From guitars to galaxies: Dr Nigel Allsopp reflects on his Cavendish years

In this blog, Cavendish alumnus Dr Nigel Allsopp reflects on his time as a PhD student in the Radio Astronomy Group at the Laboratory between 1975 and 1978.

In his own words:

“My father was a scientist and a good pianist, but he didn’t have access to a piano when he left home and couldn’t keep up practising. When I was young, he looked for an instrument for me which could harmonize and was portable.  He bought a guitar and tried strumming it to get me interested.  Nothing doing!  Only when I later started learning judo and my sparring partner was taking guitar lessons, did I ask my father what he had done with the guitar – he’d given up and sold it!

As a Cambridge Natural Sciences undergraduate, I became Head of the University Classical Guitar Society, and one of the guitar students was already studying for a PhD in the Radio Astronomy Group. He suggested that I should apply, since there had recently been two Nobel Prize winners in the department (Ryle and Hewish), and it was a great place to work. I followed his advice and was subsequently admitted.

We used to cycle out to the lab, and I remember one winter morning approaching, as usual, a chicane that we needed to negotiate, only to see a young man sitting on the chicane fence. Strange… I was soon to find out why – he was enjoying watching all the student cyclists take a sharp right and then left, skid on a sheet of ice, and end up in the field!

One of my first research projects was to map neutral hydrogen in the NGC 1023 galaxy, under the supervision of Dr John Baldwin, using the Half-Mile Radio Telescope at Lord’s Bridge. We were allowed to use the old department moped to get there. I did the mapping, but was disappointed to find that the signal was too weak to show any rotation of the galaxy. So I dumped the deck of computer cards on the floor in my office and moved on to the next project.

In the meantime, one day Professor Sir Martin Ryle came by the office that I shared with fellow student Chris Mayer, and he sat on the floor (!) to talk to us. He was keen to warn of the dangers of nuclear power stations, and I never forgot his message.

I did, however, end up stretched out on the same office floor one day, having pushed myself too hard under the largely self-inflicted stress of graduate work. Fortunately, Chris was out and no one came in. I recovered after some minutes but slowed down a bit after that.

It’s hard to believe nowadays, but one summer while I was there, the University computer was shut down for a whole month to add a third megabyte of memory..! We did some pretty good things with it, though.

At some point, a lady working on computer software showed me a programme she had developed to display galaxy rotation even with weak radio signals. I grabbed my deck of punched cards from off the floor, ran the data through her programme, and got NGC 1023 to rotate! Nobody had done this before for such a type of galaxy (S0, intermediate between ellipticals and spirals). Shortly afterwards, out came a paper with the results (Allsopp, N.J. 1979.  Mon. Not. R. astr. Soc., 187, 537).

During my time at the Cavendish Laboratory, I spotted an advert on the department notice board for a week’s introduction to marketing. I signed up and thoroughly enjoyed it all.  I was head of my group and we won first prize for the presentation of our week’s work (on waste disposal!). My future was decided – I later got a job working in marketing for a multi-national company, and continued that way for my whole career.

I still play the guitar every day, and during my professional life I have many times been grateful for my scientific training which taught me how to go about dealing with complex issues.

I have my father to thank for setting me off on a path from guitars to galaxies.

Ever since my time at Cambridge, whenever I see 10:23 on the clock, I think of ‘my galaxy’ that I ‘managed to rotate’!”

Nigel Allsopp PhD graduation, Cambridge summer 1980