Academic literature on the topic 'Sir Mark Oliphant'

Marcus Oliphant was a gifted physics student from the University of Adelaide who came to work with Rutherford in Cambridge for his doctorate. In 1937 he became Poynting Professor of Physics at the University of Birmingham, where he promoted the development of centimetre–wave research for radar and was active in connection with the atomic bomb. He returned to Australia in 1950 as Professor of the Physics of Ionized Gases in Canberra, but his efforts there to achieve a thermonuclear reaction were unsuccessful. He became the founding President of the Australian Academy of Sciences, received a knighthood in 1959 and was appointed Governor of Southern Australia in 1972.

With the death of Professor Sir Mark Oliphant, the first President of the Australian Academy of Science, Australia lost one of its most distinguished scientists. A tall, handsome man with a shock of white hair and a distinctive voice and laugh, he was well informed on a wide range of scientific matters and expressed firm views on their social consequences. He enjoyed wide respect throughout the nation as a great Australian, his influence spreading far beyond the discipline of physics, to which he made seminal contributions both through his own research and his leadership. The Academy will remember and honour him for his leading role in its establishment, and for his continuing association with it until the last years of his long life.Oliphant's outstanding international reputation was based on his pioneering discoveries in nuclear physics in Cambridge in the 1930s and his remarkable contributions to wartime radar research and to the development of the atomic bomb. In 1950, after an absence of 23 years, Oliphant returned to Australia, where he founded the Research School of Physical Sciences at the Australian National University and pioneered the creation in Canberra of a national university dedicated to the conduct of research at the highest international level.To the layman, Mark Oliphant was well known for his often outspoken comments on those matters about which he felt so strongly: social justice, peace, atomic warfare, the environment, academic freedom and autonomy, to name a few. The scientific community will remember him as a physicist for his pioneering experiments with Ernest Rutherford during momentous years that saw the birth of nuclear physics, as a physicist/engineer for his ingenuity and determination as one of the pioneers of high-energy particle accelerators, and as a science administrator and public advocate for science.

Carlyle’s ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ or synthesis of idealism and realism is interpreted by Mark Abrams as an immanentizing project. This is questioned in Chapter 12 by analysing ghost stories by women writers who reverse this trajectory to anchor the real in a supernatural cause. They use realism to open a transcendent depth in the material object. Emily Brontë’s lovers in Wuthering Heights seek to burst the limits of the material but are left in a liminal spectrality. Elizabeth Gaskell uses the reality of the supernatural to question the refusal of original sin by rational dissent. Margaret Oliphant’s Dantesque ghost stories establish the supernatural as the truly real positively in ‘A Beleaguered City’ and more problematically in ‘A Library Window’. Finally Charlotte Brontë’s supposedly new psychological Gothic is shown to be wholly traditional and to yoke feminist and theological desires for liberation in an apocalyptic union of body and soul.