Moon, Philip Burton 1907-1994

Moon was born on 17 May 1907 in Lewisham, London. He was educated at Leyton County High School before winning a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College Cambridge in 1925. He graduated from the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1928, having taken Physics in Part II and went on to research in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge under M.L.E. Oliphant. In 1931 Moon was appointed Assistant Lecturer at Imperial College London (Lecturer from 1934) and working under G.P. Thomson researched in neutron physics. In 1938 Moon followed his former supervisor Oliphant to the University of Birmingham as Lecturer in the Department of Physics. They began to build up a school of nuclear physics using the Department's 60-inch cyclotron. On the outbreak of war the Department initially concentrated on the development of short-wave radar. In 1942 Moon was seconded to the British Scientific Central Office in Washington D.C. He returned to Birmingham later in the year but in 1943 went back to the USA to join the Manhattan project at Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb. After the war Oliphant and Moon resumed their work to build up research in nuclear physics at Birmingham. Cyclotron work begun before the war was continued and a proton synchrotron became operational in the early 1950s. Moon was appointed Reader in 1943 and Professor in 1946. On Oliphant's move to the Australian National University at Canberra in 1950, Moon succeeded him in the Poynting Chair of Physics. He held this post until retirement in 1974. He was Head of the Department of Physics until 1970 and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering 1969-1972. Moon made a number of important contributions to physics. The citation of Moon for the Royal Society Hughes Medal noted his work in three main areas: 'nuclear physics, the discovery of gamma-ray resonances, and the use of colliding molecular beams to study chemical reactions'. In the 1930s at Imperial College London, working with J.R. Tillman, he had demonstrated the existence of 'thermal' neutrons and during the war after work on radar he joined the 'Tube Alloys' project working on developing the atomic bomb. Returning to the University of Birmingham after the war Moon resumed work with the cyclotron and saw the completion of the Proton Synchrotron, the first synchrotron of its type in the world to work at full power. He also developed a technique for observing the resonant scattering of gamma rays by nuclei using high-speed rotors. Moon was elected FRS in 1947 (Rutherford Memorial Lecture 1975; Hughes Medal 1991). He died on 9 October 1994.