Sir William Lawrence Bragg

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Laboratory, a position once held by his father. He stayed at the Royal Institution until his retirement in 1966.
The work that brought the Braggs fame was based on the phenomenon of X-ray diffraction in crystals, discovered in 1912 by Max Theodor Felix von Laue. Although the wave nature of X rays and the order of magnitude of their wavelength had been established, there were no methods developed to interpret the photographic interference pictures that two of von Laue's colleagues had produced by directing X rays through crystals.
Lawrence Bragg and his father had begun discussing von Laue's findings in 1912, and worked together to treat them mathematically and simplify their interpretation. Lawrence Bragg discovered that certain planes in a crystal reflect X rays, in accordance with the normal law of reflection. The distance between parallel planes of atoms determines the angle at which reflection can take place for a certain wavelength of the X rays.
This relation, known as Bragg's ...

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