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Vice-Chancellor pays tribute to Sir Mark

Monday, 17 July 2000

Adelaide ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥ Vice-Chancellor Professor Mary O'Kane has paid tribute to the memory of Sir Mark Oliphant, whose death was announced today.

"Sir Mark was one of the outstanding figures of ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥n science," she said. "He made an enormous contribution as a physicist and a science administrator and was among Adelaide's ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥'s most eminent graduates.

"He was a fine experimentalist who developed some elegant large machines to look at some very small particles.

"His other major achievement was in alerting the community - and particularly scientists - to the serious ethical implications arising from new weapons of mass destruction. This concern stemmed from his own involvement with the Manhattan Project."

Sir Mark graduated from Adelaide ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥ with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1923. He went on to Cambridge ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥ and later became the first Director of the Research School of Physical Sciences at the ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥n National ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥.

After an interval of nearly 50 years, he resumed his association with Adelaide ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥ in 1971 upon his appointment as Governor of South ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥ and Visitor of the ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥.

Professor O'Kane said that during the term of Sir Mark's Governorship, the ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥ set aside a room at the School of Physics which Sir Mark used occasionally for research. He also enjoyed attending physics seminars at the ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥.

Professor O'Kane said Sir Mark had also hosted visiting international physicists at Government House and had generously invited the ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥'s physicists there to meet them.

Sir Mark's papers are kept in the Special Collections section of the ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥'s Barr Smith Library.

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