Richard Hills

Abstract

Richard Hills (1945–2022) Simon Mitton remembers a world-class pioneer and innovator of submillimetre astronomy. Emeritus Professor Richard Edwin Hills FRS, a world leading innovator of millimetre and submillimetre radio astronomy died on 5 June 2022. Richard was born on 30 September 1945 and attended Bedford School. He was admitted to Queens' College, Cambridge in 1964 to study for the Natural Sciences Tripos and he received his BA in Physics in 1967. Then he headed west, to the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) as a doctoral student in William John ‘Jack’ Welch's radio astronomy group, which had begun in the late 1950s when UCB established the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO). Within a couple of years, Hill had co-authored papers on time-of-arrival measurements of NP 0352, the pulsar in the Crab Nebula. Meanwhile, his backstory concerned the development of a novel radio interferometer at millimetre wavelengths. Richard's five years in California shaped his career. His doctoral thesis on interferometric observations of galactic water vapour was made with a first-generation millimetre wave interferometer that he and other students had constructed. At the 50th anniversary celebrations of HCRO Richard regaled attendees with a recollection of what it was like to work with Jack Welch: “Naturally Jack figured out how the interferometer should work, but we had a great time making some of the bits and pieces. I particularly recall making the delay lines out of a series of coaxial cables, which were all tied up with rope inside a box. I didn't realize it at the time, but it turned out that what Jack taught me about telescopes and interferometers, plus how to set about actually making a technical project happen, was essentially everything I needed to know for all the subsequent things I have worked on.”