William Lawrence Bragg
Sir William Lawrence Bragg CH OBE MC FRS (31 March 1890 – 1 July 1971) was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer (1912) of the Bragg law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint winner (with his father, Sir William Bragg) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915: "For their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-ray" an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography. He was knighted in 1941. To date, Lawrence Bragg is the youngest Nobel Laureate. He was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, when the epochal discovery of the structure of DNA was made by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in February 1953.
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“The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.”
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