Pioneering physicist obtained his doctorate after 75 years

A pioneering young physicist who discovered a new particle but had to give up her PhD to have a family has been awarded an honorary doctorate from her old university in Bristol – 75 years on.

Rosemary Fowler was 20 years old and a leading researcher at the University of Bristol in 1948, and her discoveries paved the way for critical discoveries that would rewrite the laws of physics. Her discovery of the Kaon particle helped revolutionize the theory of particle physics and continues to be proven correct – predicting particles such as the Higgs boson, discovered at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland.

But in post-war Britain, Dr Fowler decided to leave academia when she married fellow physicist Peter Fowler in 1949, aged just 23. Now, at a private graduation ceremony close to her home in Cambridge, the Nobel Prize-winning University of Bristol Chancellor Sir Paul Nurse has conferred an honorary Doctor of Science on her.

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The ceremony was attended by all of Rosemary’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of them scientists, along with friends and staff from the University of Bristol. Dr Fowler, now 98, said he felt “very honoured”, but added: “I haven’t done anything since to deserve special respect”.

Sir Paul praised Dr Fowler’s “intellectual rigor and curiosity”, adding that she “paved the way for critical discoveries that continue to shape the work of physicists today and our understanding of the universe”.

In 1948, the cosmic ray physics team at Bristol, led by Professor Cecil Powell, was searching for new fundamental particles. They had already found the pion, for which Professor Powell would receive the Nobel Prize in 1950. Then, just 22 years old, Rosemary Fowler (née Brown) noticed something when she saw unusual particle tracks – a particle that decayed into three pions, a type of subatom. particle.

She said: “I knew straight away that it was new and it was going to be very important. I was seeing things that had never been seen before – that was particle physics research. It was very exciting.”

The track he was looking at, later labeled “k”, was evidence of an unknown particle, now known as the kaon, or K meson. Surprisingly, the ka track was the mirror image of a particle seen before by the Manchester colleagues, but the Manchester team’s track degraded to two pawns, not three.

Trying to understand how these mirror images were the same but behaved differently contributed to a revolution in the theory of particle physics. A year after the discovery, Dr. Fowler left the university after publishing his discovery in three academic papers.

She was born in Suffolk in 1926 and grew up in Malta, Portsmouth and Bath while her family traveled for her father’s job as a Royal Navy engineer. During the Second World War, her school moved to the countryside and she remembers their family home near Bath being attacked by the Luftwaffe.

As a child, Dr. Fowler found that math and science were easy, while writing was difficult. She was the only girl in her year to go to university. She became one of the first women to receive the first prize in physics and had three children, all of whom studied science, with Professor Peter Fowler, who died in 1996.

Their daughter, Mary Fowler, studied mathematics and then geophysics at Cambridge and had an academic career in Switzerland, Canada, London and finally Cambridge, where she was MA at Darwin College from 2012 to 2020. She said: “I am very satisfied. for my mother. As a child I wanted to be a physicist because I found it so interesting. With both parents being physicists, physics and research were a normal topic of conversation around the kitchen table.”