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Famous
Humanist
1
Born
in Vienna on November 1st 1919 and schooled at the Realgymnasium in that
city before graduating from Trinity College Cambridge. During WW2 he was
first interned as an enemy alien, but from 1942-45 was employed as a
Temporary Experimental Officer with the Admiralty, for whom he worked on
the development of radar systems. He shared a cottage near a Canadian
air base north of London with a compatriot with whom he later
collaborated on a major scientific theory. After the war he worked as
Assistant Lecturer in Mathematics at Cambridge, and was a full Lecturer
from 1948-54, when he was made Professor of Mathematics at Kings College
London. He married in 1947 and now has two sons and 3 daughters.
Whilst at Cambridge he performed many calculations for another
distinguished author and astronomer. A colleague recalled that he sat
cross-legged on the floor while this Yorkshireman sat behind him in an
armchair kicking him 'every 5 minutes to make him work faster, just as
you might whip a horse'. Under this pressure even his mathematical
prowess faltered and he is reported to have once looked up and asked
"Now at this point do I multiply or divide by 10 (to the power of
46). His famous theory was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society on 13th July 1949.
Bespectacled and with receding dark hair, he has written many books on
Cosmology, including "Relativity and Commonsense" in 1964. He
became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1959.
He has written "I find the term 'atheist' inappropriate while
different people define God in such different ways. Unless a concept of
God is defined, negating it is meaningless. I refuse to deny the concept
of a God that is defined to be Nature or defined to be Love, but I most
firmly deny a God known through this or that alleged revelation."
In the 1970s he was Chief Advisor to the Ministry of Defence and then
Chief Scientist at the Department of Energy. He was knighted in 1973 and
currently holds Honorary D.Sc.s in at least 8 British universities. In
Who's Who he lists his hobbies as 'walking, skiing and traveling'. One
final clue: in 1990 he received the G.D. Birla International Award for
Humanism.
Can you name him?
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