Thomas R. Kaiser
Thomas Reeve Kaiser (born May 2, 1924 in Ivanhoe, Melbourne , † July 2, 1998 ) was an Australian physicist and geophysicist .
Life
Kaiser came from the working class. He received his bachelor's degree in 1943 and his master's degree (with top marks) in 1946 from the University of Melbourne . As early as 1944 he became a researcher for the CSIR , the Australian government research organization, in the field of radar. In 1946 he went to the radio physics laboratory in Sydney. The research there was in connection with the development of a missile control and was carried out together with the British. He went on a scholarship to the University of Oxford , where he received his doctorate in nuclear physics with Lord Cherwell in 1949 (Experiments on the acceleration of charged particles). He worked on the 16 MeV betatron and on the then new concept of the synchrotron .
His communist sympathies were already known in the 1940s. He was a member of the communist party and was politically active. He made headlines as a participant in a small solidarity demonstration by young Australians in London against the suppression of the coal miners' strike in Australia in 1949. At that time, during the beginning of the Cold War, the authorities were suspicious of the first espionage cases involving communist sympathizers in the atomic bomb project (such as the case of Allan Nunn May in Canada). The consequences for Kaiser were serious: he was fired from the CSIR and tried in vain to gain an academic foothold in Australia in the 1950s. Instead, he intensified his political activity there. He went to England, where he was discharged from the Joddrell Bank Radio Observatory for giving a technical opinion on defense in the Rosenberg case in 1952 . But then he received a substitute professorship at the University of Reading . In 1956 he became a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield . In 1966 he was given the chair for space physics (Space Physics) and in 1987 he retired.
In 1956 he resigned from the Communist Party as a result of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising , but remained politically active (for example against the Vietnam War and for nuclear weapons disarmament) and a socialist. As recently as 1972, however, he did not receive an entry visa to the USA, where he wanted to witness the launch of a rocket that he had worked on.
He dealt with nuclear physics, physics of meteors and radio astronomy. In 1950 he studied at Joddrell Bank (as an ICI Fellow) radar observation of meteor tails and clues that could be obtained from them about the upper atmosphere. He then developed experiments to draw appropriate conclusions from the impedance of radio signals from rockets and satellites (the British Ariel 3,4 satellites).
He was also involved in the development of the British Antarctic program ( Halley station ) and the British VLF program and was involved in radio wave measurements on magnetized plasmas.
In 1994 he received the gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society .
Web links
- Phillip Deery Scientific freedom and post-war politics , Australia 1945-1955, pdf
- Website dedicated to him with links to obituaries
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kaiser, Thomas R. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kaiser, Thomas Reeve |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Australian physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 2, 1924 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Melbourne |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 2nd, 1998 |