Physics at The University of Hong Kong – an anecdotal history

Professor P.K.MacKeown

Lecturer 1970-1988, Reader 1988-2000

Department of Physics, University of Hong Kong

Introduction

In this short essay I will try to outline the development, history would be too grandiose a description, of teaching and research in physics in The University of Hong Kong, and attempt to cast some light on the personalities involved. For half a century it will basically coincide with the history of physics in Hong Kong itself – the only other physics related work being done at the Hong Kong (Royal) Observatory. In the University, some theoretical physics was taught, and still is taught, as part of the Applied Mathematics programmes in the Mathematics Department, and while we will make some attempt to acknowledge these contributions, no attempt at a systematic profiling of the relevant staff members from that department will be made. Rather than pepper the text with them, the Chinese form of all names of members of the teaching staff, where known, is given in a biographical appendix.

There is little mention of physics in published accounts of the University yet the subject has been with the University from the first day – of course – in fact the first lecturer appointed in the University was in physics and there was an endowed chair of physics in the Engineering Faculty as far back as 1914. It is helpful to think of the evolution of physics in the University in four phases. These are, the early establishment phase, the period from about 1925 until the closure of the University brought about by war in 1941, the postwar recovery phase up to the early sixties and the modern period thereafter.

Physics - the early days

Physics was taught in the Hong Kong College of Medicine, which had been in existence since 1887 and which merged with the new University on its foundation. The University opened in March 1912, and physics was one of the foundation subjects available when teaching started in October of that year, with a position in both the Faculties of Engineering and Medicine, positions it held until the mid-1950s. Of the teachers in the Hong Kong College of Medicine before the merger, most of whom were part time, thirteen transferred to the University Faculty of Medicine. There was a Lecturer in Physics in the College, an Irishman W B A Moore, and although the teacher of chemistry transferred he did not. He was a Medical Officer of Health in the Government and did, however, later serve in the University, at different times as a lecturer in Clinical Obstetrics and as a lecturer in Medical Jurisprudence. It was probably less his obvious versatility than an unfamiliarity with physics in an engineering environment, an important subject in the constitution of the new university, that led to his being overlooked in the transfer. Of the only two full-time member of teaching staff appointed by the University in its first year, one was a Lecturer in Physics, T H Matthewman (M.Eng., AMIEE) – occupying the position in both the Engineering and Medical Faculties – the other was the foundation (Taikoo) Professor of Engineering. In September of 1912 it appears that Matthewman was passing through Hong Kong, having resigned from a position in Nanyang College, Shanghai (the forerunner of Jiaotong University) when he was offered the post.

Physics was also a subject in the Faculty of Arts when that faculty began teaching in the autumn of 1913, and it was this connection which was to prove the more enduring. The Professor of Engineering, referred to above, was C A Middleton Smith, who, in 1913 with A G Warren, then a lecturer in Engineering at AstonTechnicalSchool in England, published what is almost certainly the first publication with a University of Hong Kong byline, (Fig.1), The New Steam Tables – together with their Derivation and Application (London: Constable & Co., 1913). The same A G Warren (B.Sc.(Eng.) London, AMIEE) in the same year, 1913, was appointed Lecturer in Physics in both the Faculties of Arts and Medicine, and simultaneously Lecturer in Machine Design in the Engineering Faculty, Matthewman remaining as the Lecturer in Physics in the Engineering Faculty in 1913/14.[i], although other reports have him promoted to the Chair. Whichever was the case, this arrangement lasted for only a year, for by the beginning of the 1914/15 academic year Warren was promoted to Professor of Physics in both the Arts and Medical Faculties, and moved from his lectureship in Machine Design to an endowed Chair, Ellis Kadoorie Professor of Physics, in the Engineering Faculty, where Matthewman had transferred to Professor of Electrical Engineering. For all of the first thirty years of the University’s existence its financial position was always precarious, sometimes verging on complete bankruptcy. Presumably for this reason (later Sir) Ellis Kadoorie underwrote a `lectureship’ in physics for four years to a tune of $15000 – though why he choose physics over another subject is not known[ii].

