For nearly two decades I have been covering the Nobel prize for Physics World and every October I tune into to the announcement that’s made live from Stockholm. But, the frisson that I feel with each announcement brings me straight back to a day 30 years ago when Bertram Brockhouse bagged the award.

Three decades ago I was living in Hamilton, an industrial city at the western end of Lake Ontario. About 70 km from downtown Toronto and staunchly blue collar, Hamilton was famous for its smoke-belching steel mills and its beloved Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League. In addition to steel, the city has been home to myriad manufacturing companies and in the days of Empire it had been dubbed the “Birmingham of Canada”.

So it’s safe to say that Hamilton in the 1990s was not the sort of place where you would expect to run into a Nobel laureate.

But that changed one day in October 1994. I began that day listening to a news bulletin on CBC radio – and the lead item was that the Canadian physicist Bertram Brockhouse had won half of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physics for his pioneering work on inelastic neutron scattering.

In 1994 Brockhouse was an emeritus professor of physics at McMaster University in Hamilton – where I was doing a PhD. What’s more, I had been an undergraduate intern at Chalk River Laboratories, where I worked at the Neutron Physics Branch – which was founded by Brockhouse in 1960 before he left for McMaster.

“Son of a gun”

Needless to say, I was very excited to get to the physics department and join in the celebrations that morning. And I was not disappointed. As I arrived, the normally mild-mannered theorist Jules Carbotte was skipping along the corridor shouting “Bert Brockhouse, son of a gun” as he punched the air.

I don’t remember seeing Brockhouse that day, but everyone else was in very good spirits. Indeed, it was the start of celebrations at the university that seemed very inclusive to me – with faculty, students and members of the wider community invited to what seemed like endless parties and receptions. This was understandable because Brockhouse was McMaster’s first Nobel prize winner. There have been three more since – including another in physics, with the 2018 laureate Donna Strickland having done her degree in engineering physics at McMaster.

At one of those receptions I was introduced to Brockhouse and discovered that he lived in one of my favourite parts of Hamilton – a semi-rural and heavily-wooded portion of the Niagara Escarpment nestled between the former towns of Ancaster and Dundas. Instead of talking about neutrons, I believe we chatted about the growing number of deer in the area and how they were wreaking havoc in people’s gardens.

Coffee lounge gang

Brockhouse had retired a decade earlier, but he was often at the university where he shared a small office with other emeriti professors – a gang that I would often see in the coffee lounge. As I recall, he was very quickly given an office of his own (and perhaps a personal assistant) to help him cope with his new fame.

While writing this piece, I was surprised to discover that Brockhouse was just 76 when he bagged his Nobel for work he had done 40 years previously. Perhaps because 30 years have passed, 76 no longer seems old to me – but I don’t think this is just my perception. Today, as mandatory retirement fades into the past and people are encouraged to remain physically and mentally active, 76 is not that old for a working physicist. Many people that age and older continue to make important contributions to physics.

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Indeed, one of Brockhouse’s colleagues at McMaster – Tom Timusk – remains active in research into his 90s. In 2003 Timusk published an obituary of Brockhouse in Nature and it reminded me of what Brockhouse said to a gathering of students after he won the prize: “I used to think that my work was not important, but recently I have had to change my mind.”

How nice to be able look back on one’s work and find value. I suspect that like Brockhouse, many people underestimate their contributions to the greater good. But unlike, Brockhouse, some will never stand corrected.