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Campaign to name Dublin bridge after physics Nobel prizewinner Ernest Walton
The Institute of Physics is campaigning to name the new bridge across the Liffey in Dublin at Marlborough Street “The Ernest Walton Bridge” as an icon of Irish science. What better time to commemorate Dublin City of Science 2012 and to celebrate one of Ireland’s greatest contemporary thinkers, Ernest Walton in this the 80th anniversary of Walton’s seminal work in splitting the atom in 1932?
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Earnest Walton
Ernest Walton (1903-1995) was one of the most respected scientists of the 20th century, thus maintaining a tradition in Ireland that reached back to the seventeenth century.
In 1932 he and his co-worker John Cockcroft were the first to artificially split the atom in a controlled fashion in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, which was the leading research centre in the world in atomic and nuclear physics research at that time. Walton had enrolled as a Ph.D. research student following his remarkable achievements as an undergraduate in Trinity College Dublin.
The experiment had several important outcomes including the verification of Einstein’s famous equation relating mass and energy, E=mc2. Walton was at the birth of modern physics, as carried out in CERN and elsewhere throughout the world.
This new experimental capability greatly enhanced scientific research in many fields of endeavor including studies into the origins of the Universe itself.
Walton and Cockcroft’s invention of a particle accelerator capable of splitting the atom for the first time earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951: To date, Walton remains Ireland’s only Nobel Prize winner in the sciences.
Institute of Physics Ireland
