Bergen Davis
Bergen Davis (March 31, 1869 – June 30, 1958) was an American physicist and professor at Columbia University. He was born near Whitehouse, New Jersey, to John Davis, a farmer, and Katherine Dilts Davis. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1896, earned a master’s degree from Columbia in 1900, and a Ph.D. in 1901. He then spent two years in Europe on a John Tyndall Fellowship, studying with J. J. Thomson and others.
In 1903 he joined Columbia as a physics tutor, becoming an instructor in 1907, an adjunct professor in 1909, an associate professor in 1913, and a full professor in 1919. He remained in that role until his retirement in 1939, when he became professor emeritus at age 70.
His Cavendish Laboratory experience in Cambridge prepared him to engage with the new physics after Einstein, Planck, and Bohr, and he helped bring these ideas into the Columbia curriculum. He produced important work on ionization, radiation potentials, and corona discharges. Later he studied X-rays and helped improve the double X-ray spectrometer. He also served as a X-ray consultant to the Crocker Institute of Cancer Research at Columbia.
Davis was active in science organizations. He served in the Physics Division of the National Research Council from 1923 to 1926, was a vice president of the Physics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1929. He received honorary doctorates from Columbia (1929) and Rutgers (1930).
Davis is known for reporting the Davis–Barnes Effect, a supposed interaction of alpha particles with electrons in a magnetic field. The effect was shown to be an observer error related to threshold perception, and Irving Langmuir cited it as an example of “pathological science” in 1953. Davis married Marie Clark in 1927. He died on June 30, 1958.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 03:52 (CET).