Samuel Devons: Physicist and Historian, 92, Dies
Samuel Devons, a physicist and historian of science at Columbia University who combined research in nuclear physics with a career-long effort to make science accessible to general audiences, died on Dec. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92 and lived in Irvington, N.Y.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.
In the 1960s, while he was chairman of Columbia’s physics department, Dr. Devons and others conducted experiments that shed light on the nature of the atom’s nucleus.
As a historian of science, Dr. Devons wrote and spoke about the experiments of Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin and Sir J. J. Thomson, who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1906 and was one of Dr. Devons’s teachers at Cambridge University.
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The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.
In the 1960s, while he was chairman of Columbia’s physics department, Dr. Devons and others conducted experiments that shed light on the nature of the atom’s nucleus.
As a historian of science, Dr. Devons wrote and spoke about the experiments of Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin and Sir J. J. Thomson, who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1906 and was one of Dr. Devons’s teachers at Cambridge University.