[3][4] In 1922, Walton won scholarships to Trinity College Dublin for the study of mathematics and science, and would go on to be elected a Foundation Scholar in 1924.

At the time there were four Nobel Prize laureates on the staff at the Cavendish lab and a further five were to emerge, including Walton and John Cockcroft.

[6] During the early 1930s, Walton and John Cockcroft collaborated to build an apparatus that split the nuclei of lithium atoms by bombarding them with a stream of protons accelerated inside a high-voltage tube (700 kilovolts).

[11] These experiments provided verification of theories about atomic structure that had been proposed earlier by Rutherford, George Gamow, and others.

The successful apparatus – a type of particle accelerator now called the Cockcroft-Walton generator – helped to usher in an era of particle-accelerator-based experimental nuclear physics.

[6][12] Ernest Walton returned to Ireland in 1934 to become a fellow of Trinity College Dublin in the physics department, and in 1946 was appointed Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy.

A refusal to use our intelligence honestly is an act of contempt for Him who gave us that intelligence"Walton held an interest in topics about the government and the Church,[23] and after his death, the organisation Christians in Science Ireland established the Walton Lectures on Science and Religion (an initiative similar to the Boyle Lectures).

[24] Along with Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh and Michael Fry, Walton helped found the Irish Pugwash group, opposing the nuclear weapons race.

More generally, they had built an apparatus which showed that nuclei of various lightweight elements (such as lithium) could be split by fast-moving protons.

[27] In much later years – predominantly after his retirement in 1974 – Walton received honorary degrees or conferrals from numerous Irish, British, and North American institutions.