Norrish, Ronald George Wreyford

Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, (born Nov. 9, 1897, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.—died June 7, 1978, Cambridge), British chemist who was the corecipient, with fellow Englishman Sir George Porter and Manfred Eigen of West Germany, of the 1967 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. All three were honoured for their studies of very fast chemical reactions.

Norrish did his undergraduate and doctoral work at the University of Cambridge, served as research fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and directed the university’s physical chemistry department for 28 years. Norrish and Porter, who worked together between 1949 and 1965, used the new technique of flash photolysis to study the intermediate stages involved in extremely rapid chemical reactions. In this technique, a gaseous system in a state of equilibrium is subjected to an ultrashort burst of light that causes photochemical reactions in the gas. A second burst of light is then used to detect and record the changes taking place in the gas before equilibrium is reestablished. Norrish became a professor emeritus in 1963, though he continued to work with individual students and as an industrial consultant.