Hermann Bondi. 1 November 1919

Transkrypt

Downloaded from http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on March 1, 2017
Hermann Bondi. 1 November 1919 −− 10 September 2005:
Elected FRS 1959
I. W. Roxburgh
Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 2007 53, 45-61, published 1 December 2007
Supplementary data
"Data Supplement"
http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/suppl/2009/05/01/53.0.45.DC1
Email alerting service
Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article - sign up in the box at
the top right-hand corner of the article or click here
To subscribe to Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc., go to: http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org/subscriptions
SIR HERMANN BONDI KCB
1 November 1919 — 10 September 2005
Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 53, 45–61 (2007)
SIR HERMANN BONDI KCB
1 November 1919 — 10 September 2005
Elected FRS 1959
BY I. W. ROXBURGH
Astronomy Unit, School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary,
University of London, London E1 4NS, UK
Hermann Bondi was an applied mathematician of distinction who will be remembered by
fellow scientists for his outstanding contributions to astronomy, cosmology and General
Relativity, and particularly for his pioneering contributions to our understanding of gravitational waves, his foundational work on accretion, and as co-creator with Tommy Gold and
Fred Hoyle of the steady state theory of cosmology. But Hermann had an equally important
second career in scientific administration: advising the UK Government on the Thames
Barrier, as Director General of the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO; now the
European Space Agency (ESA)), as Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government on
Defence and then on Energy, as Chairman of the Natural Environment Research Council
(NERC), and finally as Master of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was knighted in 1973. He
continued his research on gravitational radiation throughout his administrative career and published his 16th paper in the series on gravitational waves in 2004. Hermann will be remembered not only for his contributions to science and administration but also for his outstanding
communication skills and as a charismatic, warm, and stimulating person.
VIENNA TO CAMBRIDGE
Hermann Bondi was born on 1 November 1919 in Vienna. His father was a non-observant Jew
who practised as a doctor but had a deep interest in science; his mother came from a prosperous Jewish family and was strongly opposed to religious observance. After the war they lived
a comfortable life in Vienna, but at his mother’s insistence both Hermann and his sister went
to state schools. Hermann showed an early aptitude for mathematics; by the time he was nine
years old he was helping his sister, who was five years his senior, with her school homework.
He taught himself the calculus from a book he found on a visit to his uncle, and his interest in
doi:10.1098/rsbm.2007.0008
47
© 2007 The Royal Society
48
Biographical Memoirs
mathematics was further encouraged by a distant relative, Abraham Frankel, who was a professor at the University of Kiel. In 1936 he began thinking about studying in Switzerland but,
while on a visit to Vienna, Sir Arthur Eddington FRS advised him to apply to Trinity College,
Cambridge. Although he had excellent references from his teachers it was a reference from
Frankel, who by this time was at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that persuaded Trinity
to accept him. He arrived in England in September 1937, where, in Hermann’s own words, ‘I
have lived happily ever after’ ((12)*, p. 14).
Hermann began his undergraduate studies in October 1937, choosing to go straight into
the second year of the mathematics degree programme. Owing to a misunderstanding of
English he confused analysis, about which he knew nothing, with analytical geometry, at
which he was skilled, and was therefore assigned Abram Besicovitch FRS as his supervisor.
Besicovitch quickly realized that the young Bondi knew no analysis and so passed him over
to C. A. Coulson (FRS 1950), who supervised him in applied mathematics. Hermann immediately threw himself into studying analysis and by January 1938 had acquired sufficient
mastery of the subject for Besicovitch to accept him as a supervisee. Hermann thoroughly
enjoyed life in Cambridge and his studies in mathematics, and by Easter he was convinced
that he wanted to be an academic mathematician. His success in the June examinations led
the college to award him a senior scholarship, thus removing any anxieties over the continued funding of his studies.
Hermann followed the political events in Germany and Austria with increasing concern
over the rising power of Nazi Germany and its influence on Austria. When on 9 March 1938
Chancellor Schuschnigg announced a referendum on union with Germany, Hermann sent a
telegram to his parents telling them that they must immediately, and without further thought,
leave Austria. They were convinced by this urgent message from their 18-year-old son, and his
family took the train to Budapest on the morning of 11 March and then on to Lugano in
Switzerland. Hitler marched into Austria that afternoon. His parents subsequently settled in
New York.
INTERNMENT
On 10 May 1940 Hitler invaded France, Belgium and The Netherlands, and the Chiefs of Staff
recommended to Churchill’s cabinet that all ‘aliens’ should be interned. On 12 May 1940
Hermann was visited by a policeman, told to pack his bags and, together with many other
‘aliens’, was taken off to an army barracks at Bury St Edmunds. The ‘aliens’ were then moved
to the internment centre in Huyton, near Liverpool, then to the Isle of Man, back to Liverpool
and finally they were transported to Canada, being housed at Camp L on the Plains of
Abraham in Quebec. It was on the floor of the army barracks in Bury St Edmunds that
Hermann first met his fellow Austrian and lifelong friend Tommy Gold (FRS 1964).
Hermann’s recollection of life in Camp L was that it was not especially disagreeable, and,
under the leadership of Max Perutz (FRS 1954), the many academics there set up a camp ‘university’, in which several subsequently distinguished scientists participated. Hermann gave
lectures on mathematics, his first experience of teaching, mostly without the aid of notes or
* Numbers in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the text.
