The University of Bristol has conferred an honorary doctorate on pioneering physicist Rosemary Fowler, 98, 75 years after she gave up her PhD to have a family. In 1948, her discovery of the Kaon particle paved the way for findings critical to understanding the laws of physics. Fellow physicist Peter Fowler, who she married the following year, would become one of her three children’s father. Fowler said she felt “very honoured”. Dr Fowler received the degree in a private ceremony close to her Cambridge home.
Dr Fowler’s discovery was of critical importance in the theory of particle physics. It helped to predict particles such as the Higgs boson, discovered at CERN in Switzerland. In an honorary address, Nobel prize-winning University of Bristol Chancellor Sir Paul Nurse said Fowler had “paved the way for critical discoveries that continue to shape the work of today’s physicists, and our understanding of the universe”.
Fowler’s father was a Royal Navy engineer who continually moved his family around. She was born in 1926 in Suffolk and grew up in Malta, Portsmouth, and Bath. The University of Bristol’s cosmic ray physics team, led by Professor Cecil Powell, were in the midst of hunting for new fundamental particles in 1948. They had already found the pion, for which Prof Powell would later be awarded the Nobel Prize. Fowler was 22 at the time she spotted something new when viewing unusual particle tracks.
Fowler subsequently published her discovery in three academic papers. The year after the discovery, in 1949, she left university to look after her family. Sir Paul praised her for her “intellectual rigour and curiosity” and added that her fundamental discoveries were just the beginning of a lifelong quest for knowledge
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