Eric Fawcett

Eric Fawcett
Eric Fawcett, 1999
Born	23 August 1927 Blackburn, England
Died	2 September 2000 (2000-09-03) (aged 73) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Citizenship	Canada
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Known for	Nuclear Physicist, Dissident, Human Rights Activist.

Eric Fawcett (23 August 1927 – 2 September 2000), was a professor of physics at the University of Toronto for 23 years. He also co-founded Science for Peace.

Fawcett began his prestigious career in physics with a full scholarship to the University of Cambridge. After graduation, he crossed the Atlantic to take up a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Research Council in Ottawa in 1954. Two years later Fawcett returned to England, where he worked at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern. In 1961 he moved to the United States and worked as a research physicist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. In 1970, he accepted a Professorship in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, where he remained until his retirement in 1993.

Besides first observing cyclotron resonance in metals, Fawcett is credited with discovering the Hall effect in type-II superconductors. While he used many different experimental techniques over his career, including neutron scattering, magnetostriction was a technique that Fawcett especially developed as an effective probe of magnetism in metals and alloys.

In the 1980s, Eric showed leadership in the international effort to assist physicists (mainly Jewish) in the Soviet Union who had been fired from their positions in leading research institutes and universities and denied access to research facilities. Notable among these was the eminent physicist, Andrei Sakharov. He and other physicists from the West helped these "refuseniks" to keep up in current research by organizing seminars in the living rooms and kitchens of cramped apartments in Moscow. KGB agents were all around and Eric later admitted he was often fearful for his own safety.