Hermann Bondi
49
books. This experience moulded his subsequent lecturing style, and he frequently gave lectures, radio broadcasts and television broadcasts without the aid of notes.
Eventually the UK government appointed Sir Alexander Patterson to sort out the internees
and arrange the release of those where he felt this could be safely done. In June 1941 Hermann
was released; he eventually returned to Cambridge in August 1941. Although conditions for
internees were far from agreeable, Hermann never harboured any resentment about being
interned for the first part of the war.
Hermann had completed part II of the Maths Tripos in 1939 and had started on the part III
course before being interned. Technically he needed to complete three years of residence in
Cambridge to graduate, but this was excused; his senior scholarship was turned into a research
scholarship and he registered for a PhD under the supervision of Harold (later Sir Harold)
Jeffreys FRS, working on waves on the surface of water. However, along with most of the
returned internees, he was keen to contribute to the war effort and enlisted the help of Maurice
Pryce (FRS 1951) to find a suitable posting. Eventually at the beginning of April 1942 he
reported to the barracks of the Royal Marines at Southsea, near Portsmouth, where he was to
work on radar, in the Admiralty Signals Establishment (ASE).
THE WAR: ADMIRALTY SIGNALS ESTABLISHMENT
Hermann’s research up to this point had been very theoretical, but he now found himself in a
totally different environment, one in which they were seeking to develop better radar systems
that could be kept in good working order by sailors in the middle of a battle. He soon appreciated that a knowledge of Maxwell’s equations was not enough. He was working with colleagues who had an instinctive feel for electrodynamics and who could make things work
without necessarily fully understanding them. It was while at Southsea that he heard that there
was an interesting ‘wild Cambridge mathematician’ working on aerials at the branch establishment in Nutley; that ‘wild mathematician’ was Fred (later Sir Fred) Hoyle (FRS 1957). In
the summer of 1942 the research centre was moved to King Edward School in Witley, Surrey,
and a new Theory Division was established with Fred Hoyle as its head and Hermann Bondi
as his deputy; other members included John Gillams, Cyril Domb (FRS 1977) and Charles
Goodwin. Tommy Gold had graduated in 1942 with only an ordinary degree and had therefore
been sent to work on a farm in Lancashire, but Hermann persuaded both Fred Hoyle and
Maurice Pryce that Tommy would be an asset to the group, and they in turn persuaded the
establishment to hire Tommy, who joined them in October 1942.
In early 1943 Tommy and Hermann rented a small house in the village of Dunsfold near
Witley. Fred Hoyle and his family had rented a house near Nutbourne close to where he had
been working before the move to Witley, and so commuted weekly, staying with Hermann and
Tommy in their cottage during the week. The three spent almost all their time in the evenings
discussing scientific questions, with Fred firing them with enthusiasm about problems in
astronomy; as Hermann recalled, this gave him an outstanding scientific education ((12),
p. 41).
A major aspect of their work at the ASE was studying the performance of existing equipment and predicting, from the design, the performance of future equipment. The high-powered
10 cm radar beams were produced in a magnetron; however, although it was widely used, the
theory of how it worked was not understood. Hermann was set the task of developing a
50
theoretical understanding of the magnetron and, drawing on his experience in fluid dynamics,
he worked out the theory of the magnetron with its interpenetrating streams. Unknown to him
the theory had also been worked out by Oscar Büneman working with Douglas Hartree FRS
in Manchester, but in the compartmentalized world of wartime there was no way for them to
know of each other’s work.
During the evening discussions on astronomy in Bondi and Gold’s cottage, Fred Hoyle had
described his work with Ray Lyttleton (FRS 1955) on accretion of matter onto stars as they
passed through gas and dust in clouds in the interstellar medium, their objective at that time
being to demonstrate that accretion had an important role in the evolution of stars. Hermann
then set to work developing a detailed mathematical description of the accretion process,
drawing in part on his work on colliding beams of electrons in a magnetron and on the work
on fluid dynamics he had started under the supervision of Harold Jeffreys. One result of his
detailed modelling was to show that the accretion rate was tenfold greater than previous estimates, and that the interstellar medium had an important role in stellar dynamics. He submitted his results for a Trinity College Research Fellowship and was successful, the Fellowship
starting in October 1943.
The work on accretion was subsequently written up with Hoyle and published in Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1944 (1). This paper has had a lasting influence
on the subject and is still very widely quoted as laying the foundations of accretion theory.
One of the major problems for the theory group was the propagation of centimetric radio
waves over water, the gradient of water vapour having substantial effects on propagation
times, and for 3 cm radiation the refraction could hide targets as much as it could enhance
range. Fred Hoyle then had the idea of using the summit of Mount Snowdon as a base for carrying out trials, studying the propagation between the top of the mountain and the
Experimental Establishment at Aberporth on Cardigan Bay. The idea of running the station on
Snowdon appealed to Hermann, who loved mountains, and he was duly dispatched to run the
station. Although originally the plan had been to study propagation over the sea, a second
requirement was to study wave clutter, which required the experiments to be run in winter time
when the sea was rougher, so Hermann’s assignment became a year-round experiment, not just
a summer-time one. The work went well and Bondi’s little team made the first comprehensive
study of wave clutter.
