Wednesday 8 August 2012

RIP Bernard Lovell

The physicist Bernard Lovell who died yesterday aged 98 was one of the pioneers of radio astronomy at Manchester University in the 1950's.

The trams going along Oxford Road interfered with the equipment so they set up their radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank in the Cheshire countryside south of Manchester. It's about twenty years since I last went round Jodrell Bank but as well as the telescopes themselves I remember the planetarium - apparently now demolished - being pretty impressive too.

According to this profile of him last year, Lovell "had the knack of explaining concepts of immense complexity as simply as possible; and he did it in a way that was never patronising, and never made his listener feel stupid."

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