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American physicist Percy Bridgman won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1946. Bridgman studied the properties of materials under high pressure and made it possible to synthesize diamonds.
Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961), American physicist and Nobel laureate, who was noted for his study of the behavior of materials at high pressure. Bridgman was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard University. He joined the physics department of Harvard in 1910 and was appointed a full professor in 1919.
In his study of high-pressure phenomena, Bridgman was often forced to develop his own experimental equipment. Eventually he was able to create pressures as high as 400,000 atmospheres. Bridgman did experiments that explored the mechanical and thermodynamic properties of materials at high pressure (see Thermodynamics). In addition to the scientific discoveries he made using his equipment, the techniques he developed enabled others to make important advances in high-pressure science and engineering, such as the ability to synthesize diamonds, which was first done in 1955. Bridgman received the 1946 Nobel Prize in physics for the development of his experimental apparatus, and for the discoveries he made using that apparatus. Bridgman is also known for his writings on the conceptual foundations of physics. Among his works in this area are The Logic of Modern Physics (1927) and The Way Things Are (1959).