By January the work was finished and they made plans to leave the mountain. Headquarters
agreed that they could leave most of the equipment on the mountain but they had to bring
down the magnetron valves, the powerful transmitters—which were one of the secrets of
British radar success in the war—and the handbooks of the radar sets. As it was winter, the
Snowdon rack and pinion railway did not operate, so they had to carry the magnetrons on their
backs; during their descent the weather worsened into gale conditions and during a particularly powerful gust one of his team lost his rucksack, inside which were all the secret documents, which slid down the mountainside out of sight. This mishap apart, they safely reached
the bottom of the mountain. Headquarters was furious about the loss of the secret documents,
and Hermann had to lead a group of 35 commandos to the site where they lost the bag; the
commandos combed the area, eventually discovering the bag with its contents intact. Hermann
then returned to Witley and threw himself into the problem-solving work being done by the
group until the end of the war.
Hermann Bondi
51
POSTWAR CAMBRIDGE
Having been invited by Newnham College to give a course of lectures during the long vacation of 1945, Hermann was released from war duties and returned to Cambridge in the summer of 1945 to take up his Trinity Research Fellowship and an assistant lectureship in the
Faculty of Mathematics. Gradually many of his old friends returned to Cambridge, most
importantly Fred Hoyle and Tommy Gold, which led to the renewal of their wartime collaboration and major contributions to science by all three; the most famous of these was the proposal of the steady state theory of cosmology.
As a Research Fellow Hermann had a set of rooms in Trinity, on the east side of Great
Court. Hoyle, with his wife and two children, had bought a house in Quendon, well south of
Cambridge, so he made his daytime headquarters Hermann’s rooms in Trinity. Tommy Gold
was also regular visitor, and the evening conversations of wartime were replaced by daytime
and evening discussions on many areas of science including, of course, cosmology.
Fred was always difficult to find when not in Hermann’s rooms, and one day in 1947,
when Hermann was looking for Fred, he met Christine Stockman, one of Fred’s research students, who was likewise looking for Fred. They were immediately attracted to each other and
soon decided they wanted to marry. After visits to both sets of future in-laws, any anxieties
they might have had over a ‘mixed marriage’ were dispelled and they were married in a nonreligious ceremony on 1 November 1947, in the Shire Hall, Cambridge. As a married Fellow,
Hermann left his college rooms and he and Christine moved into a small flat just outside
Trinity that now became the meeting place for the Bondi, Gold, Hoyle troika. In autumn 1948
Christine became pregnant; in the following spring the Bondis moved to a house on the outskirts of Cambridge and their home ceased being the meeting place of the troika. However,
scientific collaboration with Tommy Gold continued for many years and the Bondis and
Golds remained close friends for the rest of Tommy’s lifetime. The Bondis’ first child,
Alison, was born on 19 June 1949 and Hermann thoroughly enjoyed the new experience of
parenthood.
Hermann enjoyed his teaching duties, giving lecture courses on methods of mathematical
physics, relativity, and cosmology, as well as supervising undergraduates; he loved solving problems. His research covered waves on compressible liquids, the structure of the solar corona and
chromosphere, the rotation of the Earth, and gravitation. His major paper at this time was
‘Spherically symmetric models in General Relativity’ (2), clarifying and extending earlier work
by Georges Lemaître and Richard Tolman, giving a physical interpretation to the coordinates,
evaluating the properties of the model, and initiating several lines of research that were taken up
by other authors. In particular he showed that rapidly collapsing matter might force a light ray
passing through it to travel inwards, thus anticipating future results on the formation of black
holes (Krazinski 1997, p. 69). This paper remains a classic and is still frequently referred to
today.
Early in 1947 Hermann was approached by the Royal Astronomical Society to write a critical review on the current state of cosmology. The resulting paper was a masterpiece of scholarship, laying out the observational and theoretical status of the subject and the current
problems it faced. He covered the work of Hubble, Eddington, Willem de Sitter, Lemaître,
E. A. Milne FRS and others, stressing the importance of General Relativity to cosmology (3).
This article is still worth reading to understand the situation in cosmology at the time that the
troika were thinking about the steady state theory.
52
STEADY STATE THEORY
One of the major problems of cosmology, much discussed by Bondi, Gold and Hoyle, was the
timescale problem: the time constant of the Hubble expansion was estimated by Hubble himself to be 1.8 billion years, very short compared with the estimates of 4 billion years then
being made of the ages of the oldest rocks of the Earth, of meteorites and of the Sun, all not
far from present estimates. Hubble’s tremendous prestige had prevented his figure of 1.8 billion years from being doubted for many years.
