Antony Hewish Quotations

I was educated at King's College, Taunton and went to the University of Cambridge in 1942.

I believe scientists have a duty to share the excitement and pleasure of their work with the general public, and I enjoy the challenge of presenting difficult ideas in an understandable way.

Teaching physics at the University, and more general lecturing to wider audiences has been a major concern.

As a Christian, I begin to comprehend what life is all about through belief in a Creator, some of whose nature was revealed by a man born about 2000 years ago.

Jocelyn Bell joined the project as a graduate student in 1965, helping as a member of the construction team and then analysing the paper charts of the sky survey.

I grew up in Newquay, on the Atlantic coast and there developed a love of the sea and boats.

Thus I was able to make pioneering measurements of the height and physical scale of plasma clouds in the ionosphere and also to estimate wind speeds in this region.

My decision to begin research in radio astronomy was influenced both by my wartime experience with electronics and antennas and by one of my teachers, Jack Ratcliffe, who had given an excellent course on electromagnetic theory during my final undergraduate year.

The ghostly presence of virtual particles defies rational common sense and is nonintuitive for those unacquainted with physics. Religious belief in God, and Christian belief that God became Man around two thousand years ago, may seem strange to common-sense thinking. But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense intuitions.

I believe in God. It makes no sense to me to assume that the Universe and our existence is just a cosmic accident, that life emerged due to random physical processes in an environment which simply happened to have the right properties. As a Christian I begin to comprehend what life is all about through belief in a Creator, some of whose nature was revealed by a man born about 2000 years ago.

My first research was concerned with propagation of radiation through inhomogeneous transparent media and this has remained a lifelong interest.