Bernard Lovell

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Dalton Medal
Scientific career
Fields
  • Astronomy
  • physics
Institutions
ThesisThe electrical conductivity of thin metallic films (1936)

Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell

OBE FRS (/ˈlʌvəl/ LUV-əl; 31 August 1913 – 6 August 2012) was an English physicist and radio astronomer. He was the first director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, from 1945 to 1980.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

Early life and education

Lovell was born at

Methodist upbringing and attended Kingswood Grammar School.[6][10]

Career and research

Lovell studied

Bath Technical School and later an organist at Bath Abbey. The church organ was one of the main loves of his life, apart from science.[15][16]

Lovell worked in the

H2S. In June 1942 he was involved in the recovery of a highly secret cavity magnetron from the wreckage of a Handley Page Halifax that had crashed killing a number of his colleagues, including EMI engineer Alan Blumlein
, while on a test flight.

At the end of the Second World War, Lovell attempted to continue his studies of

ionised the surrounding air. He was later able to determine the orbits of meteors in annual meteor showers to show they were in solar orbit and not of interstellar origin. With university funding, he constructed the then-largest steerable radio telescope in the world, which now bears his name: the Lovell Telescope. Over 50 years later, it remains a productive radio telescope, now operated mostly as part of the MERLIN and European VLBI Network
interferometric arrays of radio telescopes.

Portrait by Reginald Gray, 1966, for The New York Times

In 2009, Lovell claimed he had been the subject of a Cold War assassination attempt during a 1963 visit to the Soviet Deep-Space Communication Centre (Eupatoria). He alleged that his hosts tried to kill him with a lethal radiation dose[20] because he was head of the Jodrell Bank space telescope when it was also being used as part of an early warning system for Soviet nuclear attacks. He wrote a full account of the incident which, at his determination, was only published after his death.[21]

Lectures

In 1958, Lovell was invited by the BBC to deliver the annual Reith Lectures, a series of six radio broadcasts called The Individual and the Universe,[22] in which he examined the history of enquiry into the solar system and the origin of the universe.

In 1959, he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject "Radio Astronomy and the Structure of the Universe".[23]

In 1965 he was invited to co-deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Exploration of the Universe.

In 1975 he gave the presidential address (In the Centre of Immensities) to the British Association meeting in Guildford.[24]

Awards and honours

Lovell won numerous awards including:

Lovell was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.[34]

Beyond professional recognition, Lovell has a secondary school named after him in

QinetiQ site in Malvern is also named after him, as was the fictional scientist Bernard Quatermass, the hero of several BBC Television science-fiction serials of the 1950s, whose first name was chosen in honour of Lovell.[36]

Personal life

In 1937, Lovell married Mary Joyce Chesterman (d. 1993) and they had two sons and three daughters.[6][37]

In later life Lovell was physically very frail; he lived in quiet retirement in the countryside, surrounded by music, his books and a vast garden filled with trees he planted many decades before. Lovell died at home in Swettenham, Cheshire on 6 August 2012.[38][39]

Read also

  • Lovell, Bernard (1967). Our Present Knowledge of the Universe. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
  • Lovell, Bernard (1990). Astronomer by Chance. New York, USA: Basic Books.

References

  1. PMID 22932377
    .
  2. doi:10.1111/j.1468-4004.2007.48521.x
    .
  3. S2CID 11177729
    .
  4. ^ "Sir Bernard Lovell | Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics". Retrieved 7 August 2012.
  5. ^ "Lovell, Bernard (1913–)". Wolfram Research. Retrieved 22 November 2006.
  6. ^
    doi:10.1098/rsbm.2015.0026
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  8. ^ a b Hecker, Don R. (8 August 2012). "Sir Bernard Lovell dies at 98; a radio telescope bears his name". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 August 2012.
  9. ^ Bernard Lovell- A Biography, Dudley Saward, R. Hale, 1984, p. 13
  10. ^ "Bernard Lovell: 2 – Secondary school & the lecture that changed my life". Web of Stories. 5 September 2008. Retrieved 8 March 2012.
  11. ^ Index to Theses in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Theses.com (3 August 2012). Retrieved on 2012-08-21.
  12. doi:10.1098/rspa.1936.0197
    .
  13. doi:10.1098/rspa.1937.0050
    .
  14. doi:10.1098/rspa.1938.0092
    .
  15. ^ "Bernard Lovell / Astronomer". Webofstories.com. Retrieved 6 January 2011.
  16. ^ LovelI, Bernard. "Lovell's Memories / Student Memories of Bristol" (PDF). University of Bristol. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 February 2012. Retrieved 5 October 2019.
  17. doi:10.1098/rspa.1939.0122
    .
  18. doi:10.1098/rspa.1941.0003
    .
  19. doi:10.1088/0959-5309/60/5/312
    .
  20. ^ "Sir Bernard Lovell claims Russians tried to kill him with radiation". The Telegraph. 22 May 2009. Retrieved 27 March 2023.
  21. ^ "Sir Bernard Lovell (1913-2012)". 24 September 2012. Retrieved 6 October 2018.
  22. ^ "BBC Radio 4 – The Reith Lectures, Bernard Lovell: The Individual and the Universe: 1958". Retrieved 7 August 2012.
  23. ^ "Hugh Miller Macmillan". Macmillan Memorial Lectures. Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. Archived from the original on 4 October 2018. Retrieved 29 January 2019.
  24. JSTOR 41140365
    .
  25. ^ "78 – Work on meteors at Jodrell Bank: observing the Giacobinid meteor shower of 1946". Webofstories.com. Retrieved 9 January 2011.
  26. ^ Bernard Lovell telling his life story at Web of Stories
  27. ^ Article about Bernard Lovell's life, by John Bromley Davenport in The Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2011.
  28. ^ "Lovell, Alfred Charles Bernard (Oral history)". Imperial War Museums.
  29. ^ "Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell". 9 February 2023.
  30. ^ "Sir Bernard Lovell". Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester 28 August 2010. Retrieved 9 January 2011.
  31. ^ Honorary Graduates 1966 to 1988 | University of Bath Archived 25 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine. Bath.ac.uk. Retrieved on 2012-08-21.
  32. ^ Astronomical Society of Edinburgh, Lorimer Medal https://www.astronomyedinburgh.org/about-us/lorimer-medal/
  33. ^ "APS Member History".
  34. ^ "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: Bernard Lovell". Archived from the original on 13 March 2012. Retrieved 29 January 2011.
  35. ^ "Sir Bernard Lovell School in Oldland Common". Archived from the original on 5 February 2007. Retrieved 22 November 2006.
  36. ISBN 978-1-900486-50-7
    .
  37. ^ "LOVELL, Sir Alfred Charles Bernard, Who Was Who". A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2015; online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014; online edn. April 2014. Retrieved 17 November 2015.
  38. ^ "Astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell dies". BBC News. 7 August 2012. Retrieved 9 August 2012.
  39. ^ Sir Bernard Lovell, University of Manchester, 7 August 2012

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bernard_Lovell&oldid=1216734240"