| Description | Personal and working papers of Francis Farley. The collection includes family material, including correspondence and photographs, some of which relates to previous generations of the family. The professional papers include Farley's notebooks, patent applications, files of his working papers and photographs and slides covering Farley's work. It covers his work in the military, on wave generated power, theoretical physics, proton therapy treatments. Some material relating to his fiction writing is also present in manuscripts for novels and potential dramatic treatments. It also contains audio visual material in various formats. |
| AdminHistory | Francis Farley was born in India, but sent to boarding school in England. At the outbreak of World War II he was enrolled at Clare College in Cambridge, and he ended up joining the Air Defence Research and Development Establishment Dorset as a junior scientific officer. He also worked for its successor organisation, the Radar Research and Development Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire, where he met his wife.
After graduation from Cambridge following the end of the War, Farley took a lecturer post at Auckland University in New Zealand in 1950. He attended the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva in 1955 where he met Anselm Citron, who ran a research group at Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN). Farley was offered a six-year fellowhip at the laboratory, which he took up after one more year of teaching in New Zealand in 1956. At CERN he was involved with groundbreaking work on studying the muon, and the experiments to measure g-2.
Francis was dean and co-head of the Royal Military College of Science in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire fro m1968 to 1982, and held several visiting professorship appointments during this time. In 1984 he was invited to work on a new g-2 experiment being planned at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in the US. It took fifteen years for the accelerator and equipment to be completed, and two years for the data to be collected. The results were published in 2004. He also continued to study wave energies until shortly before his death in 2018. |