Willis Lamb’s eponymous groundbreaking discovery six decades ago still forms part of the foundation of quantum electrodynamics and is a key aspect of modern elementary particle physics. Willis E. Lamb Jr. died May 15 in Tucson, Ariz., at 94. He earned a bachelor’s degree from UC-Berkeley and then completed his PhD there in 1938.
While teaching at Stanford, Lamb won the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics for the “Lamb shift.” The work, conducted at Columbia University in the 1940s, led physicists to rethink the basic concepts behind the application of quantum theory to electromagnetism.
A year after winning the Nobel Prize, Lamb left Stanford for Oxford. He moved again in 1962, to Yale. In 1974, he joined the University of Arizona, where he remained until his retirement in 2002. His many awards included election to the National Academy of Sciences and the 2000 National Medal of Science. Survivors: his third wife, Elsie, whom he married in January; and a brother, Perry.
