TOOLS OF SCIENCE

A series of meetings hosted by The Physics Museum,
The University of Queensland

For students, scientists, engineers, historians of science and technology, teachers,
collectors, and all those fascinated by old scientific instruments

 

October 18
David Whitehead		 Doing a PhD fifty years ago
It is a hundred years since Einstein wrote his famous papers and 50 years since Professor David Whitehead wrote and was examined on his PhD thesis! As it is now, you had to jump a number of hurdles but the hurdles were very different then. He will describe the route to becoming a recognized physicist through primary and high school to university; the fun the students had with their lecturers and the introduction to research. You had to do everything for yourself. Equipment was built from dismantled gear from wartime, students had no access to the valve-driven computer owned by the university and you were expected to plan your own research. Along the way you learnt simple workshop skills, how to deal with quite complicated equations using a slide-rule and patience in dealing with yards of paper chart and film records. All in all it was a lot of fun.


Professor David Whitehead.
David started at U of Q as Reader in Physics on April the first (appropriately enough) in 1963 and became independent on July 4th in 1992. For seven years he was Head of the Department, guided in his management skills by that excellent book 'The Dilbert Principle'. Since he retired he has continued with his research into ionospheric physics and consulted with the team working on over-the-horizon radar. He has serious concerns with much of physics today and is a sceptic about the Big Bang, quantum computing and gravitational waves. Knowing more about global warming, he thinks the evidence for it (due to human efforts) is very strong and believes it likely that governments will do too little, far too late. He writes unpublished letters to 'The Australian' and even had a short contribution printed in the 'Guardian Weekly' on how to deal with an infection of gremlins.