[HCDX] Kenneth Budden Obituary

["Mike Terry" <miketerry73@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Times
October 11, 2005

Kenneth Budden
June 23, 1915 - September 4, 2005
Theoretical physicist who elucidated the ionosphere and the behaviour of
very long radio waves

The physicist Kenneth Budden was a leading member of the team at the
Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge that continued the research into the
properties of the ionosphere started there by Sir Edward Appleton in l920.

The ionosphere is part of the Earth's atmosphere in which the Sun's
radiation has produced a large concentration of ions and electrons. Appleton
studied the strength of radio signals received at Cambridge from the BBC
station in London. He discovered that the strength of the signals did not
vary during the day but did vary during the night. The strength rose and
fell in an almost regular pattern.

Appleton found that the radio waves were being reflected from a layer in the
ionosphere - called the Heaviside layer after Oliver Heaviside, who
postulated it in 1902. In 1924 Appleton discovered that the layer was about
100km (60 miles) above the Earth's surface. He then located another layer
250-350km up, which is responsible for reflecting short-wave radio around
the world and was named the Appleton layer. It is this layer that allows
long-distance communication between, for example, Europe and Australia.

Kenneth George Budden was born in 1915 and was educated at the Portsmouth
Grammar School. He was awarded a scholarship and in 1933 he entered St John'
s College, Cambridge. In 1936 he received a first-class honours degree in
physics and started as a research student in the Cavendish Laboratory.
He developed apparatus for studying the very long radio waves that arrived
from the Post Office transmitter at Rugby after reflection from the
ionosphere. His research showed, among other things, that the very long
waves responded in a characteristic way to those solar outbursts (solar
flares and the like) that produce sudden ionospheric disturbances of a
different kind in short waves.

On the outbreak of war Budden, like most of his colleagues at the Cavendish
Laboratory, joined the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), at
Worth Matravers, near Swanage, Dorset. TRE was the research centre for RAF
applications of radar. In August 1942 TRE moved to Malvern College,
Worcestershire.
In 1941 Budden was sent to America as a member of the British Air
Commission, and in 1945 to the Air Command in South-East Asia as a civilian
consultant.
After the war Budden returned to Cambridge as a demonstrator in the
Cavendish Laboratory and as a Fellow of St John's College. In 1965 he was
appointed Reader in Physics.

When he returned to Cambridge he characteristically did not consider himself
properly qualified to teach physics until he had first revised his knowledge
by attending all the final-year lectures on the subject.

Until 1952 Budden did experimental work on radio waves of very low frequency
but he then became more interested in theory than in experiment, and his
future work was in the field of theoretical physics.

He made his biggest step forward when he was able to use the EDSAC 1
computer at Cambridge. This was the first fully operational and practical
computer with a stored program. A program was fed into it by a sequences of
holes punched in paper tape. This generated a series of pulses that the
computer used to store the program and make the desired calculation.

In a series of important papers Budden solved many of the problems that
arise when a radio wave of great length is reflected from the ionosphere in
the presence of the Earth's magnetic field. He became recognised as the
expert in this complicated and abstruse field and his book on the subject,
Radio Waves in the Ionosphere (1961) remains a classic.

His scientific papers were always of unusually high quality and written with
extreme care. Although concerned with highly specialised mathematics, they
are often illuminated with comments about the physics underlying the
mathematics.

For many years he played an important part in teaching those who studied for
the theoretical option in physics in part II of the Natural Sciences Tripos.
He was an inspiring and painstaking teacher, in both the laboratory and in
his personal supervision of undergraduates.

In 1966 Budden was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of
his experimental and theoretical work on the propagation of very long radio
waves.
In 1947 he married Nicolette Longsdon. They had no children.

Kenneth Budden, FRS, theoretical physicist, was born on June 23, 1915. He
died on September 4, 2005, aged 90.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1819719_2,00.html

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