IOP Groups
Group News 2005
History of Physics Group News from 2005
See also news from 2004 and 2006.
28 November 2005
A meeting on the History of measurement of Air pollution is to be held on 30 November 2005 in Bristol.
Following the AGM held in Leeds on 29 October 2005 the current committee page has been updated.
A special issue of the newsletter was published in October.
A Blue Plaque was unveiled on 12 October 2005 commemmorating Michael Faraday.
Participate in the mass experiment Moonwatch for Einstein Year.
Michael Friedlander reviews biographies of Robert Oppenheimer in the November 2005 issue of Physics World (page 40).
13 September 2005
The Times published an obituary of Professor Sir Herman Bondi, F.R.S. mathematician, physicist and cosmologist who was born November 1, 1919 and died September 10, 2005 aged 85.
11 Mar 2005
Congratulations to our Chairman, Denis Weaire, on the award of the Cunningham Medal of the Royal Irish Academy, which was reported on page 9 of Physics World for March 2005. In 1994 he collaborated with Robert Phelan in the discovery of the Weaire-Phelan stucture, a new way to divide space into cells of equal size. The structure contains a mixture of 12 and 14 sided shapes which together make the most efficient way found so far to partition space. The structure has inspired architects who designed the National Swimming Centre for the Beijing Olympics and been celebrated by a stainless-steel sculpture in Trinity College Dublin.
Further details can be found on page 72 of The Pursuit of Perfect Packing published by Institute of Physics Publishing in 2000, ISBN 0-7503-0648-3. Reviewed in Crystallography News in December 2000.
Death of Hans Bethe
The Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist who worked on the atomic bomb and explained how the sun shines was born in Strasbourg, Germany on 2 July 1906 and died in Ithaca, New York, USA on 6 March 2005. Obituaries were published in The Times of 8 March 2005 and in The Independent of 9 March 2005.
Death of H Martyn Cundy
Henry Martyn Cundy was born in Derby on 23 Dec 1913 and died in Kendal on 25 February 2005. He was an inspirational teacher behind the School Mathematics Project, but is pehaps most well known for his authorship, joint with A P Rollett of Mathematical Models first published in 1951 and still in print today. It is now published by Tarquin Publications. This small paperback provides instructions for making many models of polyhedra which can be made by school pupils, some of which help them to understand how space filling shapes can be packed together to form crystals. The Independent published an obituary on 8 March 2005.
With help from Institute of Physics Staff, Lucy Gibson, Olivia Davies and other members of the History of Physics Group I have collected together some details of Institute of Physics funded Blue Plaques. Please send me corrections, further information and news of any other web pages describing these people. I should like to know the OS grid reference of their locations. If there are any near you I would appreciate your taking a photograph for me to add to the pages, similar to that sent by Malcolm Cooper for W H Bragg.
^ To the top ^