Ramsey, Norman Foster, Jr., 1915–2011, American physicist, b. Washington, D.C., Ph.D. Columbia, 1940. A member of the faculty at Harvard from 1947 and the Higgins professor of physics from 1966 (emeritus from 1987), Ramsey also held several posts with such government and international agencies as NATO and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the separated oscillatory field method, or Ramsey method, which had important applications in the construction of atomic clocks and also contributed to the development of nuclear magnetic resonance. He shared the prize with Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul. Ramsey also developed hydrogen maser atomic clock in 1960 with David Kleppner.
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