| Sir Mark Oliphant | |
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Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant (1939)
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| Born | 8 October 1901 Kent Town, Adelaide, Australia |
| Died | 14 July 2000 (aged 98) Canberra, Australia[1] |
| Residence | Australia UK U.S. |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Institutions | Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory University of Birmingham Australian National University |
| Alma mater | University of Adelaide Cambridge University |
| Academic advisors | Ernest Rutherford |
| Doctoral students | Ernest William Titterton |
| Known for | Co-discovery of deuteron, triton, helium-3 |
| Notable awards | Hughes Medal (1943) |
Sir Marcus 'Mark' Laurence Elwin Oliphant, AC, KBE, FRS (8 October 1901 – 14 July 2000) was an Australian physicist and humanitarian who played a fundamental role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and also the development of the atomic bomb.
During his retirement, Oliphant was appointed as the Governor of South Australia by Queen Elizabeth II on the advice of Premier Don Dunstan. He assisted in the founding of the Australian Democrats party, and he was the chairman of the meeting in Melbourne in 1977 at which the political party was launched.[2]
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Oliphant was born the eldest of five sons in Kent Town, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. His father was a civil servant and his mother an artist. As a boy, after witnessing the killing of pigs on a farm he became a lifelong vegetarian. He was also found to be completely deaf in one ear and he needed glasses for severe astigmatism and short-sightedness. He went to school at the Unley High School in Adelaide.
Oliphant was at first interested in a career in either medicine or dentistry, and he began studying at the University of Adelaide in 1919. However, his physics lecturer, Dr. Roy Burdon, influenced him to become a physicist by showing him "the extraordinary exhilaration there was in even minor discoveries in the field of physics".[3]
In 1925, Oliphant heard a speech given by the New Zealander physicist, Ernest Rutherford, and he decided to work for him – an ambition that he fulfilled by earning a position at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1927. It was carrying out the most advanced research into nuclear physics in the world at the time. It was at the Cavendish, for example, that the atom was first split in 1932. Among other research, Oliphant worked on the artificial disintegration of the atomic nucleus and positive ions, and he designed and built complex particle accelerators.
Oliphant's primary contribution was his discovery of the nuclei of helium 3 (helions) and tritium (tritons). He also discovered that heavy hydrogen nuclei could be made to react with each other (tritons and helions being the products, along with protons and neutrons). This nuclear fusion reaction is the basis of a hydrogen bomb and also hypothetical thermonuclear fusion power reactors. Ten years later, the American scientist Edward Teller pressed to use Oliphant's discovery in order to build one. Oliphant had not foreseen this:
. . . we had no idea whatever that this would one day be applied to make hydrogen bombs. Our curiosity was just curiosity about the structure of the nucleus of the atom, and the discovery of these reactions was purely, as the Americans would put it, coincidental.[3]
In 1937, Oliphant was appointed as a professor of physics at the University of Birmingham, in England. While visiting prototype radar stations, he realised that shorter-wavelength radio waves were needed urgently. In 1939, he obtained a grant from the British Admiralty to develop radar systems with wavelengths less than 10 centimetres, compared with the best available at the time of 150 cm.
In 1939, Oliphant also visited Berkeley, California, where he met Ernest Lawrence, who gave him a complete set of specifications for his 60-inch cyclotron. A copy was commenced at Birmingham, but World War II prevented this one from being completed until 1950.
Oliphant's group at Birmingham included Sir John Randall and Harry Boot who developed the resonant-cavity magnetron in 1940, achieving the short wavelengths needed for good airborne radars. The magnetron's power was soon increased a hundred-fold, and Birmingham concentrated on magnetron development. The first operational magnetrons were delivered in August 1941. This invention was one of the key scientific breakthroughs during the war and played a major part in defeating the German U-boats, intercepting enemy bombers, and in directing Allied bombers. See also Tizard Mission.
