A father and son shared a Nobel Prize for showing how to read a crystal's structure

In 1913, William Henry Bragg and his 22-year-old son William Lawrence Bragg worked out a simple equation predicting exactly which angles X-rays would bounce off a crystal's atomic layers. Bragg's Law turned X-ray diffraction into a precise tool for mapping atomic structure, and it was later used to reveal the shape of DNA itself.

— William Henry Bragg, William Lawrence Bragg, The Reflection of X-rays by Crystals — Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1913