John Rushbrooke, high-energy physicist
Hyfler/Rosner
October 17, 2003 Friday
Geelong Grammar Boy Saw Deep Inside The Atom
BYLINE: Michael Collins Persse
JOHN RUSHBROOKE - HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICIST - 30-3-1936 - 5-5-2003
John Gordon Rushbrooke, whose brilliant career as a high-energy physicist
has been cut short by cancer, was one of a succession of scientists educated
at Geelong Grammar School in the middle years of the 20th century who
achieved world eminence in their fields. Four became fellows of the Royal
Society and at least seven have held fellowships at Oxford or Cambridge
colleges. Rushbrooke himself was at Cambridge, where his slightly younger
school contemporary, Sir Alec Broers, president of the Royal Academy of
Engineers, has recently completed a seven-year term as vice-chancellor (he
and the also Australian-educated Lord May are the leading figures in science
education in Britain today). Collectively they represent a considerable part
of the "brain drain" perhaps inevitable half a century ago but still all too
evident.
The son of Neil and Vera Rushbrooke, with four sisters, John was born in
Geelong in 1936 and brought up there. He developed early a love of music,
shared with his father, a talented pianist, who was an accountant with the
Ford Motor Company. During 12 years at Geelong Grammar, the last four as a
boarder, he was at or near the top of every class, his chief scholastic
rival being his close friend Peter Pockley, now a distinguished science
writer and broadcaster in Sydney, whose knowledge of John underlies much of
this obituary. For many years their careers were curiously parallel.
In his last school year, 1953, though a year or so younger than most of his
peers, Rushbrooke was a sub-prefect and cadet lieutenant (he won the prize
for military efficiency and he and Pockley together led the guard of
honour), represented the school as a runner (receiving the baton from
Pockley in the sprint relay), won the top prizes for mathematics and
science, finished as dux of the school and was awarded a general exhibition
to the University of Melbourne for all-round academic excellence. Pockley
remembers that "his innate talent for mathematics and maths-based physics
was apparent all along. He always got the sums right. Precision in the
laboratory and accuracy of expression were his hallmarks, and these were
expressed in a beautifully flowing handwriting."
They went together to Trinity College, sharing physics, chemistry, and
mathematics classes in the first year of the science course but thereafter
diverging, Pockley to chemistry, Rushbrooke to physics and mathematics. Each
graduated BSc in 1956 with top prizes, Rushbrooke going on to a master's
degree under the supervision of another Geelong Grammarian physicist, David
Caro, later vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, who ran Australia's
first cyclotron in a mysterious-looking brick building with no windows where
Rushbrooke began his work as a high-energy physicist, probing the innermost
structure of the atom. As well as the then normal conscription into national
service, he and Pockley shared part-time soldiering in the Melbourne
University Regiment.
In May 1959, John Rushbrooke married Rosemary Bowen, a fellow student at the
university and former resident of Janet Clarke Hall, neighbour to Trinity
College. Greater possibilities for research overseas beckoned, and that year
he won a Shell scholarship that took him to King's College, Cambridge, a
year after Pockley, having won the same scholarship, had started doctoral
studies in geology at Balliol College, Oxford. In England they were brought
together not only by gatherings of Shell scholars but also by the annual,
always hilarious, football match between Oxford and Cambridge played
according to Australian rules - a rare experience of the game in Britain
before television made it widely known.
Following work in the Cavendish Laboratory and graduation as a PhD,
Rushbrooke would like to have returned to Australia, but opportunities
hardly existed there in nuclear physics. After a time at Oxford and a year
working with the new particle accelerator at the European Centre for Nuclear
Research (CERN), an international pure-science institute, in Geneva, he
returned to Cambridge and the Cavendish with a fellowship at Downing
College, where he was director of studies in physics, and a university
lectureship. Pockley visited him in Geneva and remembers his amazement at
Rushbrooke's "ability to direct the vast instrument to probe the minutest
levels of matter and identify new particles".
In 1964, Pockley, back in Australia, founded the weekly radio program
Insight which is still broadcast, now under the title Ockham's Razor. On a
short visit to Australia in 1965 Rushbrooke gave three talks on it that
formed the core of a series titled by Pockley "Inside the Atom". In 1966 the
ABC, in a first initiative in publishing science cheaply for the layman in
Australia, printed the scripts in a booklet from which the photograph
accompanying this obituary is taken, and in which Pockley, later describing
the talks as "a model of clarity", wrote: "Dr Rushbrooke was in the team of
European scientists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva who competed with the
Americans at the Brookhaven Laboratory in New York to discover the first
omega-minus particle predicted by the new theory of unitary symmetry. The
CERN team lost the race by a few days in 1964."
John and Rosemary's two children - Lucinda, born in 1962, and Justin, born
in 1964 - grew up in Cambridge, where John helped establish Image Research
Ltd - refining and commercialising technology derived from scanning
techniques developed at CERN - and, in 1969, Laser Scan Ltd. This, in his
own words, "was the first company on the Cambridge Science Park, which was
founded by Trinity College to foster links between industry and the
university". It manufactured "computer interactive display and measurement
devices, with a special interest in cartography" - and had the job of
preparing maps of the Falkland Islands for the military during the conflict
there in 1982. He remained a director of Laser Scan for many years. A
pioneer (like Broers) of interaction between the academic and business
worlds, he was appointed head of the High Energy Physics Group in 1974.
For five years from 1977 he was on leave from his duties at Cambridge, based
again at CERN, where he was in charge of a project at the antiproton-proton
collider, the world's highest energy-accelerator for research in
fundamental-particle physics. Of this work he wrote: "Europe leads the world
in this field, being about five years ahead of the Americas: but it is pure
research, with at least 50 years before the world will see any practical
application, which one can but hope will be beneficial for humanity." Many
physicists were involved from Cambridge, Bonn, Brussels, and Stockholm
universities, and the UA5 project, as it was called, was widely acclaimed
for the academic publications that it generated. Rushbrooke's years in
Switzerland gave his family welcome opportunities for skiing.
In 1983 he was promoted to a readership in physics at Cambridge, and in 1991
the university conferred on him a second doctorate, that of science (ScD),
thereby recognising the distinction of his published work. Soon afterwards
came an invitation to be the inaugural professor of physics at Australia's
first private university, financed by Alan Bond: but the collapse in Bond's
personal fortunes resulted in Bond University's decision to ensure survival
by closing its science faculty - an enormous blow to Rushbrooke, who had
welcomed the opportunity to establish himself in a leading position as a
physicist in his own country and to influence funding and other policy.
Courageously, however, he overcame his disillusion and, in Pockley's words,
"threw himself with renewed energy back into the high-tech commercial
pursuits that were such an important part of his working life". With
Cambridge Imaging Ltd, the successor to Image Research, he developed new
applications, first for airport-baggage and cargo screening, then for the
biomedical instrumentation industry.
His success in securing research and development contracts with a major
United States company in the latter field took him in 2000 to California to
live and, as he hoped, enjoy semi-retirement at Newport Beach. But in
February 2001, just as the first new imaging machine was about to be sold,
he was struck down by the debilitating cancer that was to end his life there
in May 2003.
He is survived by Rosemary in Cambridge, Lucinda, a writer in Melbourne, and
Justin, a barrister in London. His ashes are interred with his parents' in
the church yard of St Nicholas at Rushbrooke, a village with ancestral
connections in Suffolk - appropriately in East Anglia where at Cambridge he
had made his own contribution to the great tradition of scientific discovery
and application deriving from Isaac Newton and his successors.
Michael Collins Persse is curator and former head of history at Geelong
Grammar School.