Peter Howard Fowler, Physicist, 1923-1996

Peter Howard Fowler was born in Cambridge on 27 February 1923, the son of the leading theoretical physicist Ralph Howard Fowler the son-in-law of Lord Rutherford, the discoverer of the atomic nucleus. Fowler attended Winchester College between 1936 and 1940 and entered the University of Bristol to study for a B.Sc. in Physics. The Second World War put a temporary halt to his studies but gave him the opportunity to develop knowledge of radar techniques as a signals officer in the RAF between 1942 and 1946. His most remarkable achievement was the detection of German signals jamming the navigation systems of RAF bombers and identifying the signal station responsible which was then destroyed. However, he had been able while at Bristol to assist C.F. Powell as a project assistant before his entering the RAF, and this work led to a Nature paper published in 1947 after the conclusions had been confirmed by other researchers at Liverpool.

In 1946 he was able to resume his undergraduate studies. He graduated in June 1948 and quickly established himself as a leading member of C.F. Powell's cosmic rays research group at Bristol. Fowler was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Physics in 1948, Lecturer in 1951 and Reader in 1961. He spent a year at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis as a Visiting Professor in 1956-1957 and in 1958 he accepted the post of Professor of Physics at the same university. However the American Embassy refused to grant him an immigrant's visa on medical grounds and consequently he remained at the University of Bristol for the rest of his career. Fowler was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1964 (Rutherford Lecturer 1971, Hughes Medal 1974) and later that year appointed a Royal Society Research Professor in Physics, holding this post until his retirement in 1988.

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