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Mike Pentz


Michael John ("Mike") Pentz (30 November 1924 – 29 May 1995) was a physicist, activist in the peace movement, and an influential pioneer of teaching science to university students by distance education. Pentz was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and died in France.

Pentz was educated in South Africa at St Aidan's College, Grahamstown, and went on to attend the University of Cape Town. He came to Imperial College in London in 1948 to work on microwave spectrometry and nuclear physics. Nine years later he joined CERN in Geneva, where he was appointed leader of a large group of scientists developing the CESAR accelerator facility.

Throughout his life, Pentz was a prominent member and activist in a number of highly committed political bodies. In 1965, while working at CERN, he became the first president of the newly founded Mouvement Anti-Apartheid Suisse. From 1981–84, he was Vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Together with fellow Open University academic Steven Rose, Pentz was instrumental in the movement Scientists against Nuclear Arms (SANA), which he set up in 1981; SANA was one of the forerunner organisations of Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR). Pentz was described as a charismatic, larger-than-life character, who was committed to the cause of nuclear disarmament.

For health reasons, Pentz retired to Bonnieux, near Avignon, in France. He died of leukaemia in 1995.

Since his early days in South Africa, where in 1943 he helped found the Adult African Night Schools Association, to his time at CERN where he threw himself into extramural activities aimed at broadening educational opportunities and spreading scientific knowledge, Pentz had a passionate commitment to the public understanding of science. In 1969 he was invited by Walter Perry, the first Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, to become the founding Dean and Director of Studies of the Science Faculty. He pioneered the teaching of science at a distance, overcoming not only a variety of practical difficulties, but also many prejudices against the notion that science could be taught by correspondence and television. Writing in 2006, Steven Rose described the immense challenge:


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