At Birmingham, in 1940, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls had calculated that a uranium-235 atomic bomb was feasible. Oliphant took their findings at once to higher authorities. A committee, code-named the MAUD Committee, sent the report to the American "Uranium Committee" around March 1941 but the Americans seemingly took no action.
Great Britain was at war and authorities there thought that the development of an atomic bomb was urgent, but on the other hand, there was much less urgency in the United States. Oliphant was one of the people who pushed the American program into motion. Oliphant flew to the United States in late August 1941 in an unheated bomber, ostensibly to discuss the radar-development program, but he was actually assigned to find out why the United States was ignoring the findings of the Maud Committee. Oliphant said that "the minutes and reports had been sent to Lyman Briggs, who was the Director of the Uranium Committee, and we were puzzled to receive virtually no comment. I called on Briggs in Washington [D.C.], only to find out that this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in his safe and had not shown them to members of his committee. I was amazed and distressed."
Oliphant then met with the Uranium Committee. Samuel K. Allison, a new member of the committee, was a talented experimental physicist and a protege of Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago. Oliphant "came to a meeting", Allison recalls, "and said 'bomb' in no uncertain terms. He told us we must concentrate every effort on the bomb, and said we had no right to work on power plants or anything but the bomb. The bomb would cost 25 million dollars, he said, and Britain did not have the money or the manpower, so it was up to us." Allison was surprised that Briggs had kept the committee so in the dark.
Oliphant next visited his friends Ernest Lawrence, James Conant,and Enrico Fermi to explain the urgency. Lawrence then also contacted Conant and Arthur Compton. On 1 July 1941, Vannevar Bush, the chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, created the larger and more powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) which was empowered to engage in large engineering projects in addition to research. The Uranium Committee became the S-1 Project of the OSRD, and in December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Manhattan Engineering District was organised, and the project was dubbed the "Manhattan Project".
In November 1943, Oliphant moved to work on the Manhattan Project as part of the British delegation. The work on the bomb itself made him uneasy, and he preferred to concentrate on processes for enriching uranium-235 at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., with his friend Ernest Lawrence - a vital but less overtly-military part of the project. He was awarded the 1943 Hughes Medal.
Oliphant returned to England in April 1945, and after VE Day, he resumed his post as a professor of physics at the University of Birmingham. It was here that he first heard of the explosions of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was later to remark that he felt "sort of proud that the bomb had worked, and absolutely appalled at what it had done to human beings." Oliphant became a harsh critic of nuclear weapons and a member of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. ". . . I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of nuclear weapons and very much against their use."[3] His wartime work would have earned him a Congressional Medal of Freedom with Gold Palm, but the Australian government vetoed this honour.[4]
In 1950, Oliphant returned to Australia as the first Director of the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the new Australian National University, where he initiated the design and construction of the world's largest (500 megajoule) homopolar generator. This machine was used to power the large-scale railgun which was used as a scientific instrument. He established the Australian Academy of Science in 1954, and he was its president until 1956. After retiring from the university in 1967, Oliphant was invited by the Premier of South Australia Don Dunstan to become the Governor of South Australia, a position he held from 1971 to 1976. During this period, he caused great concern to Dunstan when he strongly supported the decision of the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr in the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis.[1] Oliphant was knighted in 1959 and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in 1977.
Late in life he watched his wife, Rosa, suffer before her death in 1987, and he became an advocate for voluntary euthanasia.
On 14 July 2000, Oliphant died in Canberra, at the age of 98.[5]
Places and things named in honour of Sir Mark Oliphant include: the Oliphant Building at the Australian National University; the Mark Oliphant Conservation Park; a South Australian high schools science competition; the Oliphant Wing of the Physics Building at the University of Adelaide; the Mark Oliphant Building, Bedford Park, and a new high school located in the new area, Munno Para West, South Australia.
Oliphant's nephew, Pat Oliphant, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist.
| Government offices | ||
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| Preceded by Major-General Sir James Harrison |
Governor of South Australia 1971–1976 |
Succeeded by Sir Douglas Nicholls |
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