Ben Roy Mottelson Biography

Ben Roy Mottelson was an American-Danish nuclear physicist. Brought up in the suburbs of Chicago, he graduated from high school, when the Second World War was at its peak and was immediately enlisted in the military. However, he spent the war years at the University of Purdue, getting trained to become a Navy Officer. After the war, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and then his PhD from Harvard University. Subsequently, he traveled to Copenhagen, where he joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics (later the Niels Bohr Institute) on fellowship. There, he began collaborating with Aage Bohr and experimentally confirmed that movement of subatomic particles can alter the shape of the nucleus. This work, which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics two decades later, not only challenged the established theories, but also stimulated further studies in this field. Soon after this, he obtained employment, first at the Theoretical Study Group of European Organization for Nuclear Researc, and then at Nordisk Institut for Teoretisk Atomfysik, both in Copenhagen. Later he became a naturalized citizen of Denmark and lived in Copenhagen.