Cyril Domb: A Personal View and Appreciation

Abstract

It is not given to so many scholars to found and establish an internationally influential “school” in a significant branch of Science. But that is what Cyril Domb had accomplished when, in 1981, he retired early at age 60 from King’s College London to start a new life at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. His first steps on this path were taken in the Spring of 1954 when (against the advice of his Cambridge University colleagues!) Cyril Domb then 32 years old, applied for the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London. This Chair had been established in 1947 soon after the College returned to its original London home in Somerset House on the banks of the River Thames at the end of World War II following its evacuation to Bristol during the war. The College had been founded in 1829 by the “Establishment” as a counterblast to that “Godless hole in Gower Street,” namely, University College, and, accordingly, by Statute a Faculty of Theology was to play a prominent role. The doors of the Faculty of Natural Science opened at King’s in 1831. But in those days “Theoretical Physics” was not yet the name of any accepted scientific field. Rather a position of “Professor of Natural Philosophy” was established and, in 1860, James Clerk Maxwell was so named! Indeed, as many years later Cyril Domb was to establish by his own original historical researches, it was during the subsequent years at King’s that Maxwell did much of his major work. Maxwell chose to resign in 1868 and return to his Glenlair estate in Scotland before, three years later, once again moving south to become Cavendish Professor at Cambridge. However, a Department of Physics, as such, was opened at King’s in 1834, the exceptionally versatile experimentalist, Charles Wheatstone, becoming the first Professor of Physics. Later the two departments merged and distinguished scientists accepted appointments, three of whom, Charles Barkla, Owen Richardson, and Edward Appleton, later received the Nobel Prize. When the College returned to London in 1946, John Turton Randall was appointed