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Sir Hermann Bondi, distinguished mathematician and astrophysicist, president of the Rationalist Press (RP) of UK for 23 years and Honorary Associate of the Rationalist International, died on September 10 in Cambridge at the age of 85. He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years.
His mathematics were effortless. He once completed a two-hour exam in 10 minutes, then tackled the alternative paper in another 10. By the age of 12 he was on to calculus, and by 15 he was studying undergraduate textbooks on theoretical physics.
Within a couple of years there was nothing to keep him in Austria. He felt drawn to England by its devotion to democracy and by the tremendous scientific standing of Cambridge University. So, encouraged by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, he applied to Trinity. When he arrived in 1937, he said it was like moving from a lower civilisation to a higher one.
Six months later, as Hitler's troops marched into Austria, the rest of his family fled to Switzerland in response to a frantic telegram from Cambridge telling them to leave "immediately ". They eventually settled in New York.
In 1940, shortly before the Battle of Britain, Bondi was interned on the Isle of Man and later in Canada. On his first night in internment camp, he met his future lifelong friend, Thomas Gold, another Viennese Jew studying at Trinity. Released from internment after 15 months, in 1942 Bondi became number two to Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist who was working on radar at the Admiralty Signals establishment. The two men found themselves holed up in the café on the top of Snowdon, waited upon by a batman and supplied with stores brought up by the rack and pinion mountain railway. There they tested equipment designed to spot enemy submarines from the air.
By 1945 Bondi was back at Trinity on a research fellowship, and the scientific papers flowed out. He wrote not only on the steady-state theory, but also on fluid motion and electromagnetism, the sun's corona and geophysics.
In 1946 he became a naturalised British citizen. "I never had any doubt that this was where I wanted to live for the rest of my days," he said. Two years later he became a university lecturer at Cambridge; finally, in 1954, he took up a chair of mathematics at King's College, London.
Prof. Bondi has major scientific contributions in the field of cosmology to his credit and served in high positions as director-general of the European Space Research Organisation (1967-1971), chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defence (1971-1977) and at the Department of Energy, chief executive of the Natural Environmental Research Council and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was knighted in 1973 and won the Einstein gold medal in 1983.
When Bondi and Gold were asked to develop radar systems for the British Admiralty, they came in contact with Fred Hoyle. The scientific trio started to work together and developed the cosmological theory of a steady-state universe, which stimulated intense cosmological research in the 1950s.
The theory suggests that the universe has no beginning and no end in time and is always expanding but maintaining a constant average density, matter being continuously created to form new stars and galaxies at the same rate that old ones become unobservable as a consequence of their increasing distance and velocity of recession. This theory was later superseded by the Big Bang theory - as self critically acknowledged by Hermann Bondi. He then focused his research on the theory of relativity and did pioneering work on black holes. He postulated that the gravitational pull of a black hole builds up gas in its vicinity – a theory which was taken up and further developed by Stephen Hawkins.
Brought up in the spirit of rationalism, Hermann Bondi never in his life “felt the need of religion”. He was a great Humanist and scientist all throughout his life.
He was president of the British Humanist Association in 1982 and of the Rationalist Press from 1982 and a Vice-President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association.
He worked under a portrait of his hero, Albert Einstein.
He married, in 1947, Christine Stockman, whom he met while she was working as an astrophysics research student with Fred Hoyle. They had two sons and three daughters.
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