A ground-breaking physicist who gave up her PhD 75 years ago to have a family has received an honorary doctorate from her former university.
Rosemary Fowler (98) discovered the kaon particle during her doctoral research under Cecil Powell at the University of Bristol in 1948, which contributed to his Nobel Prize for physics in 1950.
Fowler’s discovery helped to revolutionize the theory of particle physics, and it continues to be proven correct – predicting particles such as the Higgs bosondiscovered at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland.
But she left university without completing her PhD to marry fellow physicist Peter Fowler in 1949, a decision she later described as pragmatic after having three children in a time of post-war food rationing.
She has now been awarded an honorary Doctor of Science by the University Bristol chancellor, Sir Paul Nurse, at a private graduation ceremony near her home in Cambridge.
Fowler said she felt “very honored” but added: “I haven’t done anything since then to deserve special respect.”
Nurse praised Fowler’s “intellectual rigor and curiosity”, which “paved the way for critical discoveries that continue to shape the work of today’s physicists, and our understanding of the universe”.
At 22, Fowler noticed something when he was looking at unusual particle tracks—a particle that decayed into three pions, a type of subatomic particle.
She said: “I knew straight away that it was new and would be very important. We saw things that hadn’t been seen before – that’s what research in particle physics was all about. It was very exciting.”
The clip, later labeled K, was evidence of an unknown particle, now known as the kaon or K meson.
The K orbit was the mirror image of a particle previously seen by colleagues in Manchester, but their track decayed into two pions, not three. Trying to understand how these images were the same, yet behaved differently, helped lead to a revolution in the theory of particle physics.
The year after the discovery, Fowler left the university after publishing her discovery in three academic papers.
Born in Suffolk in 1926, Fowler excelled in mathematics and science as a child, but found writing a challenge. She was the only girl in her year who went to university.
She became one of the first women to receive a first in physics, and her three children went on to study science.
Her daughter, Mary Fowler, studied mathematics and then geophysics at Cambridge and had an academic career in Switzerland, Canada, London and finally Cambridge, where she was master of Darwin College from 2012-20.
