Portrait of Norman Ramsey Jr.

Birthday profile

Norman Ramsey Jr.

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr., American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (died 2011)

Born
August 27, 1915
Died
November 4, 2011
Zodiac sign
Virgo
Birth year
1915

About Norman Ramsey Jr.

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. was an American physicist who was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the separated oscillatory field method, which had important applications in the construction of atomic clocks. A physics professor at Harvard University for most of his career, Ramsey also held several posts with such government and international agencies as NATO and the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Among his other accomplishments are helping to found the United States Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Kansas, but in 1930 his father was posted to Governors Island, New York. At Cambridge, he took the tripos in order to study quantum mechanics, which had not been covered at Columbia, resulting in being awarded a second BA degree by Cambridge. Ramsey worked with them on the first experiments making use of the new technique and shared with Rabi and Zacharias in the discovery that the deuteron was a magnetic quadrupole.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when Norman Ramsey Jr. was born

Norman Ramsey Jr. was born in 1915. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1915

  • Top movieThe Birth of a Nation
  • Best-selling book"The Turmoil" – Booth Tarkington

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentJess Willard defeats Jack Johnson for heavyweight title in Havana
  • Top headlineLusitania sunk by German submarine — 1,198 die
  • Technology milestoneFirst transcontinental telephone call (Bell to Watson)
  • World population~1.75B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderWoodrow Wilson
  • U.S. population98.4M

1915 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Norman Ramsey Jr.'s birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19152026
Gas$0.25$3.45/gal
Movie ticket$0.10$11.95
Population98.4M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.