Among the physicists at Shelter Island was Willis Lamb, a young physicist at Columbia University. Using some of the microwave radar technology developed during the war, Lamb had just succeeded in measuring precisely the sort of effect that Oppenheimer had tried to calculate in 1930, a shift in the energy of the hydrogen atom owing to photo emissions and reabsorptions. This shift has since become known as the Lamb shift. This measurement in itself did nothing to solve the problem of infinities but forced physicists to come to grips with this problem again in order to account for the measured
...more
