The Institute of Physics in Ireland (IOP) is campaigning to have the new Marlborough Street bridge across the Liffey in Dublin named for Waterford man Ernest Walton.
Walton (along with his co-worker John Cockcroft) was the first person to artificially split the atom in a controlled fashion thus verifying Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2. Walton was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work and he remains Ireland’s only physics Nobel prize-winner. He is according to the IOP “one of the most respected scientists of the 20th century”.