Warren retained his three chairs of physics until 1918, in that year, on Matthewman’s resignation, transferring to the Chair of Electrical Engineering (but he continued to act as Professor of Physics in the three Faculties until the arrival of a new professor in early 1920). Matthewman, after some service in the First World War, seems to have had a chequered career in academia, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering in Belfast, but from there, moved to Lahore and later became Principal of an EngineeringCollege in Trivandrum.

In 1921, Warren left to do research in the British Military Arsenal at Woolwich. He worked on X-ray photography of metals, and by 1930 he was a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. In 1939 he published a substantial textbook, Mathematics Applied to Electrical Engineering, in a series of monographs on electrical engineering. It appears to have been quite successful, passing through six impressions followed by a second edition (London: Chapman & Hall, 1958).

The only physics staff in the Engineering Faculty for at least part of the 1919/20 academic year was a new ‘Demonstrator in Physics and Chemistry’, one Chan Wing To. No formal qualifications are listed for him, and he had been a demonstrator without portfolio in the Faculty as far back as 1913, also acting as honorary secretary of the HKU Union in the early days. He appears to have remained in the position for two years.

As is seen from their qualifications, these early physics teachers were basically electrical engineers – not totally inappropriately in view of the central role of electricity and magnetism in the culture of physics at that time, and the fact that any advanced

teaching of physics they would be required to do was in the Engineering Faculty. But, by the 1920s momentous changes were taking place in the history and culture of physics, and, indeed, Einstein himself paid a visit to Hong Kong in 1922 en route to Japan. An opportunity for the University to become a, small-time, player on the stage arose with the new professor, in all three faculties, D C H Florance (M.A., M.Sc.), who arrived in February 1920. Florance, had been a front line participant in the new physics. Originally from New Zealand, he had published an important paper on gamma-ray interactions in matter in Phil. Mag. in 1910, a paper for which a search in today’s Science Citation Index will still not yield a zero return, (Fig. 2, a 1998 citation). Before the First World War he studied with Rutherford at Manchester, where he was a Demonstrator and Lecturer. In that laboratory, he was one of the illustrious group of workers under Rutherford’s wing, which also included Andrade, Geiger, Marsden, Mosley and others. He may not have been the most distinguished member of this group but the following extract from I B N Evan’s biography of Rutherford, Man of Power, (London: The Scientific Book Club, n.d.) gives an indication of the importance of his work:

… Guy and Florance examined the gamma-ray scattering from lead and provided from their results the first slight indication of the Compton effect.

We can certainly say that he brought with him to Hong Kong a familiarity with developments in physics well in advance of anyone else around. One doubts that he could have expected to undertake serious experimental research here at the time, something that would have been confirmed on his arrival, and his taking up the post must be seen as a stepping-stone on his eventual return to New Zealand. This he did within a few years, in 1924 becoming Professor of Physics at Victoria University College, Wellington - he had already been somewhat removed from frontline research having volunteered and served four years in the army in the First World War[iii]. As mentioned, Einstein briefly visited Hong Kong in 1922 on his way to Japan, but it seems that his only contact with people here was with members of the Jewish community, and there is no evidence that Florance, or anyone else in the University met him at that time.

Far more important for the long-term development of physics in the University than Florance’s sojourn was the appointment in 1920 of two Demonstrators in Physics and Chemistry in the Engineering Faculty, Chan Chau Lam and Un Po. Chan Chau Lam, or Chan Chak Lam as it appears in several issues of the Calendar and presumably is the same person, became specifically Demonstrator in Chemistry in 1928, from which same year Un Po’s demonstration duties were confined to physics, but now in both the Faculties of Arts and Engineering. Un Po was an Engineering graduate of the University, the first alumnus to be employed, and was to play a pivotal role in the teaching of physics, serving at a later stage as Head of Department. He was in the first intake class into the University, the start of an association that would last on and off for 47 years until his death in 1959. He graduated in 1918 after a lapse of an academic year due to ill health, and taught briefly at Queen’s College before becoming the first graduate to be appointed to the teaching staff of his alma mater. Florance’s departure marks the end of the first phase of the history of the Department.

