In awarding the Nobel Prize to Drs. Mottelson, Bohr and Rainwater quoted the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as their “discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection.”
Ben Roy Mottelson was born on July 9, 1926 in Chicago, the second of three children of Goodman and Georgia (Blum) Mottelson. His father was an engineer. The family home was a place of lively conversation about scientific, political and moral issues, Dr. Mottelson himself in an autobiographical sketch for the Nobel Foundation.
He graduated from Lyons Township High School in La Grange, Illinois during World War II and, after enlisting in the Navy, was sent to Purdue University for officer training. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1947, he entered Harvard University for postgraduate studies in nuclear physics. There he studied with Julian Schwinger, the theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics. with dr. Schwinger as his thesis advisor, Dr. Mottelson’s Ph.D. in 1950.
He received a one-year Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard and decided to spend the time at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen (later renamed Niels Bohr, its founder). dr. Bohr still worked there, as did his son Aage. It was during this time that the collaboration between Dr. Mottelson and the younger Dr. Bohr started. (In a scientific twist, the liquid droplet model that was eventually superseded by the work of Drs. Mottelson, Rainwater, and Aage Bohr was proposed by Niels Bohr.)
When the Sheldon scholarship ended, Dr. Mottelson received a two-year grant from the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which allowed him to remain in Copenhagen. He was then hired by the newly established European Organization for Nuclear Research known as CERN, which was founded in Copenhagen before moving to Geneva.
When the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Atomic Physics was founded in 1957, Dr. Mottelson was hired as a professor there. He remained there for the rest of his professional life, with only a brief stint at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1959.
He became a naturalized Danish citizen in 1971.
The theory of Dr. Mottelson and his colleagues on the shape of atomic nuclei became widely accepted. But, as often happens in science, it initially met with some resistance.