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Person

Norman Ramsey

A man with white hair and glasses, wearing a dark suit, tie, and sweater vest, stands against a neutral background.

Harvard physicist (1915–2011) who in 1949 invented the separated oscillatory fields method, in which atoms are interrogated by two short microwave pulses with a long drift between them. The resulting fringe pattern is sharper than any single-pulse resonance and underlies every modern atomic clock. Ramsey shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for the work.

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