The timescale difficulty was so keenly felt that it made physicists and astronomers of the
highest standing (such as Paul Dirac FRS) willing to contemplate that what had been viewed
as ‘constants of nature’ (notably the constant of gravitation) were in fact changing with the
cosmic time. The three of them were horrified by such proposals, particularly as accepting the
time-dependence of one feature of our physics in no way prohibits such time-dependence in
any other features All these concerns would disappear if only the universe were unchanging
on a large scale. However, they told themselves, this resolution is ruled out by the second law
of thermodynamics and is equally ruled out by the Hubble motion of recession. Then one day
(probably in late 1947) Tommy Gold surprised Hermann and Fred with the idea of the continual creation of matter, invalidating these two objections to an unchanging universe. Both
Hermann and Fred laughed and said that they could surely disprove this crazy idea before dinner time. But however hard the three of them tried, they could not come up with a counterargument. So they studied what assumptions would have to be made to produce a viable theory
of cosmology with continual creation. If the creation process were uniformly distributed, it
would be far too small for direct detection. To reconcile an unchanging universe with the second law, creation had to bring in low entropy. This would be true if the newly created matter
were as simple as possible (neutrons or protons and electrons) and if it entered the universe
with a velocity that led to the Hubble system of receding galaxies looking most symmetrical.
It was then only a short step to show that an unchanging universe fitted a de Sitter model.
Bondi and Gold thought this was quite sufficient to publish, but Hoyle wanted to demonstrate
that it could be made to fit in with the field equations of General Relativity. Their work was
therefore published in two papers, the first by Bondi and Gold (4), and Hoyle’s formulation in
the immediately following one.
The steady state theory of the expanding Universe made their names known to the general public and to numerous students of science. Of senior astronomers, only a very few
(notably W. H. (later Sir William) McCrea; FRS 1952) thought it a likely blueprint for our
Universe, and some hated it. It certainly gave the three of them wide publicity because it
was easily explained. One of the important points of the steady state theory was that it gave
predictions that could be tested, and over the following decades mounting observational evidence on radio source counts, the cosmic background radiation, and so on, were not in
agreement with the theoretical predictions. Hoyle and colleagues, notably Geoffrey
Burbidge (FRS 1968) and Jayant Narlikar, created a quasi-steady state theory, but most of
the younger astronomers who had worked happily on the theory abandoned it in the light of
contradictory observations. After he had completed his book Cosmology in 1952 (6),
Hermann’s interests changed to other subjects. His book on cosmology, along with Hoyle’s
books The nature of the Universe and Frontiers of astronomy, was an inspiration to my generation of astronomers.
Hermann Bondi
53
STELLAR STRUCTURE
When Hermann met Christine she was working on stellar structure, and before long she and
Hermann combined their talents to develop techniques for solving the structure equations,
introducing the ‘Bondi homology variables’ to minimize the numerical calculations required
to obtain a model, then extending this to models of red giant stars (5). One has to remember
that this was before the age of computers, and developing efficient algorithms was a prime
consideration. The Bondi and Bondi papers are a fine example of the British applied mathematical approach to problems of theoretical physics. Nowadays, of course, we calculate whole
evolutionary sequences of stellar models in next to no time using modern computers.
ACCRETION
Hermann’s work on accretion began while collaborating with Fred Hoyle during the war, and
his detailed analysis of accretion on stars as they moved through the interstellar medium
gained him his Research Fellowship at Trinity. In 1951 Hermann asked himself what would
happen if the star were stationary and embedded in a cloud. This was a relatively straightforward problem, which he completed in a few days showing that the accretion rate A on to a star
of mass M embedded in a cloud with sound speed c is given by A2(GM)2/c3, where is
the asymptotic density. He regarded this as a simple piece of work, not much more than an
examination exercise, and did not plan to publish it, but Ray Lyttleton persuaded him to do
so—and the paper ‘On spherically symmetric accretion’ (7) became a classic and is the most
cited of Hermann’s papers (with 54 citations in 2006).
In career terms everything was going well in Cambridge. He had been appointed to a permanent lectureship in 1948 and to a staff fellowship of Trinity in 1952; he had little to do with
administration and what contact he had reinforced his dislike of it. His research was going well
and included many other important contributions covering subjects as diverse as waves on
compressible liquids, the structure of the solar corona and chromosphere, the dynamical
theory of the rotation of the Earth, the growth of meteorological disturbances, the generation
of magnetic fields, nuclear reactions and astrophysicics, relativity and indeterminacy, the
origin of comets, the damping of free nutation of the Earth, and increasingly foundational
problems in relativity.
MOVE TO KING’S COLLEGE: GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
In the summer of 1953 Hermann was approached by King’s College, London, to visit them to
discuss whether he would be interested in applying for the vacant professorship of applied
mathematics. Hermann went on the visit more as a matter of courtesy than with a real interest
in the position, but the visit changed all that. He found the atmosphere in King’s, London,
delightful, he got on well with the Principal, Peter Noble, and with the Professor of Pure
Mathematics and Head of Department, Jack Semple. Moreover, it was made clear that he
would have no administrative duties. This was an attractive offer and, the more he and
Christine discussed it, the more they were drawn to his accepting the position. They both liked
54
the idea of living in the country—especially in rural Surrey—and they liked the idea of being
part of a wider community than the narrow academic life of Cambridge. So after a sabbatical
in the USA, Hermann took up his new post at King’s in October 1954. They bought a beautiful house on Reigate Heath in Surrey, which Hermann helped to renovate, remaining there
during his subsequent career, only leaving in the 1980s when he became Master of Churchill
College. Their three youngest children were born while they were living at Reigate Heath (the
elder two having been born in Cambridge).
