William A. Fowler

PhysicistCalifornia Institute of Technology

Nobel Prize WinnerScientist

William “Willie” Fowler was an American physicist who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics.

He received his PhD in physics from Caltech. He spent most his career at Caltech, where he became director of the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory. He was friendly with J. Robert Oppenheimer when Oppie was on the faculty at Caltech before the war.

Fowler was an experimental nuclear physicist. His most famous paper (which he co-authored with several other physicists) was “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars.” He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar “for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe.”

William A. Fowler’s Timeline

1911 Aug 11th Born in Pittsburgh, PA.

1913 Moved with his family to Lima, OH.

1933 Received BS from Ohio State University.

1936 Received PhD in physics from Caltech.

1939 Became assistant professor at Caltech.

1946 Became full professor at Caltech.

1957 Published “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars.

1983 Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics.

1995 Mar 14th Died in Pasadena, CA.

Related Profiles

Mary Frankel

Los Alamos, NM

Mary P. Frankel was one of the “human computers” at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. In the spring of 1943, Frankel and her husband, Stan, an American physicist who later became a computer scientist, arrived at Los Alamos.

Karl T. Compton

MIT

Karl Taylor Compton was an American physicist and the brother of Nobel Prize winner Arthur Compton. Compton was born in 1887 in Wooster, Ohio.

Angela Creager

Princeton, NJ

Currently the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University. She is also the director of the Shelby Collum Davis Center for Historical Studies and previously was the president of the History of Science Society from 2014 to 2015.

Astro Teller

Astro Teller is the co-founder of Alphabet subsidiary “X.” He is the grandson of Edward Teller, the famous physicist often considered the father of the hydrogen bomb.