Birds of passage: Rudolf Peierls and Dick Dalitz in Oxford

Abstract This paper traces the different routes that Rudolf Peierls and Dick Dalitz travelled on their way to being the founding members of a new Department of Theoretical Physics in Oxford. Peierls had had the good fortune to meet all of the originators of modern quantum mechanics in Europe and had been able to apply the new theory to many areas of physics. At Birmingham with Otto Frisch he wrote the famous Frisch-Peierls Memorandum which showed that it was possible to develop an atomic bomb. Dalitz had a shorter route to Oxford and worked with Peierls at Birmingham and Hans Bethe at Cornell before rejoining Peierls in Oxford after seven years in Chicago. His pioneering work on both the τ-θ puzzle and on the constituent quark model are then briefly described. The efforts of both Rudolf and Genia Peierls to create a ‘Bohr extended family’ model for his department in both Birmingham and Oxford are described, along with some observations about their style of theoretical physics research as ‘phenomenologists’.