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Sir Hermann Bondi is no more

Hermann Bondi in his younger years

Sir Hermann Bondi, distinguished mathematician and astrophysicist, president of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) of U K for 23 years and Honorary Associate of the Rationalist International, died on September 10 in Cambridge at the age of 85. He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years.

Prof. Bondi has major scientific contributions in the field of cosmology to his credit and served in high positions as director-general of the European Space Research Organization (1967-1971), chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defence (1971-1977) and at the Department of Energy, chief executive of the Natural Environmental Research Council and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was knighted in 1973 and won the Einstein gold medal in 1983.

Born into a Jewish family Vienna, Austria, in 1919, Hermann Bondi had to flee his country from the Nazis. He graduated from the Cambridge University in 1940, but was interned as an "enemy alien" in war time Britain and later in Canada. He met the German Jewish scientist Thomas Gold in a prison camp. When Bondi and Gold were asked to develop radar systems for the British Admiralty, they came in contact with Fred Hoyle. The scientific trio started to work together and developed the cosmological theory of a steady-state universe, which stimulated intense cosmological research in the 1950s.

The theory suggests that the universe has no beginning and no end in time and is always expanding but maintaining a constant average density, matter being continuously created to form new stars and galaxies at the same rate that old ones become unobservable as a consequence of their increasing distance and velocity of recession. This theory was later superceded by the Big Bang theory - as self critically acknowledged by Hermann Bondi. He then focused his research on the theory of relativity and did pioneering work on black holes. He postulated that the gravitational pull of a black hole builds up gas in its vicinity – a theory which was taken up and further developed by Stephen Hawkins.

Brought up in the spirit of rationalism, Hermann Bondi never in his life “felt the need of religion”. He was a great rationalist, humanist and scientist all throughout his life.

Sir Hermann Bondi