IOP Groups
Group News 2004
History of Physics Group News from 2004
See also news from 2005 and 2006.
17 November 2004
Exhibition '150 years of Blue Plaques' is being held at London's Wellington Arch (tel: (020) 7930 2726 ) until 31 December 2004. There is information for one plaque for each year of the scheme, includes some scientists. Further details of the English heritage Blue Plaques scheme are given on their website.
Those of you who were not at the last History of Physics group meeting and would like to buy the book on sale there The biography of Ernest Walton concentrating on his years at Trinity College Dublin by V J McBrierty, softbound, 98 pages, can purchase one for 10 pounds sterling including postage and packing, from Prof D Weaire, Physics Department, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
1 November 2004
Rendel Sebastian Pease, known by all as 'Bas', was born on on November 2, 1922 and died on October 17, 2004. His initial work was in X-ray crystallography studying irradiation damage in materials used in the core of a nuclear reactor. Elected an F.R.S in 1977 he later became interested in nuclear fusion; in 1981 he was appointed Director of the Culham Laboratory. Between 1978 and 1980 he was President of the Institute of Physics. Following his retirement in 1987 he advocated the peaceful applications of nuclear power. He was chairman of the British Pugwash Group between 1988 and 2002.
An obituary was published in The Times of October 26, 2004 accompanied by an interesting photograph taken in Harwell in 1958 showing that physicists in those days wore ties at work and smoked a pipe.
6 October 2004
The death was announced today of Maurice Wilkins an experimental biophysicist who shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Watson and Crick for the discovery of the structure of DNA. He was born 16 December 1916 and died 5 October 2004.
The 16th AGM of the Group will be held at 12 noon on 30th October 2004 in the Poynting Building of the Physics Department, the University of Birmingham. It will be followed at 2pm by a lecture meeting Was there life before Einstein?
24 August 2004
Death of Francis Crick
Francis Crick first studied physics and later found he was more interested in biology. He is probably best known for his collaboration with J D Watson in 1953 when they discovered the structure of DNA. Together with the experimentalist M Wilkins they received a Nobel prize in 1962 for this discovery. After some years at the MRC Laboratory in Cambridge, he went to the Salk Institute in California. He was born 8 June 1916 in Northampton and died in San Diego 28 July 2004, aged 88. An obituary was published in The Times of 30 July 2004.
1 July 2004
Obituaries of the biophysicist David Blow published in The Independent of 23 June 2004 written by Richard Henderson, The Guardian of 25 June 2004 written by Michael Rossman and Guy Dodson and The Times of 1 July 2004 written by an anonymous author.
The new graphic novel Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped is due for publication on 30 June 2004.
Further details from Jim Ottavani at their website http://www.gt-labs.com, where you can find details of other cartoon histories of science they publish, including Fallout: J Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb and Dignifying Science ISBN 0-9660106-1-2, 142 pages published in 1999, reviewed in Crystallography News June 2000.
The June 2004 issue of Physics World (page 37) carries a review by Jeff Hughes of The Fly in the Cathedral: How a small group of Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom by Brian Cathcart. ISBN 0 670-88321-2, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books.
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