Clifford Charles Butler
Sir Clifford Charles Butler (born May 20, 1922 in Reading , † June 30, 1999 in Leicester ) was a British experimental physicist who dealt with nuclear and elementary particle physics. In 1947 he discovered Strange Particles with George Rochester .
Butler, the son of a retail salesman, studied physics at the University of Reading with a bachelor's degree in 1942. During World War II he was a physicist at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, teaching future radar specialists. He also worked on his dissertation on electron diffraction in crystals, which was carried out in Reading in 1946 with Tom Rymer (and JA Crowther). He became Assistant Lecturer in 1945 and Lecturer at Manchester University in 1947 , where he was in Patrick Blackett's department . This is where his collaboration with George Rochester began, which led to the discovery of new types of heavier, more unstable, but relatively long-lived particles by subatomic standards, then called V-particles and today understood as different forms ( baryons and mesons ) of particles with strange quarks . First, Rochester and Butler found the meson form ( kaon ), then a baryon form ( hyperon ). In 1953 he went with Blackett to Imperial College London , where he became professor and group leader for high-energy nuclear physics in 1957. He and his technician Derek Miller built the first hydrogen bubble chamber in Europe there. This became the National Hydrogen Bubble Chamber, which operated at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and at CERN . From 1964 he headed the Track Chamber Group (further developments of the bubble chamber) at CERN, succeeding Bernard Gregory . In 1963 he was head of the physics faculty, which he made one of the largest in the country, and from 1966 to 1969 he was dean of the Royal College of Science at Imperial College. In the 1960s, he turned to administrative positions in education and education policy. He has served on the University of Kent Planning Committee, Schools Council, and University Grants Committee. In 1970 he gave up his physics professorship and became director of the Nuffield Foundation, with which he supported, among other things, the establishment of the Open University , on whose council he was from 1971 to 1995 (from 1986 as Vice Chairman). Most recently he was Vice Chancellor of Loughborough University from 1975 until his retirement in 1985 .
In 1961 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1983 ennobled for services to education. From 1963 to 1972 he was Secretary General, 1972 to 1975 Vice President and 1975 to 1978 President of the IUPAP .
He had been married to Kathleen Betty Collins (who had studied physics with him) since 1947 and had two daughters.
literature
- Ian Butterworth, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, Volume 47, 2001
- Rochester, Butler Evidence for the existence of new stable elementary particles , Nature, Volume 160, 1947, p. 855
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Bubble chambers were introduced by Donald Glaser in 1952 , and hydrogen chambers were first introduced by Luis Alvarez in Berkeley, California
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Butler, Clifford Charles |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British experimental physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 20, 1922 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Reading |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 30, 1999 |
| Place of death | Leicester |