The evolution of a Department

The second phase, which lasts up to the Japanese invasion, starts with Florance’s successor as Professor of Physics (in the three faculties), William Faid, appointed in the summer of 1924, (Fig.3). Faid, then aged 30, had a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Durham (KingsCollege) and had been a Lecturer in that University before his appointment.

There followed the arrival in 1928 of a Lecturer, D F Davies (B.Sc.(London), M.A. (Oxford)), and the continuing employment of Un Po, all of whom were to remain for an extended period, and the Department entered a stable phase. The appointment, in 1933, of a second demonstrator, Hui Pak Mi (B.A.), who hailed from an illustrious South China family – a grandfather was a Ching Viceroy of the provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang – and a graduate of the Arts Faculty, rounded off the team that paved the way for the Department to join the new Science Faculty in 1939. Faid, who was Dean of Arts for a year in 1931, took a lot of interest in running the hostels and acted at different times as Warden of Eliot Hall and of Lugard Hall. From 1934 his wife, Jean, was variously a part-time lecturer and a full-time lecturer on local terms in the Mathematics Department. Until the move to the new NorthcoteScienceBuilding (Fig.4) in September 1941, the complete department was housed on the second floor of the west wing of the MainBuilding, which also housed the lecture room for Mathematics.

As will be clear from the above, the bulk of teaching of physics during this period was service teaching in the Engineering and Medical Faculties, with mainstream teaching of science students in the Arts Faculty almost incidental. Medical students were required to take physics, lectures and laboratory, in their first year while it was compulsory for engineering students in both their first and second years. Classes in each year were shared, and with Arts students, although there are minor differences in the published syllabi. Service teaching to pre-medical students continued until 1950, after which it became compulsory for all intending students to pass the Advanced-level examination in the subject in the matriculation examination. There were two streams of students in the Arts Faculty who took the subject, a Science Teachers’ stream who studied it in their first two years and had the option of continuing with it in their third year, and an Experimental Science stream who studied it for three years with an option of continuing with it in their fourth year. It was not until 1930 that a student completed the four-year programme, the same Hui Pak Mi later appointed as Demonstrator referred to above.

The New Faculty

As far back as 1913 the Board of the Faculty of Engineering recommended that a Faculty of Science be established ‘as soon as possible’. Senate, at the time, decided to postpone consideration of the matter but decided that the title of the ‘Faculty of Engineering’ be extended to that of ‘Faculty of Engineering and Science’. No such title, however, ever occurs in the Calendars or other University papers. When the Faculty of Science was finally set up in the summer of 1939, the Department, of course, joined it. It then consisted of a Professor, Faid, a Lecturer, Davies, and three Demonstrators Un, Hui and a new appointee, Yue Shui Chiu, an Engineering graduate of 1921 who had previously acted as a Demonstrator in Engineering. According to the Head’s submission to the Vice Chancellor’s Report, during 1939-1940 there were 170 students in the Department, 72 from Medicine, 71 from Engineering and 27 in Science. Of those in Science, one is listed as 4th Year, two as 3rd Year, nine as 2nd Year and the remainder as 1st Year students. This might have led to one graduate in 1940 and two in 1941, but according to recollections there was one Science graduate in 1941 and two in 1942 (in a special War time Congregation). This would all be very consistent with a misreading of 1939-40 in the V.C.’s report for 1940-1941 although it is very explicit there[iv]. The end of the pre-war period is a suitable place to look briefly into the teaching in the Department, and efforts at research.

