Letter

Owen Lock remembered

We were saddened to read about the death of Owen Lock (CERN Courier June 2010 p31).

In the early 1950s, both of us took Owen's course on "High-energy nuclear physics", as it was then called. The lectures were later published in a small monograph – virtually the first in the field – providing one of the few surveys of the properties of the mu- and pi-mesons then available.

The lectures were simple and clear, and delivered with an infectious enthusiasm that was quite rare for British universities at that time. He was one of our heroes, so it was with some disappointment that we learnt of his subsequent switch to the more administrative side of CERN. We have no doubt, however, that the clarity of his thinking was a major asset in his later career.

Both Owen and his attractive and vivacious wife Eleanor were prominent at physics department parties, providing a counterpoint to some of the more conservative faculty. Owen was also an accomplished cricketer with both bat and ball. His enthusiastic participation in the annual departmental cricket match – staff versus students – will be remembered by his Birmingham colleagues.

Malcolm Derrick and Brian Musgrave, Argonne National Laboratory.