Abstract
THE Rumford Medals for 1949 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, given for the most important discoveries in the fields of heat and light, have been awarded to Ira S. Bowen, director of the Mount Willson and Palomar Observatories in California. It was Bowen's early laboratory study of high-excitation spectra which laid the foundations for his brilliant work on the identification of the 'nebulium' lines in the spectra of galactic nebulæ as forbidden transitions in doubly ionized oxygen. Later, his analysis of the spectra of planetary nebulæ brought to light the unexpectedly high cosmic abundance of the inert gases. The puzzle of the selective excitation of certain permitted lines in nebular spectra was explained by him in a completely satisfactory way in terms of close chance coincidences between the wave-lengths of emission lines in the inaccessible ultra-violet. Dr. Bowen is well known also as an optical designer. Perhaps the most useful device associated with his name is the 'image slicer', by which the starlight that would otherwise be wasted on the slit-jaws of an astronomical spectro-graph is directed into the instrument, thus greatly increasing its effective speed. He is now in charge of the installation of the new 200-in. reflector at Mount Palomar, and is credited with a number of devices used in the optical tests. His many friends look forward with confidence to the successful initiation of the new telescope under his direction.
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Rumford Medals : Dr. I. S. Bowen. Nature 163, 671 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163671b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163671b0