Norrish, Ronald George Wreyford (1897-1978), a British chemist, helped to develop techniques for measuring rapid chemical reactions. For this work, Norrish shared the 1967 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Manfred Eigen of Germany and George Porter of the United Kingdom.
During the late 1940’s, Norrish and Porter developed a technique known as flash photolysis to measure rapid chemical reactions. In flash photolysis, a brief burst of intense light produces a chemical change, and allows the resultant unstable chemicals to be studied by their absorption spectra (bands of colour broken by dark lines whose frequencies indicate the presence of certain chemicals). Norrish and Porter managed to stop chemical reactions at intervals of almost one nanosecond (a billionth of a second).
Norrish was born in Cambridge, England. He studied chemistry at Cambridge University. In 1936, Norrish was elected fellow of the Royal Society, one of the world’s foremost scientific organizations. He became professor of physical chemistry at Cambridge in 1937.
