William Wilson, 1875-1965

G. Temple and H. T. Flint

1967, 386-391, published 1 November131967 Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 

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WILLIAM WILSON

1875-1965

Elected F.R.S. 1923

William Wilson was born on 1 March 1875 at Goody Hills, near the village of Mawbray on the Solway shore in Cumberland, where his father was a farmer. His ancestors on the paternal and maternal sides of the family appear to have been farmers for some generations.

His education began in the village school of Holme St Cuthbert where, as he has related, he had a master of outstanding ability, named John Routledge.

He has recorded that the books he read at this time directed his interest towards scientific study, and that a book by Nesbit owned by his father on mensuration and land surveying gave him his first taste for geometry. It was, however, evidently his intention to take up a career in agriculture, for after gaining the Longcake scholarship of £40 a year for three years when he was not quite fourteen years of age, he went to the Agricultural College at Aspatria as a weekly boarder. In the college he had his first experience of formal scientific teaching and study, especially in chemistry and surveying together with biology, geology and zoology, and became interested in the application of scientific method and knowledge in agriculture.

He was very successful in his studies and the scientific works presented to him at this time as prizes opened up for him a wider field of science.

He became a Fellow of the Highland and Agricultural Society at the age of 17 and was awarded a studentship at the Royal College of Science in London, at the age of 18 (1893). Here he was rigidly tied to agricultural study and to the allied branches of science. He was particularly interested in Professor Judd’s lectures on geology but he found the mathematical courses dull and, for him, a waste of time. He studied mathematics with greater profit by private study in the museum library. In his last session he was able to study physics with Arthur Rucker and William Watson, and astronomy with Norman Lockyer and Alfred Fowler. This appears to have been the highlight of his experience at the Royal College of Science, and throughout his life he kept the telescope which he constructed during this course and upon which Lockyer had made kindly comments.

He was not able to put in all the time required to qualify for the Associate- ship, and in fact he spent the autumn of 1895 ploughing in the Lowenghyll behind a pair of horses.

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388He left the Royal College of Science in the summer of 1896 without a

degree and took a teaching post at a Towcester school. While there he wrote a textbook of elementary algebra, published by Relfe’s under the name of his headmaster, Dr William Thomas Knight. He left Towcester in 1898 to become a mathematics master at Beccles College in Suffolk, but after two terms he left to teach at Craven College in Highgate.

During a period of three years of teaching he formed the idea of going to study in a German University, but in order to finance this project he first obtained a post in the Berlitz School of Languages at Elberfeld. For two and a half years he taught English at branches of the school in Dortmund, Munster and Barmen in Westphalia and the Rhineland, finally occupying a responsible post in the branch at Cologne. He was thus able to matriculate and enrol as a student of mathematics in the University of Leipzig in the summer of 1902.

In the course of his studies there he met a number of famous mathe­maticians and physicists, in particular Carl Neumann with whom he studied mathematics and Otto Wiener with whom he studied experimental physics.

Wilson regarded Carl Neumann as the most distinguished teacher he had met. From him he obtained a thorough grasp of Hamiltonian mechanics. In addition to his theoretical studies he undertook an experimental investiga­tion of the photo-electric effect, which was some of the earliest work done on this phenomenon. This was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to which he was promoted with the distinction summa cum laude in 1906. The chief part of this work was published in the Annalen der Physik in the following year and was his first original contribution to physics.

The experiences of the years spent at Leipzig had a deep and lasting effect upon Wilson. He entered enthusiastically into the life of the University and from his autobiography and from talks with him it is clear that he developed both admiration and affection for what he described as the academic freedom characteristic of German universities in the early years of this century.

He has written that the University of Leipzig had all the pride and dignity of the ancient universities of England. It retained many of its medieval features, it was a municipality, it had its own court of justice with jurisdiction over the student body, and its own prison in which students were incar­cerated if they misbehaved. (It seems they were always on parole and went out for meals.)

He made lasting friendships with two of his contemporaries in Leipzig, Forsyth James Wilson and John Anderson (later Lord Waverley) who were students of chemistry. With them he had many delightful walks in the neighbourhood of Leipzig and Weimar and in places farther afield.

He began his original work in Leipzig in a small laboratory famous because it had originally been provided for Wilhelm Weber on his removal from Gottingen.

As a senior student he was invited to a luncheon on the occasion of the

Biographical Memoirs

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William Wilson 389inauguration of a new building for the Institute of Physics, and there made the acquaintance of Paul Drude, who spent a long time talking to him about the subject of photo-electricity upon which he was working.

On his return from Germany in 1906 he was appointed an assistant lecturer in the Wheatstone laboratory at King’s College, London, where Professor H. A. Wilson was at that time head of the Department of Physics.

Wilson’s first paper was written under the title ‘Lichtelektrische Entladung und durch Bestrahlung erzeugtes Leitvermdgen’, and he continued experi­mental work in this field during much of his time at King’s College. When Professor O. W. Richardson came to the College in 1914* and developed his work on the emission of electrons from hot bodies Wilson found himself in a very congenial atmosphere. His last paper on this branch of physics was published in 1917 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society with the title ‘Complete photo-electric emission from the alloy of sodium and potassium’. At the same time he maintained his interest in the theoretical aspect of physics and especially in the theory of relativity and the quantum theory.

His profound knowledge of generalized mechanics, which he considered he owed to his study of the subject with Carl Neumann, enabled him to appreciate the wider consequences of the postulates introduced by Niels Bohr in the theory of spectra. This led him to the discovery of the quantumconditions j p{ = nji, which were published in the Philosophical Magazinein 1915 and 1916. With them he gave a description of the atomic orbits of the electron, especially in the hydrogen atom, and he derived the formula for the eccentricity of an elliptic orbit in the form (1—e2)* = «a/(»x+»a)- At this time J. W. Nicholson was the Professor of Mathematics in King’s College and Wilson has said of him that he understood at once the significance of his results and was largely responsible for their early publication.

