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George Braxton Pegram (October 24, 1876 – August 12, 1958) was an American physicist who played a key role in the technical administration of the Manhattan Project. He graduated from Trinity College (now Duke University) in 1895, and taught high school before becoming a teaching assistant in physics at Columbia University in 1900. He was to spend the rest of his working life at Columbia, taking his doctorate there in 1903 and becoming a full professor in 1918. His administrative career began as early as 1913 when he became the department's executive officer. By 1918, he was Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences but he resigned in 1930 to relaunch his research activities, performing many meticulous measurements on the properties of neutrons with John R. Dunning. He was also chairman of Columbia's physics department from 1913 to 1945. Returning to administration as Dean in 1936, Pegram met Enrico Fermi on his arrival in the United States. In 1940 he brokered a meeting between Fermi and the US Navy at which the prospect of an atomic bomb was raised with the military for the first time. Following Marcus Oliphant's mission to the United States in August 1941 to alert the Americans to its feasibility, Pegram and his colleague Harold C. Urey led a diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom to establish co-operation on development of the atomic bomb. They soon found themselves on Vannevar Bush's S-1 Uranium Committee coordinating technical research. Columbia's physics department was home to the SAM Laboratories, where many of the key technologies required for the bomb were developed. After the war Pegram helped found the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He served as vice president of the university 1949 to 1950. ==Early life== George Braxton Pegram was born in Trinity, North Carolina, one of the five children of William Howell Pegram, a professor of chemistry at Trinity College (now Duke University), and Emma, daughter of Braxton Craven, the college's founder and first president. He had two brothers and two sisters, all of whom graduated from Trinity College. His upbringing in the academic atmosphere of the campus left him with an appetite for careful methodical work and an inherent diplomacy. Pegram graduated from Trinity College with a Bachelor of Arts (AB) degree in 1895, and became a high school teacher. He entered Columbia University in 1900, becoming an assistant in physics.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=George Pegram )〕 He published his first two papers, on radioactive materials, the following year, and wrote his 1903 Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis on "Secondary radioactivity in the electrolysis of thorium solutions".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Secondary radioactivity in the electrolysis of thorium solutions )〕 It was published in the Physical Review that year. During the summer break in 1905, he worked for the Coast and Geodetic Survey on measuring the Earth's magnetic field at its observation stations. In those days, promising American scholars in physics would normally further their education overseas. Pegram was awarded a John Tyndall Fellowship for this purpose in 1907, and went to Germany, where he attended lectures at the Humboldt University of Berlin given by Max Planck and Walther Nernst. In 1908, he moved on to the University of Cambridge in England, where he heard lectures given by Sir Joseph Larmor. In his travels he visited some twenty European universities, and he met Florence Bement, a Wellesley College graduate from Boston. They renewed their acquaintance after they returned to the United States, and were married at her aunt's home in West Newton, Massachusetts on June 3, 1909. They had two sons, William, born in 1910, and John, born in 1916. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「George B. Pegram」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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