Nicolaas bloembergen biography
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Prof. Nicolaas Bloembergen > CV
Nicolaas Bloembergen was a Dutch-born American physicist who shared one of the two 1981 physics prizes with Arthur Schawlow, (working independently) for their work on laser spectroscopy.
Born in March 1920, in Dordrecht, Netherlands, Bloembergen was the second child of six.
Nicolaas bloembergen biography
His father was a chemical engineer, his mother a French teacher-cum-housewife. The family moved to a suburb of Utrecht, and Nicolaas attended the municipal gymnasium where he developed an interest in science and maths. He entered the University of Utrecht in 1938, but his studies were disrupted by the German occupation, and he just managed to graduate before the Nazis closed the university in 1943.
He spent the rest of the war “hiding indoors, eating tulip bulbs to fill the stomach and reading Kramer’s book Quantum Theorie des Elektrons und der Strahlung by the light of a storm lamp".
With Europe in ruins, Bloembergen applied to continue his education at Harvard.
He arrived si