A TRIBUTE TO ARTHUR CHARLESBY

摘要

For 45 years Professor Charlesby has been a dominant figure in the field of radiation science and technology. Few of us can recall a meeting of our freemasonry in which he was not a principal speaker, and a major contributor to provocative and stimulating discussions. Year after year, articles have flowed from his pen illuminating almost every aspect of our field. Despite impressions to the contrary, Professor Charlesby did not, like Minerva, spring full-grown from the head of Jupiter. He was, like most of us, born of parents. A native of London, he received some of his early education in Antwerp. At the Royal Atheneum, a French school in a Flemish city, he was the only English student. He returned to London for his university studies: engineering at what is now the City University, and physics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. It was at the latter he collected the first group of many prizes for scholarship while on his way to the award of the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees. In normal times, he would have devoted his talents to electron diffraction and the wave-particle problem, the field in which he performed his doctoral research. However, his graduation in 1939 coincided with the start of World War Ⅱ. The events of the War and the five years that followed directed his career elsewhere.