Bragg, Sir William Lawrence (1890-1971), a British physicist, pioneered the use of X rays to discover the structure of large molecules. Bragg was only 25 years old when he shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics with his father, the British physicist Sir William Henry Bragg, for this work. The two men arranged molecules into crystals and then bombarded the crystals with X rays. They studied the resulting diffraction (spreading out) of the X rays to determine the structure of the molecules, a technique later known as X-ray crystallography.
In 1912, Lawrence Bragg began studying X-ray experiments conducted by the German physicist Max von Laue. Bragg and his father developed these experiments into X-ray crystallography. Lawrence used the technique to study the structure of large molecules made by living things. The British biochemists Francis Crick and James Watson used these techniques to reveal the structure of the genetic material DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
In World War I (1914-1918), Lawrence Bragg pioneered sound ranging, the location of enemy cannons by their sound. In World War II (1939-1945), he worked on bomb and mine detection.
Lawrence Bragg was born on March 31, 1890, in Adelaide, Australia. He attended the University of Adelaide and later, Cambridge University in England. He was a professor at the University of Manchester from 1919 to 1937 and at Cambridge University from 1938 to 1953. Lawrence was knighted in 1941. From 1954 to 1965, he directed the Royal Institution of Great Britain, an organization devoted to science education and research. He died on July 1, 1971.
See also Bragg, Sir William Henry .
