Owen Chamberlain, 85; Berkeley Physicist and Nobel-Winner Worked on Manhattan Project

Owen Chamberlain, a California physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb and was later awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the antiproton, died Tuesday. He was 85.

Chamberlain, a politically active scientist who famously apologized to the Japanese for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, had long suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He died quietly in bed at his Berkeley home of complications from the disease, according to UC Berkeley, where Chamberlain taught for many years.

Chamberlain’s research “opened up a whole new field of physics and expanded our understanding of particle physics,” said his colleague and former student, Herbert Steiner, a physics professor at UC Berkeley.

“Owen Chamberlain was an example of Berkeley’s best -- a brilliant researcher with a piercing intellect and a gifted and caring teacher,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. “He’s the last of the Nobel generation at Cal that emerged from the Manhattan Project and, with E.O. Lawrence’s cyclotron, changed the face of physics.”

Chamberlain, the son of a prominent radiologist, was born July 10, 1920, in San Francisco and earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1941. He entered graduate school at UC Berkeley, but his studies were interrupted by the start of World War II.

In 1942, he joined the Manhattan Project, working under Emilio Segre, with whom he would later share the Nobel Prize, studying the fission processes of heavy elements. After the war, he resumed his graduate work at the University of Chicago under famed atomic researcher Enrico Fermi, whom Chamberlain later called “the most intelligent man I have ever met.”

Chamberlain was on hand for the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, N.M., in 1945. He bet $5 that the bomb wouldn’t explode. He lost.

After college, he took a teaching position at UC Berkeley and began his research into the exotic subatomic particle world of electrons, protons and neutrons. Building on the theories of Paul Dirac, who in 1930 predicted the existence of a shadow world of antimatter particles -- which explosively cease to exist when they meet regular matter -- Chamberlain began a series of experiments with Segre and Clyde Wiegand into proton-scattering. In 1955, the team discovered the antiproton, the antimatter equivalent and negatively charged mirror image of the proton.

The antielectron, or positron, had previously been discovered. But many doubted the existence of the mirror image proton.

Lawrence compared the find to the discovery of the electron.

“One cannot help but wonder whether the discovery of the antiproton ... likewise is a milestone on the road to a whole new realm of discoveries in high-energy physics that are coming in the days and years ahead,” Lawrence said.

Time proved him right as larger and larger colliders were constructed around the world, enabling physicists to peel back the structure of the atom to undreamed-of levels, revealing a carnival of strange objects and their antimatter equivalents. Finding the antiproton showed that all particles have twins. It remains a mystery, however, why the universe is made mostly of matter, with little evidence of antimatter.

Chamberlain’s Nobel Prize was presented in 1959.

“The most that any scientist can ask,” Chamberlain said in his acceptance speech in Stockholm, “is that he help to lay a few stones of a partially built edifice that we call scientific knowledge.”

The prize brought him fame, which he used to support progressive political candidates and causes, such as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the ‘60s. He signed a petition to the pope in support of abortion rights, advocated a nuclear test ban treaty and was a director of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation devoted to nuclear peace.

At times, however, he demonstrated ambivalence about the platform he had been given. The Nobel, he said once, “tends to bring with it increased responsibility to be some kind of spokesman for science, or one’s institution. I have felt a responsibility to take a stand on more issues than I probably would without the Nobel Prize.”

At UC Berkeley, Chamberlain was known as a student’s teacher, insisting on being called Owen instead of professor. His unusual and invariably insightful explanations of physical phenomena came to be referred to as “Chamberlainisms.”

At the same time, his office was so cluttered that he had no room for students or visitors. As a result, the physics department mounted a blackboard in the third-floor hall outside his office so he could meet with students.

Chamberlain retired from teaching in 1989, but continued to attend weekly departmental meetings, including one last week.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Physical Society and a former Guggenheim fellow.

Chamberlain is survived by his third wife, Senta Pugh-Chamberlain of Berkeley, and four children by his first wife, Beatrice Copper, who died in 1988: daughters Karen Chamberlain of Tampa, Fla., Lynne Guenther of Ithaca, N.Y., and Pia Chamberlain of San Jose, Calif., and a son, Darol Chamberlain of Ithaca. He also is survived by two stepdaughters, Mary Pugh of Toronto and Anne Pugh of Oakland. His second wife, June Greenfield, died in 1991.