Norman F. Ramsey’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1989

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of Wolfgang Paul, Hans Dehmelt and myself, I wish to express our deepest thanks for the honors granted to us today. For me it is a double pleasure to share this award with two such distinguished fellow physicists.

The three of us have neither collaborated nor competed on any experiment, but we have shared the common goals of seeking new methods for precise measurements and of applying these methods to obtain fundamental properties of molecules, atoms and elementary particles.

Although we are greatly pleased by being recognized individually, we believe the award also symbolically honors our entire field of physics, that of high-precision measurements. The award reminds the world that Physics is an experimental science and can still be successfully pursued in a university laboratory. Many scientists throughout the world are doing beautiful and accurate measurements. We believe that research of this nature will continue to make major contributions to the understanding of the fundamental laws of our universe.