50 Years - Science & Technology Facilities Council

1970s
The ‘Dooley Sculpture’ was erected in 1971 by the Liverpool artist Arthur Dooley. He was given
ten tons of magnetic steel and two 37 inch pole tips (previously designed by Sir John Cockcroft)
taken from the first small cyclotron to operate outside the USA. Dooley used the materials he
had been given to represent a beam splitting the uranium nucleus, adding the ‘Dove of Peace’
emerging among the fission products and emitted neutrons.
A new Daresbury Laboratory theory group was established in 1970 including atomic, molecular and solid state physics
and chemistry, and a youthful Jerry Hopkinson. The group interacted very closely with the Laboratory’s experimental
facilities and pioneered theoretical and computational developments in the scattering of nuclei, of electrons and photons
by atoms and of condensed matter spectroscopies such as X-ray absorption and photoemission. These activities were also
coupled to the university-based research community via the Collaborative Computational Projects – the famous CCPs.
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