A pioneering physicist who gave up her doctorate 75 years ago to start a family has received an honorary doctorate from her former university.
Rosemary Fowler, 98, discovered the kaon particle during her doctoral research under Cecil Powell at the University of Bristol in 1948, which contributed to her winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950.
Fowler’s discovery helped revolutionize the theory of particle physics, and it continues to be confirmed: it has helped predict particles such as the Higgs boson, discovered at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
But she left university without completing her doctorate to marry fellow physicist Peter Fowler in 1949, a decision she later described as pragmatic after having three children in an era of post-war food rationing.
She has now received an honorary doctorate of science from Bristol University Chancellor Sir Paul Nurse at a private graduation ceremony near her Cambridge home.
Fowler said she felt “very honoured” but added: “I haven’t done anything since to deserve any particular respect.”
Nurse praised Fowler’s “intellectual rigor and curiosity,” which “paved the way for crucial discoveries that continue to shape the work of today’s physicists and our understanding of the universe.”
At age 22, Fowler spotted something while observing unusual particle tracks: a particle that had decayed into three pions, a type of subatomic particle.
She said: “I knew straight away that this was new and that it would be very important. We were seeing things that had never been seen before – that’s particle physics research. It was very exciting.”
The trace, later labeled K, was evidence of an unknown particle, now known as a kaon or K meson.
The K trace was a mirror image of a particle already observed by colleagues in Manchester, but their trace disintegrated into two pions, not three. Trying to understand why these images were identical, yet behaved differently, contributed to a revolution in particle physics theory.
The year after the discovery, Fowler left the university after publishing his discovery in three academic papers.
Born in Suffolk in 1926, Fowler excelled in mathematics and science from an early age, but found writing difficult. She was the only girl in her year to go to university.
She became one of the first women to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics, and her three children pursued scientific studies.
His daughter, Mary Fowler, studied mathematics and then geophysics at Cambridge and had an academic career in Switzerland, Canada, London and finally Cambridge, where she was Principal of Darwin College from 2012 to 2020.
