Background

Bernard Lovell was born August 31, 1913, in the village of Oldland Common (Gloucestershire), Great Britain.

Education

At the age of 20, he received his bachelor's degree in physics from Bristol University; three years later, in 1936, he received his doctorate, also in physics.

Career

He was appointed assistant lecturer in physics at the University of Manchester. At the outbreak of World War II Lovell joined the Air Ministry Research Establishment and soon became head of the blind-bombing and antisubmarine groups; in this capacity, he helped develop the use of airborne radar systems in Great Britain. At the end of the war, in 1945, Lovell returned to the University of Manchester as lecturer in physics. He rose rapidly through the academic ranks, becoming senior lecturer in 1947 and reader in 1949. His researches during these years were a direct outgrowth of his wartime researches on radar detection techniques combined with his desire to resume his prewar cosmic-ray studies. Early Meteor Studies When bouncing radio waves off cosmic-ray showers and detecting the echoes, Lovell observed many transient (short-term) echoes, which he concluded were from meteor trails. Carefully choosing a known comet with desirable characteristics, Lovell, in October 1946, directed his radar equipment skyward and proved beyond question that the transient meteor-trail echoes he had observed earlier were signals bounced off the tails of comets. His meteor studies lead to the discoveries that meteors orbited within the solar system (and did not come from beyond it), and that science was underestimating the number and intensity of daytime meteor showers. Technical disturbing effects from the city of Manchester during this work convinced Lovell of the need for a country location, and he received permission to establish the Jodrell Bank Laboratory in Cheshire, of which he became director in 1951. That same year, a special academic chair was created for him at Manchester University: he became professor of radio astronomy. Using Michelson stellar interferometric techniques, Lovell proved that radio sources are constantly emitting "point sources" of energy, and not, as had been previously thought, diffuse interstellar clouds of ionized hydrogen. The previously detected fluctuations in radio sources were shown to be imposed on them by the earth's ionosphere, in much the same way as the earth's atmosphere causes the twinkling of a star at optical wavelengths. Development of Telescope at Jodrell The potentialities of radio astronomy were therefore clear, and in 1952 Lovell convinced the British government and the Nuffield Foundation to jointly finance the construction of the largest, completely steerable radio telescope in the world at Jodrell Bank, now part of the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratory. As it developed, the huge telescope, 250 feet in diameter, was completed in time to track the first artificial earth satellite, the Russian Sputnik, in October 1957. Communications work and future trackings, including that of the American manned moon landing in July 1969, gained for Lovell and Jodrell Bank a great deal of publicity.

Achievements

• He pioneered in radio astronomy and founded the Jodrell Bank Laboratory. The first name of the fictional scientist Bernard Quatermass, the hero of several BBC Television science-fiction serials of the 1950s, was chosen in honour of Lovell.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Emerging Cosmology (Convergence)

    (Cosmologythe science that aims at a comprehensive theory ...)

  • Voice of the Universe: Building the Jodrell Bank Telescope, 2nd Edition (Convergence)

    ( In this volume the creator and director of Jodrell Bank...)

  • Astronomer By Chance (Sloan Foundation Science Series)

    (A chance event in 1939 changed the young Bernard Lovell's...)

  • Science and civilization, (Discussion books)

    (150p original black cloth, minor foxing, from a Cambridge...)

  • The New Universe

    (The New Universe Hardcover - 1968 by Various Rand McNally...)

  • P. M. S. Blackett
  • Story of Jordell Bank
  • Discovering the universe
  • Lovell: Our Present Knowledge Universe
  • In the Center of Immensities (World Perspectives, Vol. 53)

Views

Quotations: "Youth is vivid rather than happy, but memory always remembers the happy things. "

"The pursuit of the good and evil are now linked in astronomy as in almost all science. .. . The fate of human civilization will depend on whether the rockets of the future carry the astronomer's telescope or a hydrogen bomb. "

"We have observed and admired the universe, now we have begun to move into it in a decisive manner. It is a movement which is revolutionary. .. which has never before occurred in man's history. "

Membership

Lovell was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Connections

In 1937 he married Mary Joyce Chesterman, a teacher, who collaborated with her husband in writing popular books on astronomy. They had two sons and three daughters.

Father:

Gilbert Lovell

Mother:

Emily Laura Lovell

Spouse:

Mary Joyce Chesterman