chambers_search-1

Search Chambers

Consult Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, The Chambers Thesaurus (1996) or Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1997 edition with amendments). Enter your search and choose your title from the drop-down menu.

Uhlenbeck, George Eugene 1900-88
US physicist

Born in Batavia (Jakarta), Indonesia, he studied at the University of Leyden and from 1927 worked at the University of Michigan, where he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1939. To explain the results of the Stern-Gerlach experiment which showed that a beam of particles passing through a magnetic field are deflected in different directions, Uhlenbeck and his fellow student Samuel Goudsmit proposed that electrons in atoms can have intrinsic spin angular momentum as well as orbital angular momentum. Paul Dirac's theory of relativistic quantum mechanics later showed that spin is an intrinsic property of electrons.