CBA (Brian) McCusker

 

What can I say about Brian McCusker?  I first met and heard him in our fourth year honours course when he gave a course on cosmic rays. He was really a very good lecturer with a wealth of history behind him - having worked at the University of Liverpool (working with Chadwick) and then the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, interacting with such immortals as Janossy and Schrodinger and even supervising Harry Messel on air shower simulation studies.

In those early days he was a scientist with international recognition, and his supervision of the installation, operation and running of the M-Unit array, the 64 scintillator array (unshielded, shielded and sandwich) associated cloud chambers as well as the Pilliga arrays brought keen interest at all the international cosmic ray conferences.

It must be said that all those early research efforts were well founded. Examining the cores of air showers with good resolution, establishing the occurrence of high transverse momentum interactions in air shower cores and extending the energy spectrum via SUGAR (including examination of the knee and ankle)  gave rise to much interest and some friendly controversy (with Trumper at the University of Kiel for example).

Another idea that was certainly a good idea at the time was to search for quarks using cloud chambers in the cores of air showers. No-one had ever done this before; and it made a lot of sense as no-one knew about quark confinement in those days; and for all we knew there could have been quarks everywhere as a result of the high energy disruptive collisions occurring in air shower cores.

When the first paper was published showing four likely candidates; this was good science. It presented some interesting data with possibly spectacular conclusions – and said effectively “watch this space”. This was followed by a sensational paper (with Ian Cairns) showing  a very impressive cloud chamber picture of nine parallel core tracks – one of which was apparently  of lower ionisation and surrounded by normal neighbours. Again good science.

Unfortunately, Brian was seen to become increasingly arrogant in his presentation of these results and got a lot of people off-side accordingly. As more and more other experiments failed to produce any evidence of quarks, it was felt that the Sydney result was an unfortunate  non-uniformity in the cloud density and the statistics were not as telling as originally thought because of the way the droplets are formed in the first place.

Brian regrettably saw his Nobel prize vanishing – and he was well and truly over the peak of his scientific career. What followed were excursions into Eastern religions (involving a claim about levitation – which made him somewhat of a laughing stock) and an interest in near-death experiences (because of the work of his second wife Cherie Sutherland).

He was soon to disappear down to Victoria and no longer kept in contact with the school. I never had the chance to say good-bye to him.

My personal interaction with him was always positive. He supported my research at all times and steered me to an early PhD. In fact he oversaw many cosmic ray theses as we all know; and I am sure we can remember the drafts coming back to us full of red pencil!

In the early heady days of First Year TV teaching, Brian and I put together a series on “Heat and Thermodynamics”. Our producer, Jock Millett It turn – was a very lively Scotsman with scant regard for copyright. Things soon became far more restrictive. It turned  out that putting an entire lecture theatre in front of a box  for an hour was not the best idea. Nevertheless, our lectures were well received as the “Brian and Lawrie” show. In that exercise I could see what a good teacher Brian really was.

We played many a squash game together and he was extremely competitive. He would stay in the centre of the court often blocking the view and way for his opponent, much to their exasperation. He was always a very keen member of the Physics team when we played against Chemistry.

More than anything else, my memories of Brian are a mixture of respect and sadness. For someone with so much to give, I think with much sadness of his later years.

Lawrie Peak

June 2015.