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Nicholas Kemmer
Nicholas Kemmer, theoretical physicist, former Tait Professor of Mathematical Physics in the University of Edinburgh.
Born: 7 December 1911, in St Petersburg
Died: 21 October 1998 in Edinburgh, aged 86
Portrait of Nicholas Kemmer by Alberto Morrocco, 1980
Nicholas Kemmer was born in St Petersburg of Russian parents. In 1916 his father's career took the family to London: after the 1917 October Revolution they never returned to Russia. In 1922 they settled in Germany, where Nicholas attended school in Hanover and subsequently became a student at the University of Gottingen. There one of his teachers was Max Born who, after being driven from his professorship by the Nazis for being a Jew, was appointed in 1936 to the Tait Chair of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh.
On graduating in 1932 Nick moved to Zurich for research in theoretical physics: on completing his doctorate he became an assistant to Wolfgang Pauli. In 1936 he was appointed to the Beit Fellowship at Imperial College London. It was there that he made his best known contributions to the theory of elementary particles; his improved version of Yukawa's theory of nuclear forces predicted the existence of three varieties, carrying different amounts of electric charge, of a particle now known as the pion, which was discovered in cosmic rays by Cecil Powell in 1947.
Kemmer's academic career was interrupted by World War 2. In 1940 he moved to Cambridge to take part in the wartime atomic energy project and in 1944 this work took him to Canada for two years. In 1946 he returned to Cambridge, initially as a Fellow of Trinity College and subsequently as Stokes Lecturer. There he met his future wife, Margaret.
These Cambridge years saw a revival of his personal research, but increasingly his role became that of supervisor and inspirer of a generation of talented graduate students, many of whom have achieved distinction as theoretical physicists. ln 1953 he succeeded Born, his former teacher, as Tait Professor at Edinburgh.
The status of theoretical physics at Edinburgh posed Kemmer a challenge; it was seriously undervalued within the Physics honours degree programme - indeed, Born and his two lecturers had the role of teachers of applied mathematics. Kemmer began by setting up an honours degree in Mathematical Physics and a separate department with that name. The new degree soon flourished, attracting a steady stream of high calibre students, and established Edinburgh's reputation in this field. The second phase of Kemmer's plans, the re-integration of his department with Physics, took a little longer; the merger finally took place in 1971, following the establishment of a Chair of Applied Mathematics and of new chairs in Physics.
Kemmer's wider role within the University during these years included chairing, in 1966, the committee which reviewed the provision of computing facilities and which recommended (following the Flowers Report) the setting up of the Edinburgh Regional Computing Centre and the Department of Computer Science, in place of the existing Computing Unit. He was President of the local branch of the Association of University Teachers at the time when the constitutional reforms which were to be embodied in the 1966 Universities of Scotland Act were under discussion. Both inside and outside the University he was well known, during the fifties and sixties, as an active supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
No account of Nicholas Kemmer's achievements would be complete without a mention of the Scottish Universities' Summer Schools in Physics. About forty years ago the newly created NATO Science Committee advertised the availability of funding for Advanced Study Institutes. Kemmer, who had long been concerned about the relatively low level of research activity in Scottish university physics departments compared with some of their counterparts further south, saw the opportunity to bring together international groups of distinguished lecturers and PhD-level students for summer schools, which would stimulate local activity. The first SUSSP, with Kemmer himself as Director, took place at Newbattle Abbey in 1960. There has been at least one each summer ever since, and the total number now exceeds fifty; Kemmer himself was a director of five within the first fifteen years.
Nick Kemmer's standing as a scientist was recognised by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh over forty years ago. He was awarded the Hughes Medal (Royal Society, 1966), the first J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (University of Miami, 1975), the Max Planck Medal (German Physical Society, 1983) and the Gunning Victoria Jubilee Prize (Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1985). He was elected a Fellow of Imperial College, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (1988) and, most recently (1997), an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge.
Nick retired from the Tait Chair in 1979, but maintained contact with his former colleagues until his health began to fail a few years ago. He is remembered with great affection by former students and colleagues and by his many other friends. He is survived by his widow Margaret, by two sons and one daughter and their spouses, and by eight grandchildren.
Professor Emeritus Peter Higgs