Mark Oliphant
Marcus "Mark " Laurence Elwin Oliphant ( born October 8, 1901 in Adelaide, † July 14, 2000 in Canberra) was an Australian physicist and politician.
Life and work
In 1919 he began the study of medicine at the University of Adelaide, but a professor sparked his interest in physics, which in many areas experienced upheavals at that time. After Oliphant had heard a speech in 1925 by Ernest Rutherford, made up his mind to be his assistant. This wish was fulfilled in 1927, when he joined the staff of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. In 1929 he was awarded his doctorate with a thesis on nuclear physics. At Cambridge he laid the theoretical foundations in 1934 for the discovery of ( 3He) by Alvarez in 1939. Moreover, he succeeded in 1934, with Rutherford, the artificial production of tritium, which had been predicted in 1920 by Walter Russell.
1937 Oliphant was appointed professor of physics at the University of Birmingham. His most famous students of this period were Ernest William Titterton, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch. He played a major role in the British contribution to the Manhattan Project (see MAUD Committee ) - on a U.S. tour in 1939 he was the very influential Ernest Orlando Lawrence convince to engage it - and also in the development of radar. In 1937 he was commissioned to examine the British coast defense. He recognized the need to shift to shorter radar wavelengths than the then usual 170 cm and made - from 1939 sponsored by the British Admiralty - for the development of an appropriate device at the University of Birmingham ( development of the magnetron by John Turton Randall and Harry Boot to his institute in Birmingham). He worked for the transport of electricity in gases, the surface chemistry and solar energy. In 1943 he was awarded the Hughes Medal.
After the Second World War he built Europe's first proton synchrotron, however, instructed with insufficient means and as an employee only to his students. July 1953 reached the machine almost 1 GeV, but was at that time already from cosmotron ( Brookhaven National Laboratory ) and Bevatron (Berkeley ) obsolete.
In 1950 he returned to Australia and was first founder and first director of physical research institute of the University of Canberra; this position he held until 1963. Subsequently, he was President of the Australian Academy of Science in 1971 and Governor of South Australia ( until 1976 ).
In Australia he built from about 1950, the world's largest Unipolarmaschine that was used for an accelerator.
After the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he was a convinced pacifist and vowed to never again have anything to do with military research. He was a founding member of the Pugwash movement ..
In 1959 he became Knight Commander of the British Empire and ennobled. He was founding president of the 1954 Australian Academy of Sciences and was until 1956 the President. In 1977 he was Companion in the Order of Australia (AC). Since 1937 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society.