UChicago names building after pioneering physicist Albert Michelson

The University of Chicago has named its Physics Research Center in honor of former faculty member and founding physics department chair Albert A. Michelson, a pioneering scientist who was the first American to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences. Michelson was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics for his field-defining work, including taking the first accurate measurement of the speed of light. His Nobel Prize was the first of 91 that since have been awarded to University of Chicago faculty members, alumni and researchers during their careers. "The pioneering work of Albert Michelson is fundamental to the field of physics and continues to support new discoveries more than a century later. The naming of the Michelson Center for Physics is a fitting honor for the first physics department chair at the University of Chicago, serving as an inspiration for students and scholars alike," President Robert J. Zimmer said. At UChicago, Michelson recruited some of the world's leading physicists, while his own research focused on making more precise measurements than had ever been made across multiple fields-including calculating the rigidity of the Earth, estimating the diameter of a distant star and making the measurement long used for the standard length of a meter. Albert Einstein once wrote to a colleague: "I always think of Michelson as the artist in science.