- Author, Nina Massey
- Role, Average PA
A 98-year-old pioneering physicist who gave up her doctorate 75 years ago to start a family has received an honorary doctorate from her former university.
In 1948, Rosemary Fowler’s discoveries at the University of Bristol paved the way for crucial findings that would rewrite the laws of physics.
Her discovery of the Kaon particle helped revolutionise the theory of particle physics. But in post-war Britain she decided to leave academia, marrying fellow physicist Peter Fowler in 1949 and having three children.
Dr Fowler said she felt “very honoured” but added: “I haven’t done anything since that deserves any particular respect.”
Dr Fowler received his doctorate at a private graduation ceremony near his Cambridge home.
The Chancellor of the University of Bristol, Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, conferred on him an honorary doctorate of science.
Dr Fowler’s discovery of the Kaon particle helped predict particles such as the Higgs boson, discovered at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
Sir Paul praised Dr Fowler’s “intellectual rigour and curiosity”, adding that she “paved the way for crucial discoveries that continue to shape the work of physicists today and our understanding of the universe”.
Dr Fowler was born in Suffolk in 1926 and grew up in Malta, Portsmouth and Bath while his family travelled for his father’s work as a Royal Navy engineer.
In 1948, the Bristol Cosmic Ray Physics Team, led by Professor Cecil Powell, was searching for new fundamental particles.
They had already found the pawn for which Professor Powell would receive the Nobel Prize in 1950.
At just 22 years old, Rosemary Fowler (née Brown) spotted something while observing unusual particle tracks: a particle that was decaying 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 saw things that had never been seen before. That’s what particle physics research was all about. It was very exciting.”
The track she observed, later labeled k, was evidence of an unknown particle, now known as a kaon or K meson.
Track k was a mirror image of a particle previously seen by colleagues in Manchester, but the Manchester team’s track disintegrated into two pions, not three.
Trying to understand how these mirror images were identical, yet behaved differently, contributed to a revolution in particle physics theory.
The year after the discovery, Dr. Fowler left the university after publishing his discovery in three academic papers.
