James R. Arnold
| James R. Arnold | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
May 5, 1923 Metuchen, New Jersey |
| Died | January 6, 2012 (aged 88) La Jolla, California, United States |
| Other names | Jim Arnold |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Cosmochemistry |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | Ph.D., Princeton University, 1946 |
| Known for | |
| Influences | |
| Notable awards |
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| Spouse | Louise C. Arnold |
James Richard Arnold (May 5, 1923 – January 6, 2012) was the Harold C. Urey Professor of Chemistry (emeritus), and a noted pioneer in the field of planetary and space chemistry at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), where an endowed lectureship has been established in his name.
Arnold received his education at Princeton University, where he enrolled as an undergraduate at age 16. He earned his doctorate there in 1946 at 23, for work on the Manhattan Project (his thesis is still classified). Concerns about nuclear fallout and war prompted him to be an early member of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a World Federalist, through which he met his wife Louise in 1950.
As a Postdoctoral researcher under Willard Libby at the University of Chicago, Arnold helped develop the techniques for Carbon-14 dating, working with archeological samples from Egypt and other samples with known ages. For this work, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960.
After his postdoc, Arnold returned to Princeton as a faculty member, working on using cosmic rays to measure the age of rocks., and where he began his work on extraterrestrial material, including cosmic rays. It was at Princeton that Masatake (Masa) Honda and Devendra Lal first joined his work, an association amongst them that would last the rest of their lives.
In 1957, Roger Revelle was working to start UCSD near the campus of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He recruited Arnold and a few others to be the founding faculty. The recruitment of Harold C. Urey convinced Arnold to accept and move west in 1958, leaving Princeton to become the founding chair of the UCSD Department of Chemistry and help found the campus and recruit faculty. He was a NASA consultant for many years, helping set scientific research priorities, starting just three months after NASA was founded. He played a major role in establishing and reforming the Lunar Receiving Laboratory for handling lunar samples returned during the Apollo program, including being one of the "Four Horsemen", along with Bob Walker, Paul Werner Gast, and Gerry Wasserburg.
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