Kenneth Marshall Watson (born September 7, 1921) is a theoretical physicist and physical oceanographer. Watson graduated in 1943 with BS in electrical engineering from Iowa State College. From 1943 to 1946 he was a researcher at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. During his work for the U.S. Navy he went to night school at George Washington University. He graduated from the University of Iowa with Ph.D. in 1948 with thesis The polarizability of the meson-charge cloud of a neutron in an external electrostatic field. He was from 1948 to 1949 an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and from 1949 to 1951 an AEC Fellow at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. He was from 1951 to 1954 an assistant professor of physics at Indiana Univ