Where did it all Lead?

Abstract

At the end of World War II it would have been impossible to have foreseen the rapid growth of radio astronomy at the Radiophysics Lab. In the space of about five years radio astronomy not only became the dominant research program, but the RP group was easily the largest and most generously funded in the world. The two main rivals to Radiophysics were the Jodrell Bank group at the University of Manchester led by Bernard Lovell and the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University led by Martin Ryle. However, both these English groups were relatively small sections within their University’s physics departments and, with the post-war austerity in England, both groups operated on shoestring budgets. Around 1950, the combined budgets of the Jodrell Bank and Cambridge groups were only a small fraction of the RP radio astronomy budget (see e.g. Robertson, 1992: 131; Sullivan, 2009: 153).