Darwin, Charles Galton

Darwin, Charles Galton, 1887–1962, English physicist and administrator. Educated at Cambridge, he worked under Ernest Rutherford at Manchester, where he collaborated with H. G. J. Moseley in fundamental work on X-ray diffraction by crystals. Following World War I he became a fellow and lecturer at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he and R. H. Fowler developed new methods of statistical mechanics that later served as a foundation for quantum statistics. Professor at Edinburgh from 1924 to 1936 and master of Christ's College from 1936, he directed the National Physical Laboratory during World War II, leaving the post in 1949. The last 15 years of his life were devoted to the study of the sociological implications of the population explosion, as reflected in his book The Next Million Years (1953).

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