Radio Astronomer ─ John Bolton and a New Window on the Universe

The leading Australian astronomer of his generation, John Bolton (1922–93), was born in Sheffield and educated at Cambridge University. After wartime service in the Royal Navy, he arrived in Sydney and joined the CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory. In the late 1940s he discovered and identified the first discrete radio sources, unusual objects at vast distances with intense emission at radio frequencies. These discoveries marked the birth of a new field – extragalactic radio astronomy. Bolton had the unusual distinction of being the inaugural director of two new observatories. In the late 1950s at Caltech he built the first major observatory for radio astronomy in the United States, and then returned to Australia to take charge of the newly completed Parkes telescope in New South Wales - featured in the acclaimed film The Dish. In this thoroughly researched and generously illustrated biography, Peter Robertson tells the remarkable story of how John Bolton, and his CSIRO colleagues, propelled Australia to the forefront of international radio astronomy.

Peter Robertson spent most of his career with the CSIRO Publishing group in Melbourne, where he was editor of the national research journal for physics. He has written widely on Australian science, including a book on the history of the Parkes radio telescope, Beyond Southern Skies, published by Cambridge University Press in 1992. Now retired, Peter is currently an honorary research fellow in the Astrophysics Group at the University of Melbourne.