Clifford Glenwood Shull, a 1994 Nobel Prize winner in physics for his pioneering work in neutron scattering, died of kidney failure on 31 March 2001 in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 23 September 1915, Cliff enrolled at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh to study aeronautical engineering. Influenced by Emerson Pugh, he switched to physics after his freshman year, earning a BS in physics in 1937. He then went on to graduate school at New York University, where he received a PhD in nuclear physics in 1941. His thesis at NYU, under Frank Myers, involved the construction of a Van de Graaf accelerator and the scattering of polarized electrons.
During the time Cliff was working on his thesis, exciting things were happening at NYU involving the theory of neutron scattering from magnetic materials and the initial experimental efforts in the magnetic scattering of neutrons. In 1939,...
