Personal Stories
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue22 1–30 November 2021
I was born in Perth, WA and much of my childhood was spent in or on the Swan River, swimming, catching fish and crabs, and messing around in boats with a gang of friends. From the age of 10, I went to Scotch College, which was one of Perth’s public (i.e. private) schools. I can’t remember much about the first few years, except for army cadets and WWII weapons, and a lot of mental arithmetic. In the final two years, I studied Mathematics (double), Physics and Chemistry, English, Latin and German. All of the math and physical science was taught by one inspired individual. Our English teacher was a published short story writer, and the Latin teacher later moved to the University (UWA) as an associate professor. It was a good experience.
Then I went to UWA to study mathematics and physics. UWA had just hired a strong group of mathematicians from the aerodynamics group at the Aeronautical Research Lab in Melbourne. We were lucky to have them teaching the applied math – we learned a lot of aerodynamics. Another highlight was a visiting Swiss theoretical physicist, Armin Thellung. He was Pauli’s last assistant and taught our third-year quantum theory course. While dropping names from the quantum scene … my next quantum physics course (in Cambridge) was taught by Paul Dirac himself.
At the end of third year at UWA, I spent the summer as a vacation scholar at Mt. Stromlo, and went back again at the end of my honours year. I wanted to do theoretical astrophysics for my PhD, and had already developed an interest in galactic dynamics. There was not much going on in Australia in that area, so I was planning to go abroad. George Batchelor, an Australian mathematician famous for his work on turbulence, and now head of the Dept of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) group in Cambridge, came by UWA at just the right time, and persuaded me to apply to Cambridge and to join his college, Trinity College, Isaac Newton’s old college. This all worked out very well. My supervisors were Leon Mestel and Donald Lynden-Bell – Donald was only a few years older than I was, and had already done some great work in stellar dynamics. I worked on the dynamics and evolution of barred galaxies, and Donald advised me to learn about adiabatic invariants. That was good advice. I wrote a few papers on the topic and won a research fellowship at Trinity.
It was an exciting time to be in Cambridge. Fred Hoyle was the lead astrophysicist in DAMTP. He was now into his Steady State Theory of the Universe, after an amazing decade defining the subject of element nucleosynthesis, and he was having skirmishes with radio astronomer Martin Ryle about radio source number counts. These got so serious that we were forbidden to talk with the PhD students from Ryle’s radio astronomy group.
After Cambridge, I spent a postdoc year in Austin, Texas, working with Gerard de Vaucouleurs who was an observational expert on galaxies. He had been at Stromlo for a period in the early 1950s, using our 30-inch Reynolds telescope for some pioneering work on southern galaxies. I learned a lot from him.
After that, and another year in Cambridge, I got a QEII Fellowship in 1967 and came to Stromlo, where I have been on and off ever since, except for a year in Groningen NL (1975), learning about radio synthesis. Allan Sandage from Carnegie came to Stromlo for a sabbatical year in 1969, and he and I got on very well. We published a couple of papers together, and I was lucky to have him as a mentor thereafter. Allan had been Hubble’s assistant and was now a famous cosmologist. Much of his work was focussed on measuring the Hubble Constant, and he believed that Ho = 50. My other mentor, Gerard de Vaucouleurs, believed that Ho = 100. This was a (very) polarising subject at the time. Each had their followers, and I may have been one of the few people who was on good terms with both of them. It turned out that they were both wrong: the current value is around 70. Other mentors for me at Stromlo in those early days were Olin Eggen, Ben Gascoigne, Don Mathewson and Alex Rodgers.
Ken Freeman
