Charles Taylor (physicist)
Charles Alfred Taylor was a British physicist, known for his work in crystallography and his efforts to promote science to young audiences.
Early life and education
Charles Taylor was born in Hull in 1922. He began his degree at Queen Mary College, but the college was subsequently evacuated to Cambridge during World War II. He graduated in 1943 and after working for the Admiralty during the war, worked as a lecturer and then a reader after completing his PhD.Career
Taylor's first work was for the Admiralty, designing radar countermeasures, work that eventually took him to Harvard University in the United States until the end of the war. He then studied for a PhD at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and continued there from 1948 until 1965. He worked for a long time with Henry Lipson on the development of optical diffraction analogue methods. He was awarded a DSc in 1960.In 1965 he moved with his family to Cardiff to take up the position of Chair of Physics at University College Cardiff, where the main interest of the department was X-ray crystallography, in the same field as the work he did with Lipson in Manchester.
He was appointed to the post of Visiting Professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal Institution, a post he held until 1988. He also gave many lectures to schoolchildren. In 1990, he lectured to thousands of children in Tokyo as a follow-up to his Christmas Lectures in London the previous year.