Norman Foster Ramsey Jr.

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. was born August 27, 1915, and spent most of his career as a physics professor at Harvard. In the 1940s he invented the separated oscillatory field method — a technique for probing atoms that became the foundation of atomic clocks. The work earned him the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics. Beyond the lab, he helped found Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab, two of the United States' major research centers, and held posts with NATO and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He died November 4, 2011, decades after the clocks he made possible began keeping time for the world…