The same discovery was made shortly afterwards by Professor Sommerfeld and, as is well known, was widely applied by him to become the basis of spectroscopic theory in the old quantum theory. Wilson regarded the discovery he made in 1922 as more important than that of the originalquantum conditions. At that time he amplified them to J 7rt = , where7T{ = pi+eA^pi denoting a component of momentum and -4,- a component of the electromagnetic vector potential.

It would appear that he was the first to realize that the quantum con­ditions were a limitation upon the coordinate and its mechanically conjugate quantity.

In the year 1919 he was appointed to a readership in the Physics Depart­ment of King’s College, and 1921 to the Hildred Carfile chair of physics at Bedford College. Among his students was Kathleen Lonsdale, F.R.S.( neeYardley).

A few years later (1928) he published a paper showing that his amplifica­tion of the quantum conditions had brought him close to the work of Kaluza, who had propounded a unitary theory of gravitation and electromagnetism

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390by the extension of Einstein’s theory into the framework of five-dimensional Riemannian geometry. He held that this new discovery revealed a link between the general form of the theory of relativity and wave mechanics and some of his later writings elaborate his views on this subject. Other writings show his wide interest in physics. He wrote critical articles on thermo­dynamics, on theories of dimensions and on Milne’s kinematic relativity, the last of which did not find favour with him. He also wrote articles for encyclopaedias on stadstical physics, the Auger effect, the quantum theory and made some contributions of general interest. In 1917 he was awarded the degree of D.Sc. in the University of London.

Between the years 1931 and 1940 he published a work on theoretical physics in three volumes. They are original and profound in exposition and give the impression that he was a scholar who after long study of his subject had felt constrained to write about it. He also wrote books entitled: A hundred years of physics, published in 1950, The microphysical world, published in 1951, and two chapters in A century of physics (1951). time and the cosmos appeared in 1958. He was a great teacher and always had time for talks with his pupils and colleagues when they came to him for help. He will be remembered with appreciation and affection by them and by his friends of Bedford College and also of King’s College, of which he was a Fellow.

During the war when Bedford College moved to Cambridge he took part in the teaching of the Cavendish Laboratory.

Wilson was a tall, broad-shouldered man with large brown moustaches. He walked and moved with a striking and unusual manner, almost as if he were one of the three original mousquetaires of Dumas, and about to draw and flourish a rapier. (According to his wife, this gait originated in the habit of lifting his feet to cross the ridges in ploughed fields.) His bright and piercing eyes would shine with enthusiasm as he expounded his scientific theories. He ever conveyed an immense vitality and friendliness. He was patient and sympathetic, and always ready to find time to elucidate difficulties.

He retired in 1944 and became Professor Emeritus in the University of London in 1944.

He married Rose Blanche Lucy, the daughter of Henry Heathfield of Stoke Canon in Devon whom he had met in Leipzig. She died in 1957. There was one son, W. F. H. F. Wilson, M.A., who practises as a solicitor in Hereford.

In preparing this notice the authors are greatly indebted to his son, who kindly allowed us to consult an unfinished autobiography, which contains many fascinating details of his father’s life in Germany. We are also grateful to Professor E. N. da C. Andrade, F.R.S., who let us see another auto­biographical fragment of great interest.

G. Temple H. T. Flint

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William Wilson 391

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1907. Lichtelektrische Entladung und durch Bestrahlung erzeugtes Leitvermogen. Annin Phys. 23, 107.

1911. The discharge of positive electricity from hot bodies. Phil. Mag. 21, 634.1913. The quantum theory of energy and the emission of electricity from hot bodies.

Proc. Phys. Soc. 25, 331.1913. Versuch einer Anwendung der Quanten Hypothese auf die elektrische Entladung

von heissen Korpern. Annin Phys. 42, 1154.1915. The quantum theory of radiation and line spectra. Phil. Mag. 29, 795.1916. The quantum of action. Phil. Mag. 31, 156.1917. Complete photo-electric emission from the alloy of sodium and potassium. Proc. Roy.

Soc. A, 93, 359.1919. Relativity and gravitation. Proc. Roy. Soc. 31, 69.1922. The quantum theory and electromagnetic phenomena. Proc. Roy. Soc. A, 102, 478. 1928. Relativity and wave mechanics. Proc. Roy. Soc. A, 118, 441.1936. Mass of a convected field and Einstein’s mass-energy law. Proc. Phys. Soc. 48, 736.1937. The origin and nature of wave mechanics. Sci. Progr. 32, Oct.1938. The fundamental unit of electric charge. Proc. Phys. Soc. 50, 340.1939. The elementary particle. Phil. Mag. (Ser. 7), 27, 84.1942-1944. Discussion with Dingle and others on dimensions of physical quantities. Phil.

Mag. 33, 631; 35, 420.1944. Kinematic relativity. Phil. Mag. 35, 241.

‘Article on quantum theory.’ Encyclopaedia Britannica.Articles on ‘Quantum theory’, ‘Statistical physics’, ‘Ether’, ‘Auger effect*. Chambers's

Encyclopaedia.

Books

1931-1940. Theoretical physics (3 vols.). London: Methuen.1950. A hundred years of physics. London: Denchworth.1951. Two chapters in A century of science. London: Hutchinson. 1951. The microphysical world. London: Methuen.1958. Space time and the cosmos. London: Methuen.

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