Harrie Massey

Harrie Massey
Born	(1908-05-16)16 May 1908 St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia
Died	27 November 1983(1983-11-27) (aged 75) Cambridge, UK
Residence	UK
Nationality	Australian
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	Queen's University of Belfast Cambridge University University College London
Alma mater	University of Melbourne Cambridge University
Doctoral advisor	Ralph Fowler
Doctoral students	David Robert Bates Ian Sloan Michael Seaton

Sir Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey FRS (16 May 1908 – 27 November 1983) was an influential Australian mathematical physicist. He worked primarily in the fields of atomic and atmospheric physics.

Life and career

Harrie Massey was born in St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia, but grew up in the rural community of Hoddles Creek. Massey enrolled in the local state school in 1913. At the age of 16 he won a Senior Government Scholarship to the University of Melbourne. There he studied physics and chemistry and graduated with a first class honours BSc in 1927. He stayed on to study mathematics and was awarded another first class degree, a BA, in 1929. At that time, the university did not offer a PhD program but, clearly gifted, he took on an MSc with both experimental and theoretical components. The former dealt with soft X-ray deflection from metal surfaces and the latter with wave mechanics. His external examiner was Ralph Fowler from the University of Cambridge who was Paul Dirac's PhD supervisor.

In 1929, with the benefit of another scholarship, Massey went to Trinity College, Cambridge to perform research at the Cavendish Laboratory led by Ernest Rutherford. Fowler was appointed as Massey's supervisor although it was clear that he did not need any supervision per se. Massey obtained his PhD on the The Collision of Material Particles in 1932. He co-authored a book on atomic collision processes with Nevill Mott shortly afterwards. He then became a lecturer at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1933 and left to take up a chair in Mathematics at University College London five years later. This was to create a strong academic link between QUB and UCL which persists to this day.

During the Second World War he worked for the Admiralty Mining Establishment. He had a great influence on the future careers of nearly every scientist that worked there including David Bates, who was invited to join the staff at UCL, and Robert Boyd, who was offered a research assistant post. Francis Crick was introduced to Maurice Wilkins by Massey.

Massey was made head of the UCL Physics department in 1950 and remained its head after the department was merged with Astronomy in 1973. He retired in 1975.

Massey was the first chairman of the British National Committee for Space Research, the first Chairman of the European Space Sciences Committee, the first Chairman of the Council for Scientific Policy and helped found the European Space Research Organization as well as the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL.

Honours & awards

• Royal Society Hughes medal 1955
• Knighted 1960

Massey has a number of awards named after him;

• Royal Society/COSPAR Massey Award. [1]
• Harrie Massey Medal and Prize jointly awarded by the Australian Institute of Physics and Institute of Physics (UK). [2]

See also

• Atomic physics
• British Atomic Scientists Association
• Mullard Space Science Laboratory

Books

• Mott, NF; Massey, HSW (1949). Theory of Atomic Collisions. Clarendon Press, Oxford.  (1st edition, 1933)
• Massey, HSW; Kestelman, H (1964). Ancillary Mathematics (2nd ed. ed.). Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd. 
• Massey, HSW (1982). Applied Atomic Physics Processes. Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-419951-8. 
• Massey, HSW; Robins, MO (1986). History of British space science. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-30783-X. 

External links

• From Lardner to Massey, by JW Fox