Abstract

Half this year's Nobel Prize in Physics went to Y. Nambu "for the discovery of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics", while the other half was shared by M. Kobayashi and T. Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of broken symmery which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature". Professor Delbourgo will discuss the historical context in which these discoveries were made and the vagaries of the awards.

Speaker Profile

Bob Delbourgo obtained his PhD in 1963 at Imperial College, University of London, under the supervision of Professor Abdus Salam. Professor Salam was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 and he and Bob have co-authored 30 research publications. After receiving his PhD, Bob held various appointments at the University of Wisconsin, the International Centre of Theoretical Physics at Trieste and the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. In 1966 he was appointed to a Lectureship at Imperial College where he remained for ten years, being appointed Reader in 1972. In 1976 he was awarded a DSc by the University of London and accepted the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Tasmania. He held this position until his retirement in December 2000. During the period 1989-96 Professor Delbourgo was Dean of the Faculty of Science and subsequently Dean of Graduate Studies. He served as Chair of the National Committee for Physics of the Australian Academy of Science in the mid 1990s. He has published over 200 scientific papers and still continues his research at the University as an Honorary Research Associate. Professor Delbourgo is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and was awarded its Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal in 1989. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics, which awarded him the Walter Boas Medal in 1988 and (together with the Institute of Physics in the UK) the prestigious 2002 Harrie Massey Medal and Prize for his contribution to quantized gauge-field theories and their symmetry properties.