Scientific Adventures at the Dawn of the Space Age

The speaker will use his career to illustrate how scientific research happens in practice. His career started in 1954 when there was little money, and everything was “do it yourself”. Building cosmic-ray recording instruments in Tasmania; and operating them in Papua New Guinea and Antarctica, led to much fun and excitement, and an invitation to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The opportunity to use one of the first “numerically intensive” computers led to a much better understanding of the effects that the Earth’s magnetic field has on cosmic rays. The talk will outline how that understanding allowed him to adjudicate in 1961 between the three prevailing solar wind models. Based on that work he was selected to build and operate cosmic ray instruments on four interplanetary spacecraft (Pioneers 6, 7, 8, and 9) and two Earth-orbiting satellites (IMPs) just three years after completing his PhD. Building satellite instruments then was an unknown art - everyone was learning on the job. It was the era of crash through, or crash. Those experiences illustrate the things that go wrong, and what one does to solve the problems in state-of-the-art science. The tempo of the times will be illustrated by recounting how the scientists were responsible for protecting the US astronauts from being sterilized by large solar flares. Returning to Australia he circumvented the Australian bureaucracy to fly X-ray telescopes on rockets flown from the Woomera rocket range, leading to the discovery that X-ray stars can be very variable in their intensity. Getting bored with space science, he was appointed by the Australian government to establish a branch of the CSIRO to develop better methods to find deeply buried minerals, and assisted in the design of new Australian bank notes. The CSIRO and bank note experiences illustrate that physics is a career that allows enormous versatility.