€15 Silver Proof Coin 2015 – Ernest Walton

Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton, born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford in 1903, is the only Irish person to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. His achievement in artificially splitting the atomic nucleus was one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century.

In 1951, Waterford-born Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton and his colleague at Cambridge University, John Douglas Cockcroft, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneer work in artificially splitting the atomic nucleus. Their experiments during the early 1930s confirmed a number of scientific predictions arising out of relativity theory and quantum mechanics and proved that a large amount of energy could be released in a nuclear reaction, thus providing the first experimental verification of Einstein’s famous mass/energy equivalence equation. The coin design, by Irish artist Rory Breslin, illustrates in graphic form the importance of the experiment because it was the first time that Einstein’s mass/energy relationship E=mc2 was verified directly in a nuclear reaction.