British physicist born in London, experimenter in transmutation of chemical elements (1923), awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1948) for contributions to the study of cosmic radiation from his development of Wilson's cloud chamber, as a professor at Victoria University, Manchester, United Kingdom. The son of Arthur Stuart Blackett, he was initially raised to be a military man in the British navy.
He entered Osborne Naval College (1907) and Dartmouth (1912) and became a naval cadet (1914), militating in World War I, in the battles of the Falkland Islands and Jutland. At the end of the war he was discharged as a Lieutenant, and decided to study physics with Lord Rutherford at Cambridge. He obtained the B.A (1921) and began his research with cloud chambers which resulted (1924) in the first photographs of the transmutation of nitrogen into an oxygen isotope.
He worked in Göttingen (1924-1925) with James Franck and then returned to Cambridge. He married (1924) to Constanza Bayon; and both were parents of a couple of children. Along with a young Italian scientist, G.P.S. Occhialini, he designed the controlled cloud chamber (1932), a brilliant invention with which they they managed to make cosmic rays carry their own photographs and the following year confirmed Anderson's discovery of electrons positive.
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At the start of World War II (1939) he joined the Instrument Section of the Royal Aircraft Establishment and (1940) became Scientific Advisor to Air Marshall Joubert, Coastal Command, and, in the same year, Director of Naval Operational Research at the Admiralty, developing weapons and defense systems in operations: naval ships.
Yet (1940) he was appointed Scientific Advisor to General Pile, C.M.C., Anti-Aircraft Command. After the war he started to research cosmic rays at the University of Manchester (1945), in particular, in the study of particles in strong magnetic fields. He was appointed Head of the Physics Department of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London (1953) position where he remained for ten years, then continuing (1963) as Professor of Physics and Pro-Rector at the Imperial College.
Member of the Royal Society (1933), he was awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society (1940) and the American Medal for Merit (1946). He was the author of Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (1948) and the American version Fear, War, and the Bomb (1949) and died in London.
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http://www.nobel.se/
Source: Biographies - Academic Unit of Civil Engineering / UFCG
Order P - Biography - Brazil School
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
COSTA, Keilla Renata. "Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/biografia/patrick-maynard.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
