Ernest Walton: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton (6 October 1903 – 25 June 1995), commonly abbreviated as E. T. S. Walton, was an Irish experimental physicist. He shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Cockcroft "for their pioneer work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles." According to their Nobel Prize speech: "Thus, for the first time, a nuclear transmutation was produced by means entirely under human control."

Walton was a key member of the nuclear physics faculty at the University of Cambridge, where he worked with Cockcroft and Ernest Rutherford. He then spent the majority of his career in Ireland, after returning from England in 1934. He remained active as a member of the teaching faculty at Trinity College Dublin, where he served as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy from 1946 until his retirement in 1974, after which he continued to be associated with the Physics Department at the College. Along with William Rowan Hamilton, Walton is regarded as one of the most influential Irish physicists.