|
|signature = Harold Urey signature.svg }} Harold Clayton Urey (April 29, 1893 – January 5, 1981) was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, but may be most prominent for his contribution to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter. Born in Walkerton, Indiana, Urey studied thermodynamics under Gilbert N. Lewis at the University of California. After he received his PhD in 1923, he was awarded a fellowship by the American-Scandinavian Foundation to study at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He was a research associate at Johns Hopkins University before becoming an associate professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. In 1931, he began work with the separation of isotopes that resulted in the discovery of deuterium. During World War II Urey turned his knowledge of isotope separation to the problem of uranium enrichment. He headed the group located at Columbia University that developed isotope separation using gaseous diffusion. The method was successfully developed, becoming the sole method used in the early post-war period. After the war, Urey became professor of chemistry at the Institute for Nuclear Studies, and later Ryerson professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago. Urey speculated that the early terrestrial atmosphere was probably composed of ammonia, methane, and hydrogen. One of his Chicago graduate students was Stanley L. Miller, who showed in the ''Miller–Urey experiment'' that, if such a mixture be exposed to electric sparks and water, it can interact to produce amino acids, commonly considered the building blocks of life. Work with isotopes of oxygen led to pioneering the new field of paleoclimatic research. In 1958, he accepted a post as a professor at large at the new University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he helped create the science faculty. He was one of the founding members of UCSD's school of chemistry, which was created in 1960. He became increasingly interested in space science, and when Apollo 11 returned moon rock samples from the moon, Urey examined them at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. == Early life == Harold Clayton Urey was born on April 29, 1893, in Walkerton, Indiana, the son of Samuel Clayton Urey, a school teacher and a minister in the Church of the Brethren, and his wife Cora Rebecca née Reinoehl. He had a younger brother, Clarence, and a younger sister, Martha. The family moved to Glendora, California, but moved back to Indiana to live with Cora's widowed mother when Samuel became seriously ill with tuberculosis. He died when Urey was six years old. Urey was educated in an Amish grade school, which he graduated from at the age of 14. He then attended high school in Kendallville, Indiana.〔 After graduating in 1911, he obtained a teacher's certificate from Earlham College,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Harold C. Urey )〕 and taught in a small school house in Indiana. He later moved to Montana, where his mother was then living, and he continued to teach there. Urey entered the University of Montana in Missoula in the autumn of 1914, where he earned a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in zoology in 1917. After the United States entry into World War I that year, Urey took a wartime job with the Barrett Chemical Company in Philadelphia, making TNT. After the war ended, he returned to the University of Montana as an instructor in Chemistry.〔 An academic career required a doctorate, so in 1921 Urey enrolled in a PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied thermodynamics under Gilbert N. Lewis. His initial attempt at a thesis was on the ionization of cesium vapor. He ran into difficulties, and an Indian physicist published a better paper on the same subject. Urey then wrote his thesis on the ionization states of an ideal gas, which was subsequently published in the ''Astrophysical Journal''. After he received his PhD in 1923, Urey was awarded a fellowship by the American-Scandinavian Foundation to study at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where he met Werner Heisenberg, Hans Kramers, Wolfgang Pauli, Georg von Hevesy, and John Slater. At the conclusion of his stay, he traveled to Germany, where he met Albert Einstein and James Franck. On returning to the United States, Urey received an offer of a National Research Council fellowship to Harvard University, and also received an offer to be a research associate at Johns Hopkins University. He chose the latter. Before taking up the job, he traveled to Seattle, Washington, to visit his mother. On the way, he stopped by Everett, Washington, where he knew a woman called Kate Daum. Kate introduced Urey to her sister, Frieda. Urey and Frieda soon became engaged. They were married at her father's house in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1926. The couple had four children: Gertrude Bessie (Elisabeth), born in 1927; Frieda Rebecca, born in 1929; Mary Alice, born in 1934; and John Clayton Urey, born in 1939. At Johns Hopkins, Urey and Arthur Ruark wrote ''Atoms, Quanta and Molecules'' (1930), one of the first English texts on quantum mechanics and its applications to atomic and molecular systems. In 1929, Urey became an associate professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, where his colleagues included Rudolph Schoenheimer, David Rittenberg, and T. I. Taylor. 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「Harold Urey」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|