Ronald Wilfrid Gurney (1899-15.04.1953) was an English theoretical physicist. He was born in Cheltenham. Until 1935 he worked at the University of Manchester, in 1935—41 at the University of Bristol, from 1941 at the Ballistic Research Laboratories in Aberdeen (Scotland), and then at the Argonne National Laboratory (USA).
His work was in the fields of quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, the physics of liquids, nuclear physics and physical chemistry. In 1928, together with E. Condon and independently of G. Gamow, he constructed the theory of alpha decay as a tunnelling process. In 1938, with N. Mott, he developed the first theory of the photographic process (the Mott — Gurney model), and in 1940 he predicted that controlled emission currents could flow through a dielectric. In 1931 he was the first to apply quantum mechanics to electrochemistry.