Bertram Neville Brockhouse was “awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter and particularly for the development of neutron spectroscopy.”
The work for which he was recognized was carried out in the 1950s and 1960s and it helped answer “the question of what atoms do!”
Bertram Neville Brockhouse was born on 15 July 1918 in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. His grandfather was a miner who emigrated to North America from England. He became active in a strike to unionize the mines and to protest against the poor working conditions; as a result, he had to leave mining.
Bert briefly attended a one room prairie schoolhouse, a few miles from the family farm before the family moved to Vancouver. The depression made the situation worse and in 1935 the family moved by train to Chicago in the hope that their circumstances would improve.
They went to Chicago for three years to try to improve their precarious financial situation.
While in Chicago, Bert became interested in the technical aspects of radios and learnt to repair, design and build them, which probably sparked his later interest in physics and electronic equipment.
The family returned to Vancouver in 1938 and when war broke out, Bert enlisted in the Royal Canadian navy. He went to sea as a sonar operator before eventually rising to the position of electrical sub-lieutenant.
In 1944, he spent 6 months at the Nova Scotia technical College in an electrical engineering course and then he was assigned to the National Research Council in Ottawa.
When the war ended in 1945 Bert enrolled in the physics and mathematics course in University of British Columbia and did well in the first year, winning another scholarship.
Bert then enrolled in the MSc programme of the University of Toronto, which at the time was one of only two Canadian universities to offer a PhD program, the other being McGill. He worked with Professor Hugh Grayson-Smith and Professor James Reekie on the effects of stress and temperature on ferromagnetism and finished his Master’s degree within 8 months.
In 1950, Bert began work at Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories of the National Research Council of Canada’s Atomic Energy Project near Ottawa.
He solved one problem after another and eventually came up with his own design for a triple-axis spectrometer to measure the frequency distribution of phonon excitations in crystals.
His neutrons spectrometer was so successful that it is now used worldwide. A special feature of his spectrometer was its ability to vary three angles: the direction of the neutron beam, the position of the specimen and the angle of the detector.
Bert was appointed a professor at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) from 1962 until his retirement in 1984. McMaster University in Hamilton was the only university-sited nuclear reactor in Canada at the time. With access to one of the world’s best nuclear reactor facilities and his new spectrometer, Bert was able to explore the tiny inner-world of the atom for the next twelve years.
When Bert was named as the recipient of the 1994 Nobel prize in Physics, he had already been retired since 1984. Bert died on 13 October 2003 in Hamilton, Canada and is survived by Doris.
Bertram Neville Brockhouse: Canadian physicist
