Evan James Williams
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Evan James Williams FRS |
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| Born | Evan James Williams 8 June 1903 Cwmsychbant, Ceredigion, Wales |
| Died | 29 September 1945 (aged 42) Brynawd, Carmarthenshire, Wales |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | Sub-atomic particle research, anti-submarine warfare |
| Notable awards |
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Evan James Williams FRS (8 June 1903 – 29 September 1945) was a Welsh experimental physicist who worked in a number of fields with some of the most notable physicists of his day, including Patrick Blackett, Lawrence Bragg, Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr.
Williams earned a degree at Swansea University, doctorates at Manchester and Cambridge universities and a professorship at Aberystwyth University. He was highly regarded by his colleagues, and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1939.
He died of cancer at the age of 42.
Williams was born in the Ceredigion village of Cwmsychbant to stonemason James and Elizabeth (née Lloyd) Williams. He attended Llanwenog Primary School, then Llandysul School, where he was a close friend of Evan Tom Davies and, like Davies, excelled in mathematics. From there Williams, at the age of 16, won a £55 scholarship to Swansea University where he studied physics and attained a first-class honours degree in 1923.
From Swansea, Williams went into physics research at Manchester University's physics laboratories under Lawrence Bragg. At Manchester he attained a doctorate in physics in 1926 for his work with Bragg, studying X-rays in gases, then a second degree at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford. In 1930 he obtained a University of Wales D.Sc.
Much of Williams's work was on sub-atomic particles, and in 1933 he spent a year working with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen where (Blackett considered) he did his best work. Throughout the 1930s he worked on developing theories further, and lectured in physics at Manchester and Liverpool, where he worked with James Chadwick. His work included attempting to prove the existence of Hidiki Yukawa's hypothetical pi meson particle, and in 1939 Williams was the first person to witness the process experimentally and to photograph it.
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