Huntingdon borough
The Nobel Physicist
Did you know? A Juniata College graduate shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.
William Daniel Phillips graduated from Juniata in 1970. He went on to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and in 1997 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu, for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
To be straight about it, he is not a Huntingdon County native. He was born in Wilkes-Barre in 1948 and grew up in Camp Hill, outside Harrisburg. What this county can claim is the college that graduated him, and that is a real claim.
A small college in a small county has a Nobel laureate on its rolls.
Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 1997, so there is no passage in them that bears on it. Rather than attach an unrelated page and let it look like corroboration, this story stands on the sources listed below.
What the fact check changed. CORRECTED, and this one was plainly false as written. THE ERROR: both queued copies open 'A Huntingdon County man won the Nobel Prize in Physics.' He is not a Huntingdon County man. Phillips was born in Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, on November 5 1948, and grew up in Camp Hill outside Harrisburg. His Huntingdon County connection is that he graduated from Juniata College in 1970, which is a fine story on its own and does not need inflating. Publishing 'a Huntingdon County man' invites a one-search correction in the comments. SOLE CREDIT CORRECTED: the post says the work 'earned him the Nobel Prize'. The 1997 physics prize was shared three ways with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu, for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. Giving one man the whole prize is the same defect as the Gregg and Custer post in batch 000. The rewrite says shared, and names the other two. It may well be true and it would be a nice detail. It needs a source from Juniata College before it goes out. The laureate list and motivation here come from Wikipedia, which is a lead.
Checked 2026-08-01 · County history, independently fact checked