On Friday, a memorial service was held for Roger Barrett, who died in January It was a service organised and run by his family. I listened and shed a few tears at the loving reminiscences by his siblings and children, who recounted aspects of his life, starting from his childhood in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where his parents taught at a boarding school, to his University days in Oxford, his early career with a couple of positionsi in the US, and his life in Guildford. It concentrated, of course, on the family reminiscences and on what Roger meant to the people present.
Ron Johnson, emeritus professor in our Department, led the part of the proceedings talking about Roger's professional life at Surrey, which took up the greater part of Roger's career, talking of his pioneering use of computing in calculations of phase shifts in nuclear scattering.
I knew something of Roger's work at Surrey, but little of his family life. I also had no idea that he had worked at Columbia University as a post-doc of C.-S. Wu, the Chinese-American physicist who should have won two Nobel prizes (one for the experimental proof that parity is not conserved, and one for observation of quantum entanglement in photons). A quick search reveals papers from Roger from after he arrived at Surrey, still collaborating with C.-S. Wu, and with Nobel laureate James Rainwater.
Roger's family spoke endearingly of his nerdish qualities. The one I liked best was that when he microwaved coffee, he always put the cup in with the handle pointing to the open door, then ensured that he heated it up for a multiple of 11 seconds, as that was the period of rotation of the microwave plate, ensuring that the handle was in the right place after heating!
His last few years sounded physically brutal, through the recurrence of a thought-beaten cander which had travelled to his spine causing so much destruction that he was immobile for four years. Apparently, he retained good humour, which seemed a great comfort to his family. RIP Roger.
