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Patrick Blackett

Geophysicist

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Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett was an English physicist and geophysicist, born in 1897 in London and died in 1974. Awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the Wilson cloud chamber and his discoveries in cosmic ray physics, he turned in the 1950s to designing sensitive magnetometers to measure the residual magnetism preserved in sedimentary rocks. Working with Stanley Keith Runcorn and other collaborators, his paleomagnetic research provided important new evidence supporting Alfred Wegener's hypothesis of continental drift at a time when the idea remained widely doubted.

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