14 Quotes by John Henry Carver

Nobody with any sense would go into building the Van de Graaff, so that was left to honours people who were making sacrifices, really.

One of the good things we did, which was extremely valuable to me, was to make loads and loads of different sorts of Geiger counters.

I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.

Knowing I needed to build some counters, I began by putting together a good vacuum system and a pumping system to build ion chambers of some sort.

The pattern of things was that each of the research students would be doing some particular experiment on the accelerator, often involving the building of counters or a system like that.

Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.

In Canberra my vision of what could happen in nuclear physics really depended on the big successes we might have had in the particle physics area.

I had some vague memory of visiting Canberra as a lad, when we came up with my father by car. But when I made the long train journey from Sydney to Canberra and arrived at the little stop, I did wonder slightly whether this really was the national capital.

My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine.