Alfred Lauck Parson (24 October 1889 – 1 January 1970) was a British chemist and physicist, whose "magneton theory" of the atom contributed to the history of chemistry.

Between 1913 and 1915 he was a visiting graduate student at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where coincidentally Gilbert N. Lewis was working as the chair of the department of chemistry.

[1] Stimulated by this paper, Lewis published his famous 1916 article "The Atom and the Molecule", in which a chemical bond forms owing to the sharing of pairs of electrons.

[2] Several other physicists of the time, including Arthur H. Compton, Clinton Davisson, Lars O. Grondahl, David L. Webster,[3] and H. Stanley Allen, developed Parson's ideas further using a toroidal ring model for the atom.

Suffering from severe shell shock, he did not pursue an academic career, but years later published papers and books on astronomy and related topics.