After graduating from high school at age 15, WLB entered the University of Adelaide, graduating at age 18. He then followed his whole family to England, when his father was appointed to Leeds.

The young student then joined JJ Thomson's team in Cambridge. It was there that he carried out the first experiments and above all the crucial deductions which guided his entire career: in 1912, aged only 22, he found the key to a mystery raised by researchers in Munich and that no one, neither the Germans, or even WHB, his father , had failed to understand. This concerned the deflection of X-rays by the crystals. He explained the phenomenon, established a mathematical law that bears his name and for this won, together with his father, the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics.

He was only 25 years old and remains to this day the youngest scientist to be crowned in this way.

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The spirit, however, was not at the party: he heard the news on a battlefield and it followed other announcements far more dramatic: in the previous months, his younger brother, Robert, had been killed. He also lost his best friend, Cecil Hopkinson, in 1917.

Returning to Cambridge in 1919, he met a history student, Alice Hopkinson, to whom he quickly made a marriage proposal ... which she declined: she wanted to finish her studies first and enjoy life in CambridGE.

In 1919 he took over from Ernest Rutherford in Manchester , while the latter took over from JJ Thomson in Cambridge . He modified the lines of research to direct them towards his area of ​​expertise: crystallography and the study of X-rays.