Harrie Massey
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Sir Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey (16 May 1908 - 27 November 1983) was an influential Australian mathematical physicist. He worked primarily in the fields of atomic and atmospheric physics.
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[edit] Life and career
Harrie Massey was born in St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia. At the age of 16 he won a Senior Government Scholarship to the University of Melbourne. There he studied physics and chemistry and graduated with a first class honours B.Sc. in 1927. He stayed on to study mathematics and was awarded another first class degree, a B.A., in 1929. At that time, the university did not offer a Ph. D. programme but, clearly gifted, he took on an M.Sc. with both experimental and theoretical components. The former dealt with soft X-ray deflection from metal surfaces and the latter with wave mechanics. His external examiner was Ralph Fowler from the University of Cambridge who was Paul Dirac's Ph. D. supervisor.
In 1929, with the benefit of another scholarship, Massey went to the University of Cambridge to perform research at the Cavendish Laboratory led by Ernest Rutherford. Fowler was appointed as Massey's supervisor although it was clear that he did not need any supervision per se. Massey obtained his Ph. D. on the The Collision of Material Particles in 1932. He co-authored a book on atomic collision processes with Nevill Mott shortly afterwards. He then became a lecturer at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1933 and left to take up a chair in Mathematics at University College London five years later. This was to create a strong academic link between QUB and UCL which persists to this day.
During the Second World War he worked for the Admiralty Mining Establishment. He had a great influence on the future careers of nearly every scientist that worked there including David Bates, who was invited to join the staff at UCL, and Robert Boyd, who was offered a research assistant post. Francis Crick was introduced to Maurice Wilkins by Massey.
Massey was made head of the UCL Physics department in 1950 and remained its head after the department was merged with Astronomy in 1973. He retired in 1975.
He was the first chairman of the British National Committee for Space Research and helped found the European Space Research Organization as well as the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL.
[edit] Honours & awards
- Royal Society Hughes medal 1955
- Knighted 1960
He has had a number of awards named after him;
- Royal Society/COSPAR Massey Award. [1]
- Australian Institute of Physics Harrie Massey Medal and Prize. [2]
[edit] Books
- Mott, NF, Massey, HSW (1949). Theory of Atomic Collisions. Clarendon Press, Oxford. (1st edition, 1933)
- Massey, HSW, Kestelman, H (1964). Ancillary Mathematics, 2nd ed., Sir Issac Pitman and Sons Ltd.
- Massey, HSW (1982). Applied Atomic Physics Processes. Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-419951-8.
- Massey, HSW, Robins, MO (1986). History of British space policy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052130783.
