recruited by Professor Robert Williams (scientist) to teach at the University of Washington. World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: Immense human sacrifice, fierce indoctrinations, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons - the atom bomb being the ultimate. ... Control panels and operators for calutrons at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ... Los Alamos National Laboratory, aerial view from 1995. ... The University of Washington, founded in 1861, is a major public research university in the Seattle metropolitan area. ...

Davisson was a member of the Washington team which designed a system for detecting a subatomic particle known as a muon. After the U.S. government pulled the funding on the Superconducting Supercollider project, the team was recruited by CERN to provide the system to Europe's state-of-the-art particle accelerator. A subatomic particle is a particle smaller than an atom: it may be elementary or composite. ... In the Standard Model of particle physics, a muon (Greek μείον = minus) is a semistable fundamental particle with negative electric charge and a spin of 1/2. ... CERN logo CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the worlds largest particle physics laboratory, situated on the border between France and Switzerland, just west of Geneva. ... One of the early particle accelerators responsible for development of the atomic bomb. ...

Davisson retired in 2000, at the age of 77.

Quotation

"There are no physicists in the hottest parts of Hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of Hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible."

A red-hot iron rod cooling after being worked by a blacksmith. ... Medieval illustration of the Mouth of Hell Hell is a place or state of painful suffering. ... Temperature is the physical property of a system which underlies the common notions of hot and cold; the material with the higher temperature is said to be hotter. ... A heat engine performs the conversion of heat energy to work by exploiting the temperature gradient between a hot source and a cold sink. Heat is transferred to the sink from the source, and in this process some of the heat is converted into work. ...

External links

• Richard Davisson on wikiquote