Bridgman, Percy Williams

Bridgman, Percy Williams (1882-1961) An American physicist who studied the properties of matter under extremely high pressure. A graduate of Harvard, he remained there as professor from 1919 rmtil retirement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1946. He is also noted for his writings on the philosophy of science and studies of electrical conduction in metals and properties of crystals. He was president of the American Physical Society in 1942. 

Walter, M.L. (1990) Science and Cultural Crisis An Intellectual Biography of Percy William Bridgman (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA). 

It had long been known that ultrahigh pressures could pack the atoms and molecules of some substances into more substantial configurations. Gases, as we have already noted, could be liquefied by putting them under pressure, and some metals that did not superconduct on their own eventually did so when pressure was applied. Among the pioneers in the field was Percy Williams Bridgman, an American physicist at Harvard University whose contributions resulted in new techniques that increased laboratory pressures nearly a hundredfold, and won him a Nobel Prize in 1946. Once, when he reached a pressure twenty thousand times that of normal atmospheric pressure— physicists use the term 20,000 atmospheres—he burst the metal containers used in the experiment. Eventually, he developed more resilient materials, and succeeded in creat-... 

Bridgman, P.W. (1946). Dimensional analysis. EncyclopaediaBritannical. 439-449. Kemble, E.C., Birch, F. (1970). Percy Williams Bridgman. Biographical memoirs. National Acadeiry of Sciences USA Ti-Gl. Columbia University Press New York. P Newitt, D.M. (1962). Percy Wilhams Bridgman. Biographical memoirs. Royal Society 8 26-40. P... 

Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961), Professor at Harvard University, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1946 for his studies of materials at very high temperatures and pressures. 

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