Harry George Drickamer is recognized as a world leader in the use of high pressure to investigate the electronic structure of matter. His fundamental discovery was that pressure affects different kinds of electronic orbitals to different degrees. An electronic orbital is the wave function of an electron moving in a molecule or atom, corresponding to the orbit of the electron in earlier theory. The finding of this pressure effect, known as the "pressure tuning" of electronic energy levels, had two main consequences. One, it explained how the electronic transition to a new ground state, the state of least possible energy, can lead to very different and often unanticipated physical and chemical properties in a variety of materials. Two, it provided new ways to test theories about physical and chemical phenomena using pressure as a variable.

Drickamer was born on November 19, 1918, in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, George Henry Drickamer...