NORMAN F. RAMSEY
Author: By Richard Saltus, Globe Staff
Date: Friday, October 13, 1989
Page: 3
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
At 74, Norman F. Ramsey is so hale and extroverted that reporters at
yesterday's Nobel news conference wanted his formula for living.
Science, said Ramsey, "is a lot of fun, and it's nice to be paid for it
too." But it seemed clear that the fun is the ingredient that, he says,
deters any thought of giving up his research, even though he is officially
retired.
He said he will use some of his share of the $469,000 physics prize to pay
for his trips to Grenoble, France, where he is participating in an
international experiment on neutrons at the Institut Laue Langevin.
Described in a newspaper 30 years ago as a "raw-boned Scot," Ramsey is an
outdoor enthusiast. He has four daughters by the late Elinor Jameson, whom he
married in 1940; two are in academic life. He is now married to Ellie Welch
Ramsey.
When possible, he said, the family gathers to trek or ski on land Ramsey
owns in Vermont and around a lake in Nova Scotia.
Born in 1915 in Washington, he received undergraduate and graduate degrees
from Columbia University and additional degrees from Cambridge University in
England. During World War II he worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and the
Los Alamos National Laboratory, and afterward he was the first chairman of the
physics department at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
He was appointed scientific adviser to NATO in 1958, was a Guggenheim
Fellow and served as president of the American Physical Society in 1978-79.
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