Ronald George Wreyford Norrish Biography

Ronald George Wreyford Norrish was a British Chemist, who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1967 for his work on the studies of extremely fast chemical reactions. He was a co-recipient of the award along with George Porter and Mafred Eigen. From 1949 to 1965, Norrish worked in collaboration with his former pupil George Porter in the development of ‘flash photolysis’ and kinetic spectroscopy for the investigation and study of very fast reactions. Norrish’s contribution to chemistry became significant and obtained worldwide recognition when he made the most remarkable correction to the Draper’s law. John Draper had proposed that the amount of dynamic rate of photochemical change is directly proportional to the product of the intensity of light and time. But Norrish proved that it is proportional to the square root of the light intensity. Norrish was a man of immense energy. He enjoyed meeting people from other countries and different walks of life and also loved to travel to different places around the world.