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Person

Steve Lamoreaux

American experimental physicist who, while at the University of Washington, performed the first high-precision direct measurement of the Casimir force in 1997, confirming Casimir's 1948 prediction to within five per cent. His apparatus used a torsion pendulum with a sphere-and-flat geometry, chosen to make the boundary conditions analytically tractable. The measurement resolved fifty years of ambiguity about whether the Casimir force was quantitatively as predicted, opening the topic to modern engineering applications in MEMS and nanotechnology.

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