Antony Hewish

In 1950, Hewish married Marjorie Elizabeth Catherine Richards. The couple has two children; a son and a daughter. Their son is a physicist, who has obtained his Ph.D. in neutron scattering in liquids and their daughter is a language teacher.

Hewish believes that science and religion are complementary. In the forward to 'Questions of Truth' complied by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale, he declared that, “The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense.” He then continued to add, “We should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense understanding."

Antony Hewish was born on 11 May 1924 in Fowey, Cornwall, United Kingdom. His father was a banker and he was the youngest of his parents’ three sons.

Sometime after his birth, his father was transferred to Newquay, a town located on the shore of Atlantic Ocean. Antony spent his early childhood in this town. Here he developed a love for the sea and boats.

Antony began his education at Newquay. Their residence was located on top of his father’s bank. Here, he was allowed to set up a laboratory and one of his early experiments on electricity blew up the fuse of the entire building.

Later he enrolled at King's College, an independent co-educational secondary boarding school in Taunton, Somerset, for his secondary education. In 1942, he passed out from there with reasonably good grade.

He next entered Gonville and Caius College under the University of Cambridge, studying Physics with radiology. However, within one year, he was drafted into military service and in 1943, he was sent to work first at Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and then at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern.

In 1952, soon after receiving his degree, Hewish began his career as a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. All along, he continued working with Martin Ryle on radio astronomy.

Hewish remained at Caius till 1961. Thereafter, he was transferred to Churchill College, where he served as lecturer till 1969. This period was highly productive for Hewish. During this period, he made a number of major discoveries.

In 1964, he developed a method to make the first ground-based measurements of the solar wind. He also showed how interplanetary scintillation could be used to obtain very high angular resolution in radio astronomy. Concurrently, he also started designing Interplanetary Scintillation Array.

The array, built at Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1967, was designed to measure the high-frequency fluctuations of radio sources for monitoring interplanetary scintillation. Initially, it covered an area of 16,000 m² and working with his student Jocelyn Bell, Hewish soon discovered the first pulsar with its help.

In 1969, he became a Reader at Churchill College and continued his work on radio astronomy. Later in 1971, he was promoted to the post of Professor of Astronomy.

Hewish is best known for his designing of Interplanetary Scintillation Array, also known as IPS or Pulsar Array. After he showed how interplanetary scintillation could be used to obtain high angular resolution he decided to build a giant phased-array antenna for a major sky survey; something very different from existing radio telescopes. In 1965, he obtained a grant of £20,000 and began working on it. The array was completed by 1967 and in the month of July, they began their sky survey.

Jocelyn Bell, who had joined the team as a graduate student in 1965, was not only in the construction team, but once survey started, she was given the job of analyzing the paper charts. Very soon, she spotted one scintillating source that varied from week to week.

It was initially taken as a radio flare star. Some members also felt that it was either caused by earthly interference or by intelligent life forms trying to communicate with earth. Finally, it was Hewish, who recognized it as energy emissions from a cluster of neutron stars, known as pulsars.