The department at King’s was small, and Hermann set about building up a research group
in General Relativity; Clive Kilmister was already there and Felix Pirani joined him soon
afterwards. At this time, in the mid 1950s, there was debate as to whether Einstein’s general
theory of relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves. Hermann himself records
how, at a meeting in 1955 in Berne to celebrate 50 years of relativity, Marcus Fierz took him
on one side and said, ‘the problem of gravitational waves is ready for solution and you are the
person to solve it’ ((12), p. 79). Thus gravitational waves became the focus of research at
King’s.
In January 1957 Bondi and Pirani participated in a conference on General Relativity at
Chapel Hill, NC, USA; this received some support from the US Air Force, which had started
a programme funding research in General Relativity. Discussions with Joshua Goldberg led to
a contract with King’s College to support Bondi’s group. During the 1950s and 1960s King’s
became a world centre for research in relativity, establishing close links with Leopold Infeld’s
group in Poland and attracting many students and visitors including Leslie Marder, Peter
Szekeres, Andrzej Trautman, Alfred Schild, David Robinson, Roger (later Sir Roger) Penrose
(FRS 1972), Goldberg and many others. The group’s research covered gravitational radiation,
epistemological foundations, high gravitational potentials, slowly changing fields and special
solutions.
Their work on gravitational radiation led to the famous series of papers ‘Gravitational waves
in General Relativity’ published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A from 1958 to 2004; some
were by Hermann himself, some were by his students, and others were written with collaborators or by visitors to King’s. Two of these papers deserve special mention. In their 1959 paper
III, ‘Exact plane waves’ by Bondi, Pirani and Robinson (8), they gave the first exact solution
for such waves, thus finally demonstrating that General Relativity did indeed predict gravitational waves. In their 1962 paper VII, ‘Waves from axi-symmetric isolated systems’, by Bondi,
van der Burg and Mezner (9), they obtained a clear understanding of the transport and reception of energy in such waves, introducing the ‘Bondi radiation coordinates’, the ‘Bondi mass’,
the ‘news function’ and the Bondi–Metzner–Sachs group, thereby laying the foundation for
much future work on the subject. Hermann considered this his most important paper. He continued working in this field throughout his subsequent career in scientific administration; his
last paper in the series, XVI, ‘Standing waves’, was published in 2004 (13).
During his period at King’s, Hermann became increasingly involved in what we now call
‘public outreach’, giving series of talks on radio and television, always lucid and inspirational.
He wrote several popular books, namely The Universe at large, Relativity and common sense
and Assumption and myth in physical theory, which were translated into many languages. It
was during this period that Hermann became friends with the playwright and poet Ronald
Duncan, visiting the Duncans’ farm in Welcombe on the border of North Devon and Cornwall,
and having long discussions about science that culminated in Ronald Duncan’s epic poem
Man, which he dedicated to Hermann (Duncan 1970).
Hermann Bondi
55
ATTRACTION OF ADMINISTRATION
Hermann’s original idea that he would have no administrative duties at King’s soon fell by the
wayside. First he was involved in plans for a computer to serve the whole of the University of
London, persuading the administration that they should buy a commercial computer rather
than have one built by research scientists in the university. He chaired the university’s Board
of Studies in Mathematics, reducing the length of such meetings by a factor of three, advised
the new universities in the West Indies, Nigeria and Ghana on mathematics and physics, produced a plan for the rebuilding of King’s College, served as Secretary of the Royal
Astronomical Society, and advised on what was to become the Anglo-Australian Telescope.
He found both that he enjoyed chairing committees and that he was good at it. Then, out of
the blue, came an invitation from the Secretary of State for Air asking him to sit as a non-specialist member on the Meteorological Research Committee. He was obviously an asset to the
committee because he was subsequently asked to take over as chairman. He was also invited
to join the Defence Scientific Committee, and then to chair a committee to look at British
defence interests in space. Hermann was now deeply involved in government science as well
as in his research and teaching.
Then came a request for him to produce a one-man report on a proposed Thames barrier to
protect London in times of floods. His 1967 report (10), which recommended the building of
a barrier near Woolwich rather than further down the estuary, was accepted and subsequently
acted on; the barrier was officially opened on 8 May 1984. Hermann regarded this as one of
his major achievements.
In the spring of 1967 Hermann was contacted by the Department of Education and Science
to be asked by the Minister to agree to being nominated for the post of Director General of
ESRO. He agreed and was appointed from October 1967, taking leave of absence from his
Professorship at King’s for the three-year duration of the post.
ESRO/ESA
When Hermann took over as Director General of ESRO in November 1967, the organization
was deep in crisis. At its meeting in July 1966 the ESRO Council had refused to approve the
secretariat’s proposed budget of 808 million French francs (MFF) for the three-year period
1967–69, had refused the carry forward of 122 MFF from 1966 into the new three-year funding period, and had instructed the secretariat to come forward with new proposals limited to
690 MFF. There was disharmony among the member states; some were unhappy with the distribution of industrial contracts, others with the management structure, which had led the
Council to set up the Bannier Group to recommend reform. The ambitious satellite programme
had been cut back to two small satellites (ESRO I and II), one Highly Eccentric Orbit Satellite
(HEOS A), two Thor-Delta satellites (TD1 and TD2) and the Large Astronomical Satellite
(LAS). The Council meeting in December 1966 had failed to agree a three-year budget for
1967–69 and instead agreed a budget of 240 MFF for 1967 only. The programme was further
revised with the LAS to be delayed and capped at 300 MFF.
