Roswell Clifton Gibbs - Physicist

Physicist

As a physicist, Gibbs's primary area of interest was spectroscopy. At the time, this was the fairly new and exciting field of research in physics. Physicists investigated the emission and absorption of radiation, creating an understanding of atomic structure. The new theory of quantum mechanics attempted to explain phenomena at the atomic and subatomic level. Gibbs was the author or co-author of over forty research papers, on subjects such as the ultraviolet spectra of isoelectronic sequences, and the hyperfine structure of spectra. He determined the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron by studying the intervals between the H-alpha lines of hydrogen and deuterium, and investigated the absorption spectra of organic compounds in solution.

Gibbs became an assistant professor of Physics at Cornell in 1912, and a professor of Physics in 1918. He rose to chairman of the Department of Physics from 1934 to 1946. As chairman, he moved the thrust of physics research at Cornell to nuclear physics. He hired Stanley Livingston, who had worked with Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley, to build a cyclotron at Cornell, and Hans Bethe as a theoretical physicist, and Robert Bacher as an experimental physicist. In this, he was opposed by the Dean of the Graduate School, fellow Cornell-educated physicist Floyd K. Richtmyer, who wanted the department to concentrate on his own field of research, X-ray spectroscopy. Bethe would work at Cornell for seven decades, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his work on stellar nucleosynthesis.