He was born in Crewe, England, to Jane and Harold Astbury. His mother worked in a bakery and his father was an engineer for the Co-op Dairy. He went to Nantwich and Acton Grammar School. Although he was a good cricketer and footballer - he played for Crewe Schoolboys along with Chelsea and England player Frank Blunstone - his parents discouraged a career in football.
[8]
He joined Kenneth Crowe's group at Berkeley in 1961, using their 4.67m (184 inch) synchrocyclotron and working on a bent-crystal spectrometer for more precise particle mass measurement. In 1963, he joined the inchoative Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) structures, with their 7GeV Nimrod proton synchrotron and eventually became the RAL's Chief Principal Scientific Officer. There, he and others confirmed charge-parity violation in neutral kaon decay. In 1964, the RAL began a two-decade collaboration with Peter Kalmus's group at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), as well as with groups from Harwell and the University of Bergen amongst others. Experiments were carried out on various weak and strong interactions in the UK and low-energy antiproton-proton experiments at CERN. In 1974, he became the chair of the Nimrod coordinating team, in 1975, the chair of the CERN Electronic Experiments Committee and in 1976 he joined the evaluation committee of Canada's national particle accelerator, TRIUMF.[8]
Astbury became a professor at the University of Victoria, receiving significant funding for his research. He was joined by researchers from CERN. In 1986, he became a member of the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council grant selection committee and, in 1991, director of Canada's Institute for Particle Physics.[8] He used his skills when becoming director of TRIUMF in 1994 to further direct Canadian involvement in CERN with contributions to the Large Hadron ColliderATLAS experiment, in addition to the continuing OPAL experiment of the Large Electron–Positron Collider.[8]
He served as president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) from 2005 to 2008. He organised new memberships, instigated the IUPAP Young Scientist Medal and Prize and promoted the increased participation of women in the commissions and executive council.[8][11][12][13]
He died in 2014, survived by his wife, Kathleen (née Stratmeyer), and daughters Elizabeth and Gillian.[8]
Honours and awards
2002 CAP Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics[14]
^Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on High Energy Physics: ICHEP '98, Editors Alan Astbury, David Axen, Jake Robinson, World Scientific, 1999, ISBN9789810237721