Univ Record 2017

EDMUND JOHN NOBLE WILSON (Liverpool Institute High
School) died on 3 November 2016 aged 78. Jim Williamson (1956)
has kindly supplied this obituary prepared by his family:
Edmund Wilson, known as “Eddie” at Oxford and later
as “Ted”, a particle physicist and visiting professor at Oxford
University and former head of CERN Accelerator School, died
after a short illness on 3rd November.
He was born on 18 March 1938 in Liverpool, the son of school
teacher John Wesley Wilson and nurse Anna Wilson. His passion
for mathematics and physics was quickly recognized by his teachers
at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, leading him to be
accepted at Oxford University, where he graduated in Physics in 1959. Ted first worked in
experimental particle dynamics at the Rutherford Laboratory but soon became interested
in the theory of particle accelerators. He moved to Switzerland in 1967, to become righthand
man to Sir John Adams, the “father” of the giant particle accelerators, preparing
the design of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), which was CERN’s first underground
accelerator – seven kilometres in circumference and stretching across the border between
Switzerland and France. During SPS construction, Ted spent a sabbatical at Fermilab
near Chicago, where he brought his experience to bear in coaxing Fermilab’s new 500
GeV synchrotron into life. Ted returned to CERN to lead the commissioning of SPS
before joining CERN’s ground breaking Antiproton Accumulator team which converted
the SPS into a proton–antiproton collider. It was while working in this ground that Ted
established a strong friendship with Fang Shouxian, the director of China’s Institute
of High Energy Physics, who had been seconded by the Chinese government to work
with the physicists at CERN on the antiproton accumulator project. That friendship
led Ted to travel to China on a number of occasions in the early 1980s as a guest of the
government in a period when there were few links of any kind between China and the
West. It is difficult to appreciate today just how unusual such collaboration was at that
time. Ted achieved this in part through force of personality, a great sense of humour and
natural diplomacy but also his underlying belief, gained through his work at CERN, in
the value of international scientific collaboration. Throughout his career he worked with
laboratories across the globe, including Germany, Russia, the US and Japan. He was also
a true internationalist: in his private life he met his German wife Monika, while working
in Switzerland and took Swiss nationality after 50 years of residence. In the later stages
of his career and in retirement Ted turned his attention to inspiring international groups
of young mathematicians and physicists in the design and use of particle accelerators in
a variety of applications including medical science. He spent twelve years as head of the
CERN Accelerator School and then rekindled his connection with Oxford University,
becoming Visiting Professor in Oxford’s John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science
where he taught post-graduate students. Ted believed the language of mathematics to be
deeply intertwined with the language of music and this showed in his lifelong passion
for classical music and opera. He was a keen and talented amateur pianist and singer and
never happier than on his frequent visits to the opera. He was the author of two works on
accelerators: Engines of Discovery and An Introduction to Particle Accelerators.
Ted is survived by his wife Monika; three sons, Martin, Alexander and Nicholas and
five grandchildren.
78
1957
IAN ARTHUR LEESON (Rugby) died on 22 December 2016 aged 79. He read PPE at Univ.
He qualified as an accountant, and became a partner in Ernst and Whinney (later Ernst and
Young). His father Alister and one of his daughters, Sally, came up to Univ in 1931 and 1986
respectively.
1958
JOHN HORSLEY RUSSELL DAVIS (Christ’s
Hospital) died on 15 January 2017 aged 78. He
read History at Univ, after which he moved to
the LSE as a postgraduate. In 1966 he moved to
the University of Kent, where he later became a
Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent,
and then a Professor of Social Anthropology. One
of his main achievements there was to found the
Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing
in 1985. In 1990 he was returned to Oxford when
he was elected Professor of Social Anthropology,
a post which brought with it a Fellowship of All Souls, and then he served as Warden
of All Souls in 1995-2008. He was appointed a Fellow of the British Academy in 1988.
Professor Simon Green, a colleague from All Souls, writes: “John took everything he did
seriously. What made him so strikingly different from Englishmen of his generation was
to be as serious about leisure as labour, or pleasure as pain. John revelled in his friends, and
was possessed by a genuine, and endearing, need for friendship. He kept on making friends
throughout his life, routinely adding to, rather than subtracting from their number.” [The
portrait of John Davis by Andrew Festing reproduced here is copied by permission of the
artist and of All Souls College.]
1960
ERIC DAVIS EARLE (Memorial University of Newfoundland and University of British
Columbia) died on 24 December 2016 aged 79. Davis Earle came to Univ as a Rhodes
Scholar and a postgraduate in Physics. His D. Phil. thesis, titled “Collision studies of low
energy particles with nuclei” was completed in 1964. His former colleague at the Sudbury
Neutrino Observatory, Professor Art McDonald, co-winner of
the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2015, sums up Davis’s scientific
career as follows:
“Davis had a solid career in nuclear physics at Oxford
during his graduate studies and at Chalk River Nuclear
Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s, specializing in nuclear
reactions initialized by neutrons from nuclear reactors. In
1984, he was one of the 16 founders of the Sudbury Neutrino
Observatory (SNO) international scientific collaboration that
carried out a highly unique set of measurements leading to the
award of the 2015 Nobel Prize and the 2016 Breakthrough
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