At the time that Hermann took up his post as Director General there had been no successful satellite launches since the foundation of the organization: ESRO I had been delayed and
ESRO II lost in a launch failure in May 1967. A new analysis of the costs of TD1 and TD2
56
showed that these costs would be at least double the previous estimates. Italy, already unhappy
with the distribution of industrial contracts, refused to approve an increase in budget to cover
the escalating cost of the TD programme, and exercised its veto. The consequence of the
Council decision would be the cancellation of the TD programme with the loss of the 72 MFF
already committed to the programme and the wastage of facilities at the European Space
Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) installed for the two satellites. In Hermann’s words
‘the future of ESRO looked bleak indeed’ (Krige & Russo 2000, p. 151).
Hermann realized that the future of ESRO depended on getting a swift and successful
launch of the back-up version of ESRO II, and the other small satellites, and on resolving the
impasse over the TD programme. He asked the highly talented, but somewhat abrasive, engineer P. Blassel to take on the responsibility for ESRO II, a move that was soon to reap rewards.
He reoriented the policy on industrial contracts and put forward a rescue plan for the TD satellites in which one of the satellites would be continued but under article VII of the Convention,
which allowed ESRO to develop projects on behalf of a subset of member states, with all
states except Italy contributing to the costs to completion, and all, including Italy, contributing to operation costs. The second TD satellite was to be cancelled and replaced by a small
satellite similar to ESRO II, with a reduced payload. This plan was accepted by Council.
By the end of 1968 almost all problems had been resolved, in large part due to Hermann’s
efforts. After the Bannier report the Director General and his directors had been given more
authority, ESRO II had been successfully launched in May, ESRO I in October and HEOS A
in November; the future programme had been revised with the cancellation of LAS, and TD1
had been transferred to an optional programme, with a slimmed-down version of TD2 to be
flown in the future. In November 1968 the Council approved the secretariat’s budget request
of 860 MFF for the three years 1969–71, and granted authority to enter into financial commitments beyond 1971. In the words of the chairman of the Scientific and Technical
Committee, R. Lust, 1968 was ‘ESRO’s first glorious year’ (Krige & Russo 2000, p. 219).
Commenting on the problems that ESRO had been facing, the chairman of Council (Hendrik
van de Hulst; ForMemRS 1991) observed (ESRO 1968, p. 7):
That a solution was found at all was due in no small part to the untiring and persevering efforts of our Director
General who played a major role in all discussions and negotiations. Without his personal interests and intervention the project would undoubtedly have collapsed completely.
The meeting of the European Space Conference (ESC) in November 1968 drafted a space
policy for Europe, which included ESRO’s eventual involvement in applications satellites, and
agreed to fund studies within ESRO, but only at a level of 5 MFF per year. Hermann was convinced that the future health of the organization depended on expanding into applications
satellites; he worked hard to overcome the worries of the scientific community and to convince them that this was the way forward. In spite of the disagreement between member governments, in 1970 the funding was increased to 25 MFF, but the full implementation of an
applications programme was only finally agreed in December 1971 after Hermann had left
ESRO. It was this same ESC meeting that put forward the proposal that ESRO, ELDO
(European Launcher Development Organisation) and CETS (Conférence européenne pour les
Télécommunications par Satellites) should combine into one organization with a core mandatory programme plus optional additional programmes. This ultimately matured into the formation of ESA.
Given the new-found stability, and that only TD1 had been approved, the time was now ripe
for ESRO to choose new projects, and in March 1969 the Council approved three small
Hermann Bondi
57
projects, ESRO Ib, HEOS A2 and ESRO IV (the result of the TD2 rescue plan). ESRO Ib was
launched in October 1969; the other two were launched in 1972 after Hermann had left ESRO.
In July 1969, after long and often heated discussions, the Council approved a future programme of COS B (launched in 1975) and GEOS (launched in 1977). The scientific advisory
structure was changed, with the establishment of the Astrophysics Working Group, the Solar
System Working Group and a new Fundamental Physics Panel with Hermann as chairman
(and the author as deputy chairman).
Hermann’s three-year contract expired on 31 October 1970, but, by mutual agreement, his
appointment was extended; however, other events intervened and he left ESRO in February 1971
to take up a new appointment as Scientific Adviser to the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD).
CHIEF SCIENTIST, MINISTRY OF DEFENCE
In early summer 1970, Solly (later Lord) Zuckerman FRS, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the
Government, met with Hermann and told him the both he and Lord Carrington, the new
Secretary of State for Defence, were most anxious that Hermann should be the new Scientific
Adviser to the MOD. Hermann had of course worked in the MOD as an adviser and he wholly
supported the line on defence that government after government had held, so after seeing
ESRO through yet another crisis in the autumn of 1970, he took up his new post in March
1971. He thoroughly enjoyed this position, and the challenges it posed, working with a succession of Secretaries of State of different political affiliations: Lord Carrington, Ian Gilmour,
Roy Mason and Fred Mulley. Much of the work Hermann did remains classified but I can
relate Hermann’s own account of his role ((12), pp. 100–110). He chaired the Defence
Equipment Policy Committee, which independently reviewed projects that had reached the
stage where a yes or no was required for their development. He and his team could look at the
issues in an entirely independent manner and come to their own technical conclusions. The
most difficult issue was the British nuclear deterrent; the decision was finally taken to go for
Chevaline, the British improvement to Polaris.
