George Paget Thomson

George Paget Thomson was born in 1892, son of the physicist who'd discovered the electron itself. He spent his career in experimental physics, working with crystalline materials and electron beams. In 1927, firing electrons through thin metal films, he observed diffraction patterns — the signature of wave behavior — in the very particles his father had characterized as discrete corpuscles. The finding, arrived at independently alongside Clinton Davisson's work in the U.S., confirmed de Broglie's theory of matter waves and earned Thomson half the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics. He died in 1975, ha…