The 1963 Nobel Laureate in Physics is awarded to Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure. Since 1948, Maria Goeppert-Mayer had worked on nuclear shell structure and the meaning of the "magic numbers" - those nuclei that have a special number of protons. She postulated these numbers to be the shell numbers of a shell model, a "nuclear counterpart to the closed shells of electrons" at the atomic level.
This timeline entry suggestion courtesy of
Fiona Watson, Glasgow, Scotland.