CHIEF SCIENTIST, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
In the spring of 1977, Hermann was invited to lunch by Tony Benn, then Secretary of State
for Energy, who offered him the post as his Chief Scientist. After six years in the MOD,
Hermann was ready to move and so transferred from Defence to Energy in October 1977. His
post was for three years even though that took him 11 months beyond the normal retirement
age for civil servants of 60 years. Much of his contribution here consisted of advising the
Secretary of State on research programmes of the nationalized industries, namely electricity,
coal and gas, and research programmes in renewable energy sources, especially wave energy.
However, two jobs were the most rewarding: leading the UK delegation to the International
Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE), and the Severn Barrage Committee.
The INFCE was launched by President Jimmy Carter with the aim of reconciling the
spread of nuclear electricity generation without encouraging the spread of nuclear weapons.
Hermann recognized that he needed expert advice and therefore turned to Walter (later Sir
Walter) Marshall FRS, who had been the Scientific Adviser to the Department of Energy
58
before Hermann’s appointment and who had left after major disagreement with Tony Benn.
The main problem was that the United States considered that the way forward was to prevent
the separation of plutonium, and this was clearly unacceptable to other nations—the UK,
France, Germany and Japan—that were deeply engaged in the development of fast breeder
reactors, which required such facilities. Hermann led the British delegation and had a major
role in the discussions, which culminated in the final plenary session in Vienna in February
1980 in which some 59 countries and six international organizations took part. In Hermann’s
words in the UK statement at the final meeting of the INFCE in 1980 (reported in Gummett
1981) (11):
INFCE has been a great success. … We have produced eight agreed reports, and an agreed summary, with no
minority reports. This is an achievement which not all of us would have thought possible two years ago. It is
a considerable achievement that so many countries with varying interests in the nuclear fuel cycle—suppliers,
customers, industrialized and developing countries—have been able to sit down together to produce this result.
Then Tony Benn appointed Hermann to head the Severn Barrage Committee, to look at
the feasibility, environmental consequences and economic benefits of building a tidal barrage
across the Severn Estuary, using the exceptionally high tides to generate electricity. It is
indicative of Hermann’s chairmanship skills that this very heterogeneous committee, with
representatives of water authorities, ecologists and parliamentarians, reached a unanimous
report recommending that a 16 km barrage be built between Brean Down and Lavernock
Point that would generate 7200 MW (Severn Barrage Committee 1981). The committee’s
recommendations were not acted upon but have remained as the basis of subsequent studies
and proposals, most recently that by the Welsh First Minister and the Secretary of State for
Wales in 2006. Hermann retired at the end of September 1980, having reached the age of
60 years 11 months.
CHIEF EXECUTIVE AND CHAIRMAN OF NERC
In 1980 the positions of Chairman and Chief Executive of the National Environmental
Research Council (NERC) were combined, and a search committee (which included
Hermann) was set up to find a suitable candidate. The person they agreed upon turned out not
to be available so Hermann himself was offered and accepted the four-year appointment starting on 1 October 1980. He immediately set about understanding the needs, problems and aspirations of the sciences within the NERC remit, and in establishing good relationships with the
many government departments with which NREC was involved: Energy, Environment,
Agriculture, Overseas Development and the Scottish and Welsh Offices. Hermann was tireless
in pushing the NERC case within the Advisory Board of Research Councils, in seeking to
attract contracts from home and overseas, and in strengthening collaboration with industry.
During his term of office remote-sensing blossomed, the modern British Geological Survey
was born, NERC joined the new Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, the RSS Charles Darwin
was built and NERC’s budget for Antarctic research increased. During his tenure he visited all
the 43 establishments in the UK where there were NERC staff, and several abroad, although
to his regret he never got to Antarctica.
Hermann Bondi
59
CHURCHILL COLLEGE
In spring 1982 Hermann was approached by Churchill College to see whether he would be
interested in being put forward as Master of the College, a post that would be vacant from
October 1983. Initially he (and Christine) were somewhat hesitant, but they were both won
over by their visit to the college in May, when they found it to be modern in outlook, to be
friendly and, importantly for someone who had always supported the state system of education, to have a large majority of undergraduates from the maintained sector. Moreover, at the
end of his four-year appointment at NERC he would be 65 years old and unlikely to be
employed in government service beyond this, whereas the retirement date at Churchill would
be July 1990, the summer after he reached the age of 70 years. So he agreed to be considered
for the post and soon afterwards received a letter from the Prime Minister asking him to take
on the Mastership. He accepted, although for the first year he was non-resident because his
appointment as Chief Executive of NERC did not expire until September 1984.
