Ramsey Appointed to Science Medal Committee

President Bill Clinton last week announced his intent to appoint Higgins Professor of Physics Emeritus Norman F. Ramsey to the presidential committee charged with selecting recipients of the National Medal of Science Award.

The annual award is considered the American equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Ramsey, who is regarded as one of the most influential physicists of his time, should have no trouble choosing future medal winners. Early in 1989 he himself won the National Medal of Science Award, an honor followed several months later with a Nobel Prize in physics.

With these two triumphs already under his belt along with a laundry list of other awards that span his long career, the 84-year-old physicist said he is nonchalant about this most recent honor and called it a "very minor thing."

Although the formal announcement of his appointment occurred just last Wednesday, Ramsey said he had known of President Clinton's intent to appoint him to the committee for about a year.

But despite his understatement, colleagues said Ramsey is deserving of all his honors.

"Norman Ramsey is amazing," Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi '62, also master of Leverett House, wrote in an e-mail message. "He has also been a tireless worker on a variety of boards and committees that keep national and international science running."

With a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Ramsey joined Harvard's Faculty as Higgins professor of physics in 1957.

Since then, he has been at the forefront of physics research.

During World War II, Ramsey developed the delivery system for the atomic bomb, a job that included choosing and modifying the allies' airplanes.

His work has also focused on the physics of measuring time. His discovery of the physics behind the atomic clock, an extremely precise time measurement system, won him the Nobel Prize in physics and half of the $469,000 monetary award he shared with two other scientists.

But Ramsey is perhaps best known for his work that contributed to the creation of a technology known as the Global Positioning System (GPS). With vast military and lay applications, GPS allows people to pinpoint their geographic location with a small handheld device.

Although officially a professor emeritus, Ramsey has continued to play an active role at the University. On Saturday he presented a lecture at a symposium celebrating 50 years of proton beams at the Harvard cyclotron laboratory.

Ramsey said he envisions working at the University for an additional 10 years.

"I've still got plenty I want to do here," he said.

Professor of Physics Gerald Gabrielse said Ramsey is a "vigorous" scholar and person despite his age.

"I can tell he's getting older because when I when we walk across campus, I can just about keep up," Gabrielse quipped. "He's a real class act, Norman is."