Obituary: Bruce Liley

By CATHY ARONSON

Physicist. Died aged 72

In 1969 Professor Bruce Liley founded the Waikato University's physics department at the newly formed School of Science.

During the nuclear debate of the 1970s Liley became a vocal advocate for nuclear power. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Nuclear Power Generation in NZ in 1976.

Liley was born in Havelock North on September 7, 1928, and studied physics at Otago and Auckland Universities.

In 1955 he went to England and joined a private industry thermonuclear team to find a way to control nuclear fusion to produce power.

Liley co-invented a device called the Levitron, which showed it was possible to create a completely stable magnetic-well system.

He gained his PhD at Reading University under the guidance of physics professor Sir George Thomson, son of J.J. Thomson who discovered the electron.

In 1962 he moved to Australia and became the head of a fusion physics group at The Australian National University and created one of the world's first tokamaks (which in nuclear engineering terms describes an apparatus in which plasma is contained by means of two magnetic fields).

The tokamak could store a gigajoule of energy and could provide up to 2 million amperes and up to 800 volts for several seconds.

While in Australia, Liley and his wife Margaret had two sons, David in 1964 and Angus in 1968.

In 1969 he returned to New Zealand as a foundation professor of physics at Waikato University. He was Dean of Science for four years and helped the Astronomical Society to design radio and optical telescopes.

He was the author of an Encyclopaedia Britannica article on plasma physics.

He died at Hamilton Hospital after a long illness.