He very much enjoyed his time as Master; his chairmanship skills, which had been honed
over the years with ESRO and in government science, were much valued by the Fellows. He
got on easily and informally with both students and Fellows, engaging them in discussions on
a wide range of subjects and telling jokes, of which he had a large repertoire. One of the major
tasks of the Master is to solicit donations, and during his tenure as Master the college received
a munificent donation from the Danish Maersk Foundation. Equally important is to ensure the
maintenance of a stimulating academic environment and the communal life of the college, a
role that Hermann and Christine fulfilled admirably. Hermann retired as Master in 1990 and
was elected a life Fellow.
HONOURS AND AWARDS
Hermann Bondi was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1959 and appointed Knight
Commander of the Bath in 1973. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Einstein Society in
1983, the Gold Medal of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in 1988, the
Austrian Decoration of Honour for Science and Art in 1999, and the Gold Medal of the Royal
Astronomical Society in 2001. He served as Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society
(1956–64), President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (1974–76), President
of the Hydrographic Society (1985–87) and Chairman of the International Federation of
Institutes of Advanced Study (1982–90). He was awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Bath, Birmingham, Plymouth, St Andrews, Salford, Southampton, Surrey, Sussex,
York and Vienna.
Both Hermann and Christine were very active in the British Humanist Association from the
1950s onwards, Hermann serving as President from 1982 to 1999 and as President of the
Rationalist Press Association from 1982 to 1999. In 1990 he was awarded the G. Birla
International Award for Humanism. He was similarly active in education and the public understanding of science, serving as President of the Association of British Science Writers
(1981–83), President of the Association for Science Education (1982–84) and President of the
Society for Research into Higher Education (1981–97).
60
AFTER RETIREMENT
Hermann continued to support Churchill College and to pursue his own research on gravitational waves that he had started in the 1950s when he set up the research group in King’s
College, London. He continued to regularly participate in, and contribute to, the Alpbach
Summer Schools organized by ESA and the Austrian Space Agency, stimulating the students
and staff in science, and entertaining them with stories and jokes. Although he had Parkinson’s
disease in later life he still remained scientifically active; his last paper, ‘Gravitational waves
in General Relativity. XVI. Standing waves’, was published in Proceedings of the Royal
Society A in February 2004. He also remained a tireless worker for Save the Children, delivering envelopes and collecting funds in his home village of Impington and Histon for as long
as he was mobile. He died on 10 September 2005 aged 85 years, and is survived by his wife
Christine, their five children, Alison, Jonathan, Elizabeth, David and Deborah, and four grandchildren, Tom, Max, Ben and Claire.
Hermann Bondi will be remembered for his foundational contributions to science, particularly to relativity and gravitational radiation, accretion, and cosmology. He will also be
remembered for his major contributions to government science and administration, his outstanding communication skills, and as a charismatic, warm and stimulating person.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The frontispiece photograph is reproduced courtesy of Lady Bondi.
REFERENCES TO OTHER AUTHORS
Duncan, R. 1970 Man. London: Rebel Press.
ESRO 1968 Annual report of the European Space Research Organisation. Paris: European Space Agency.
Gummett, P. 1981 From NPT to INFCE: developments in thinking about nuclear non proliferation. Int. Affairs 57,
555.
Krazinski, A. 1997 Inhomogeneous cosmological models. Cambridge University Press.
Krige, J. & Russo, A. 2000 A history of the European Space Agency, vol. 1 (1957–1984). Paris: European Space
Agency.
Severn Barrage Committee 1981 Tidal power from the Severn Estuary, vol. 1. (Energy paper no. 46.) London: HMSO.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following publications are those referred to directly in the text. A full bibliography is
available as electronic supplementary material at http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2007.0008 or
via http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk.
(1)
(2)
(3)
1944 (With F. Hoyle) On the mechanism of accretion by stars. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 104, 273–282.
1947 Spherically symmetric models in General Relativity. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 107, 410–423.
1948 Review of cosmology (Council Report on the Progress of Astronomy). Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 108,
104–110.
Hermann Bondi
(4)
(5)
1949
(6)
(7)
(8)
1952
(9)
1962
(10)
1967
(11)
(12)
(13)
1980
1990
2004
1959
61
(With T. Gold) The steady state theory of the expanding universe. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 108,
252–270.
(With C. M. Bondi) The integration of the equations of stellar structure. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 109,
62–85.
Cosmology. Cambridge University Press.
On spherically symmetric accretion. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 112, 195–204.
(With F. A. E. Pirani & I. Robinson) Gravitational waves in General Relativity. III. Exact plane waves.
Proc. R. Soc. A 251, 519–533.
(With M. G. J. van der Burg & A. W. K. Metzner) Gravitational waves in General Relativity. VII.
Waves from axi-symmetric isolated systems. Proc. R. Soc. A 269, 21–52.
London Flood Barrier. A Report prepared for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government.
(Unpublished.)
No technical fix to a political problem. Nature 284, 7.
Science, Churchill and me: the autobiography of Hermann Bondi. London: Pergamon Press.
Gravitational waves in General Relativity. XVI. Standing waves. Proc. R. Soc. A 460, 463–470.

Hermann Bondi. 1 November 1919

Transkrypt

Podobne dokumenty

Title of Publication

wrocław university of science and technology – general information