Teaching - the syllabus

As has been noted, it was the engineering connection that largely determined the day-to-day direction of the Department, and the earliest Calendars state that ‘the standard of the University of London is the standard aimed at by the University of Hong Kong, and its whole organization has been planned to this end’. One can thus assume that the original syllabus was very much modelled on that of the University of London, the Professor of Engineering having come from King’s College and that institution used as a reference for vouching that the standard of the Final Examination was equivalent to their B.Sc.(Eng.). Detailed versions are given in the early Calendars; in First Year it covers the major areas of classical physics under five headings, General Physics (basically, properties of matter), Heat (but no mention of thermodynamics), Light (not including interference or diffraction, but mentioning ‘the velocity of light’), Sound and Magnetism and Electricity (starting with magnetic poles, leading to electrostatics, electromotive force, dynamos, motors, electrical oscillations – but no mention of potential). This First Year syllabus changed little up to the War, a more integrated approach to ‘magnetic and electric charges’ was adopted and the discharge of electricity through gases, Rontgen rays and radioactivity were included, although any mention of ‘the velocity of light’ was removed. The Second Year syllabus had the same headings, and included electric potential, interference, diffraction, polarisation, double refraction, Carnot cycle, absolute temperature (though no explicit mention of thermodynamics), liquefaction of gases and, in the Arts Faculty under the heading of Heat, Quantum Theory (presumably the Einstein-Deby theory of specific heats – there is no mention of, for example, the photoelectric effect in any pre-war syllabus). Third and Fourth Year syllabi simply refer to ‘a fuller treatment …….’. Minor differences exist between that for the engineers (where teaching was for two years) and the Arts Faculty and, latterly the Science Faculty. Early listed textbooks include, for First Year, A Classbook of Physics by Gregory and Hadley and An Intermediate Course of Practical Physics by Schuster and Lee, and for advanced students, A Textbook of Physics Vol. 3 by Poynting and Thompson, General Physics for Students by Edser as well as the Professor’s New Steam Tables. By the mid twenties more familiar titles appear, like Duncan and Starling’s A Textbook of Physics and, for Arts students, Rutherford’s Radioactive Substances, Thompson’s Conduction of Electricity through Gases and Bragg’s X-rays and Crystal Structure. Some extension of the syllabus was made with entry into the Science Faculty, the one for 1941 contains Quantum Theory, Relativity and Atomic Theory in the 4th Year. A major overhaul of the syllabus did not occur until 1954. From the paucity of staff, library facilities and the quality of experimental apparatus available one could hardly expect great sophistication in the syllabus, but H T Huang (黄兴 宗), the first graduate of the Science Faculty, describes his efforts to repeat Millikan’s oil drop experiment using apparatus constructed in the Department, and also recollects a discussion of the discovery by Hahn and Strassman of nuclear fission in 1938 during the course of a tutorial in the Department in 1941.

Research

Other than in the Medical Faculty, there was little published research in the pre-war University, and none in the Physics Department. Many factors can account for the lack of serious research activity in these years, lack of students, lack of resources, but not least of them was the small number of staff and the consequent heavy teaching load. The weekly load of 28 hours for the professor of physics in 1928 was not untypical. Support staff were also lacking; as late as 1936 the only other member of the Department, apart from the four teachers, was one coolie – secretarial work presumably falling to the Faculty office. Morale in these matters was not improved by the report of a Government committee set up in 1937 to advise on staffing and organization in the University which concluded that ‘Hong Kong does not obtain and in fact does not require the university professor of such exceptional academic attainments as might claim emoluments on the scale paid for the leading professorial posts in the United Kingdom.’ Excellence was not the top priority. One cannot claim, however, that there was no interest in research. Warren, on his departure could take up a full time research position in the Woolwich arsenal where he worked on X-ray photography of metals, published papers in theoretical mechanics and finally produced his text-book in 1939. Neither Faid nor Davies appear to have brought any particular research interest with them but both were inclined to some work if they could get the time. Davies, in fact, applied for a study-leave extension to his long leave in 1937 with the ambitious hope of furthering his studies in Low Temperature Physics in the Clarendon Laboratory under Lindemann. His application was rejected by Council, in part because of the lack of formal arrangements at that time for such study leave, and possibly because of his lowly status – most recognized research in the University was by professors in the Medical Faculty. Both Faid and Davies became involved with the state-of–the-art radiotherapy equipment acquired by the newly opened QueenMaryHospital in 1938. Professor Faid, was appointed Hospital Physicist and a member of the Hospital Radiation Centre, while Davies spent an extra three months study leave that year at the RoyalCancerHospital in London familiarizing himself with the equipment and methods for calibrating radiation doses.