by
Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of
Tasmania
Professor Robert (Bob) Delbourgo has
been awarded the prestigious 2002 Harrie Massey Medal and Prize for his
contribution to quantized gauge-field theories and their symmetry properties.
Bob Delbourgo is a
graduate from London University obtaining his PhD in 1963 at Imperial College,
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, the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. In 1966 he was appointed to a
Lectureship at Imperial College, London. There
he remained for ten years, being appointed Reader in 1972.
In 1976 he was awarded a DSc from
London University and also accepted the Chair of Physics here, 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.
The Harrie Massey
Medal and Prize is awarded jointly by the Australian Institute of Physics and
the Institute of Physics in the UK, to an Australian physicist working anywhere
in the world, for significant contributions to Physics and its applications.
The award is named after Professor
Harrie Massey, a Melbourne-born physicist who had a very distinguished academic
career in the UK. The 2002 award was presented to Professor Delbourgo by Sir
Peter Williams, President of Institute of Physics at the 15th Australian
Institute of Physics Biennial Congress in Sydney on 8 July 2002.
We are
privileged to have this presentation in Hobart. Professor Delbourgo's lecture,
which he previously gave at the Physics Congress,
will be focussed on the different facets of "dimension" in
Physics and how they have impacted on his own work on dimensional continuation in various problems of
quantum field theory. He will also describe a model of the physical world ,
based on equal numbers of bosonic and fermionic coordinates, which has the
property of being effectively zero-dimensional.
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