| Authorised form of name | Adams; Sir; John Bertram (1920 - 1984); physicist; scientific administrator |
| Dates | 1920 - 1984 |
| Nationality | British |
| Place of birth | Canbury Park Road, Kingston, Surrey, England, United Kingdom |
| Date of birth | 24 May 1920 |
| Place of death | Hôpital Cantonal Universitaire, Geneva, near his home at Founex in the Swiss canton of Vaud, Switzerland, Europe |
| Date of death | 04 March 1984 |
| DatesAndPlaces | Cremation: Geneva (8 March 1984) |
| Occupation | Physicist |
| Research field | Plasma physics |
| Nuclear fusion |
| Accelerator physics |
| Physics |
| Activity | Education:
Eltham College (1931-1936); South-East London Technical Institute (1939)
Career:
Worked at Siemens laboratories during his studies, Woolwich; Telecommunications Research Establishment, Swanage to begin with and then at Malvern, where he was responsible for development of microwave radar systems (1939-1945); moved to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell (1945); joined as a junior member of the team formed to build the world's largest elementary particle accelerator, at the then recently formed high energy physics laboratory at the Conseil Européen de Recherches Nucléaires (CERN), Geneva (1953); left CERN to take charge of the development of Britain's controlled thermonuclear fusion programme; controller at the Ministry of Technology in the first Labour government of Harold Wilson; director of PS Division, CERN in (1954-1960); served as acting Director-General, CERN, until Victor Weisskopf was appointed Director-General (1960-1961); became member for research of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (1966); Director of the 300 GeV Project, and Director-General designate for the new 300 GeV Laboratory, which was to become CERN Laboratory II (1969); Director-General for CERN Laboratory II, with responsibility for the design and construction of the SPS acceleratoR, following the decision to continue with the 8-year programme (1971); executive Director-General, with Léon Van Hove as Director-General for Research, by this point CERN Lab I and Lab II were fused in one laboratory (1976-1980); died from lung cancer.
Honours:
CMG 1962; Kt 1981
Awards/Medals:
Röntgen prize of the University of Giessen 1960
Duddell medal of the Physical Society 1961
Royal Society's Leverhulme and royal medals 1972 and 1977
Faraday medal from the Institution of Electrical Engineers 1977
Memberships:
USSR Academy of Sciences
Institution of Electrical Engineers
Institute of Physics |
| Membership category | Fellow |
| Date of election | 21/03/1963 |
| Age at election | 42 |
| Proposer | Frederic Calland Williams |
| Brian Hilton Flowers |
| Samuel Devons |
| Denys Haigh Wilkinson |
| William George Penney |
| Basil Ferdinand Jamieson Schonland |
| Ben Lockspeiser |
| George Paget Thomson |
| Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey |
| Cecil Frank Powell |
| Philip Ivor Dee |
| Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett |
| John Cockcroft |
| RSActivity | Medals and prizes:
Leverhulme Medal 1972; Royal Medal 1977 |
| Relationships | Parents: John Albert Adams (c.1890–c.1964) and his wife, Sarah Ethel Emily Searles (1890–c.1970).
Sister: Marjorie Bertram.
Spouse: (m. 23 January 1943) Renie Warburton, daughter of Joseph Warburton, engineer.
Children: One son and two daughters. |
| OtherInfo | J.B. Adams was responsible at C.E.R.N. for the design and construction of the 25/28 Billion electron volt proton synchrotron. This was the first major accelerator to be designed on the strong focusing principle and serious instabilities in the 400,000 turn orbit might have been encountered. These were avoided by design studies using high speed computers. Potential difficulties due to very small misalignments of the 200 metre diameter magnetic track were also avoided by good design. The accelerator delivered protons of 28 BeV energy within a few weeks of starting up, and the intensity of the proton beam is already ten times higher than the design intensity, with promise of a further increase.
The design and construction is a remarkable achievement of an international team led by Adams, but his own contribution played a major part.
The early start of the machine restores to Europe the opportunity of working in the front of high energy nuclear physics, which it has lacked for the last decade. |
| Royal Society Obituary or Memoir | Click to view (may be contained within a meeting notice, presidential address or list of death notices) |
| Related images | Discover a selection of related images in our picture library |
| Source | Obituaries:
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1986 vol 32 pp 1-34, plate, by Godfrey Harry Stafford |
| Virtual International Authority File | http://viaf.org/viaf/268278613 |
| Code | NA3529 |