Antony Hewish Facts
Antony Hewish Facts
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| Interesting Antony Hewish Facts: |
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| Hewish's promising educational career at Gonville and Caius College was interrupted when World War II broke out, sending the young man to serve at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. |
| Following the war, he returned to school and completed his first degree. |
| He eventually went to work at the Cavendish Laboratory and earned his Ph.D. in 1952. |
| Thanks to Hewish's work in radio scintillations and his experiments on their practical applications, he was able to write a proposal and earn the funding for the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, which was a large radio telescope. |
| This radio telescope was constructed and installed at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory to observe and record interplanetary scintillation. |
| When one of Hewish's students, Jocelyn Bell, discovered the very first pulsar through a radio source, the resulting published paper listed her name along with Hewish and three other researchers. |
| They determined that pulsars were not earth-originated and not-as some speculated-a sign of extraterrestrial life; instead, pulsars were discovered to be radio emissions that originated from stars themselves. |
| However, based on this paper, Hewish and one other researcher-Martin Ryle-were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, and Bell herself was omitted. |
| A controversy ensued, one that divided the physics and astronomy communities for a time; it was Bell herself who put much of the controversy to rest by stating in an interview that research students did not deserve to be awarded the Nobel or any other prestigious prize, and that she was not upset by the committee's decision. |
| The controversy surrounding the awarding of the prize was all the more upsetting considering it was the first time the prize had ever been awarded for observational astronomy. |
| Hewish went on to earn several other prestigious awards, including honorary degrees from six universities and membership in several academies of science, including the Royal Academy and a foreign membership in the Belgian Royal Academy. |
| He has served as a professor of radio science and delivered lectures on various topics in radio astronomy. |
| Hewish was made a professor of the Royal Institution in the late 1970s. |
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