Porter, Sir George (1920-2002), an English physical chemist, shared the 1967 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Manfred Eigen of Germany and Ronald Norrish of the United Kingdom. Porter, Eigen, and Norrish achieved the award for developing techniques to measure rapid chemical reactions. Porter also contributed much to films and television programs about science, and advocated communication between scientists and nonscientists.
During the second half of World War II (1939-1945), Porter was a radar officer in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve Special Branch. His training in electronics influenced his approaches to chemical problems. Porter’s principal investigations were into photochemical reactions (chemical reactions involving light). His early research attempted to study free radicals (unstable molecules with at least one unpaired electron) that were produced in gaseous photochemical reactions. He also studied the equilibrium of chlorine atoms and molecules.
In the late 1940’s, Porter and Norrish 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 color 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). Porter’s technique has since been improved so that the timescale is now a matter of femtoseconds (quadrillionths of seconds).
Porter was born on Dec. 6, 1920, in Stainforth, now in West Yorkshire, England. He studied at Leeds University, and then under Ronald Norrish at Cambridge University, England. In 1955, he became professor of physical chemistry at Sheffield University. Porter was president of the Royal Society, one of the world’s leading scientific organizations, from 1985 to 1990. He was knighted in 1972 and admitted to the Order of Merit, the United Kingdom’s highest civilian award, in 1989. He became a life peer in 1990 as Baron Porter of Luddenham. Porter died on Aug. 31, 2002.
See also Eigen, Manfred ; Norrish, Ronald George Wreyford .
