G. I. Taylor facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor
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| Born | 7 March 1886 St. John's Wood, Middlesex, England
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| Died | 27 June 1975 (aged 89) Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England
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| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Known for | Taylor column Taylor cone Taylor dispersion Taylor microscale Taylor number Taylor scraping flow Taylor's dislocation Taylor's decaying vortices Taylor's potential flow Taylor–Caulfield instability Taylor–Couette flow Taylor–Culick flow Taylor–Dean flow Taylor–Goldstein equation Taylor–Green vortex Taylor–Proudman theorem Taylor–von Neumann–Sedov blast wave Rayleigh–Taylor instability Zeldovich–Taylor flow Saffman–Taylor instability Taylor impact test Taylor–Melcher leaky dielectric model CQR anchor Eddy diffusion Entrainment Flow plasticity theory Homogeneous isotropic turbulence |
| Awards | FRS (1919) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics Mathematics Fluid mechanics Fluid dynamics Solid mechanics Wave theory |
| Academic advisors | J. J. Thomson |
| Doctoral students | George Batchelor Philip Drazin Albert E. Green Francis Bretherton Rosa M. Morris Stewart Turner |
Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor (March 7, 1886 – June 27, 1975) was a famous British scientist. He was a physicist and mathematician who studied how liquids and gases move. He also worked on how waves behave. His ideas helped us understand many things, from how clouds form to how bombs work.
Contents
Early Life and Learning
Geoffrey Taylor was born in London, England. His dad was an artist, and his mom came from a family of mathematicians. His grandfather was George Boole, a very important mathematician.
When he was a kid, Geoffrey loved science. He went to special Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution. He even did his own experiments at home using simple things like paint rollers and sticky tape!
From 1905 to 1908, Taylor studied math and physics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was very good at his studies and won many awards. One award let him learn from J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron.
Amazing Discoveries and Work
Taylor started publishing his scientific papers even before he finished college.
Light Experiments and Interference
One of his first papers was about how light behaves. He showed that even very dim light could create patterns called interference fringes. He used light from a gas lamp, made it very faint, and shone it around a sewing needle. It took him three months to get a good photograph!
Today, we understand this experiment using tiny particles of light called photons. Taylor's work helped scientists realize that a single photon can behave like a wave and go through more than one path at the same time.
Understanding Air and Water Movement
After this, Taylor studied shock waves, which are like very fast waves of pressure. He won an award for this work. In 1910, he became a Fellow at Trinity College. The next year, he got a job studying meteorology, which is the science of weather.
His work on turbulence (the messy, swirly movement of fluids like air or water) in the atmosphere was very important. He wrote a paper called "Turbulent motion in fluids."
In 1913, Taylor worked on a ship called the Scotia. He was a meteorologist on an International Ice Patrol. His observations helped him create a model for how air mixes.
Helping During World War I
When World War I started, Taylor used his science skills to help with aircraft design. He worked at the Royal Aircraft Factory. He studied things like the stress on airplane propellers. He also learned to fly planes himself! He even studied how parachutes work.
Fluid Mechanics and Materials
After the war, Taylor went back to Cambridge. He studied how turbulent flow applies to oceanography (the study of oceans). He also looked at how objects move through spinning liquids.
In 1923, he became a special research professor. This meant he didn't have to teach, which he didn't enjoy much. During this time, he did a lot of his most important work on how liquids and solids move and change shape. He also made a big step in understanding turbulence by using statistics to study how speeds change.
In 1934, Taylor and other scientists realized that the way metals bend and stretch (called plastic deformation) could be explained by tiny flaws in their structure called dislocations. This idea was very important for the modern science of how solid materials behave.
In 1936, he gave a famous series of talks called the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures about "Ships." One of these talks, about "why ships roll in a rough sea," was the first Christmas Lecture ever shown on TV by the BBC.
The Manhattan Project
During World War II, Taylor again used his knowledge to help with military problems. He studied how blast waves spread, both in the air and underwater.
From 1944 to 1945, Taylor went to the United States to help with the Manhattan Project. This was a secret project to build the first atomic bombs. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Taylor helped solve problems with how the bombs would explode. He helped with the design of the plutonium bomb used in Nagasaki.
In 1944, he was given a special honor called a knighthood and also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society.
Taylor was there to see the very first nuclear test, called Trinity, on July 16, 1945. He was one of only 10 special guests who watched the explosion.
In 1950, he published two papers where he used photos from the Trinity test to figure out how powerful the explosion was. His estimates were very close to the secret official value!
Later Years and New Ideas
Even after officially retiring in 1952, Taylor kept doing research for another 20 years. He liked to work on problems that he could solve with simple equipment.
He studied how liquids flow through tubes and how they move through porous (spongy) surfaces. He also looked at the movement of thin sheets of liquids.
When he was between 78 and 83 years old, Taylor wrote six papers about electrohydrodynamics. This is the study of how electric fields affect liquids. He went back to his interest in electrical activity, like in thunderstorms. He studied how jets of liquid are pushed by electric fields. The cone shape from which these jets come out is now called the Taylor cone after him.
Taylor's love for sailing often influenced his work. He was very interested in how air and water move. In the 1930s, he invented a new type of boat anchor called the 'CQR' anchor. It was stronger and easier to use than other anchors.
Personal Life
Geoffrey Taylor married Grace Stephanie Frances Ravenhill in 1925. She was a school teacher. They were together until Stephanie passed away in 1965.
Taylor had a serious stroke in 1972, which stopped him from working. He died in Cambridge in 1975. He is buried in the churchyard of St Edward King and Martyr, Cambridge.
Awards and Honors
Sir Geoffrey Taylor received many important awards for his scientific work:
- Theodore von Kármán Prize (1972)
- Theodore von Karman Medal (1969)
- A. A. Griffith Medal and Prize (1969)
- Order of Merit (1969)
- Franklin Medal (1962)
- Kelvin Gold Medal (1959)
- Timoshenko Medal (1958)
- De Morgan Medal (1956)
- Wilhelm Exner Medal (1954)
- Symons Gold Medal (1951)
- Knight Bachelor (1944)
- Copley Medal (1944)
- Royal Medal (1933)
- Bakerian Medal (1923)
- FRS (1919)
- Adams Prize (1915)
- Smith's Prize (1910)
See also
In Spanish: G. I. Taylor para niños
