[BITList] The science of soufflé

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2010-05-14



Kurti,  Nicholas  [formerly Miklos Mor Kurti]  (1908-1998), physicist, was born on 14 May 1908, in Budapest, the only son and younger child of Karoly Kurti, formerly Karfunkel (1868-1911), vice-director of the Commercial Bank of Pest, and his wife, Margit, nee Pinter (1882-1943). Both parents were Jewish. His father (who had changed his surname to Kurti before 1900) died when Miklos was three, and the latter's great-uncle, Jozsef Pinter, helped and advised his widowed mother over the education of Miklos and his sister Hedwig. He first attended the Lutheran elementary school, then the Trefort utcai or Minta Gimnazium (1920-26), a small elite secondary school under the control of the University of Budapest rather than the ministry of education. Although study at the university was open to him, despite being a Jew, the options of studying for a professional career in law, medicine, or chemical engineering did not appeal to him. Although he was an accomplished musician, he was not accepted by the Budapest Academy of Music for training as a professional pianist. Instead, he chose to study for a career in physics outside Hungary, supported by his great-uncle and with the help of a grant from his father's bank.

Kurti's undergraduate studies at the Sorbonne (1926-8) were followed by his doctoral period in Berlin (1928-31) under Franz Simon. During these years, the University of Berlin was the centre for the development of quantum physics, and with Einstein, Hertz, von Laue, Nernst, Planck, Schrodinger, and Wigner providing inspiration, Kurti's interests turned towards the low-temperature manifestations of quantum physics. In 1931 Simon took over from Professor A. Eucken at the Technische Hochschule in Breslau. He took Kurti and his fellow student Kurt Mendelssohn with him as 'private post-doctoral assistants', leaving them there in 1932 when he himself went to the University of California at Berkeley for a semester.

By 1933 the future for Simon, Mendelssohn, and Kurti as Jews in Germany was bleak. Their luck changed dramatically when Professor F.A. (Frederick) Lindemann invited all three to Oxford to build up low-temperature physics at the Clarendon Laboratory. Kurti was enchanted by Oxford from the day he arrived, on the pillion of Kurt Mendelssohn's motorcycle, in September 1933: 'we came over Magdalen Bridge, the sun was shining; it was like fairyland; why should I ever leave? ... and of course I never did'  (video interview by R. Berman). Kurti, as assistant to Simon, came to develop magnetic cooling-the adiabatic demagnetization of paramagnetic electron and nuclear spin systems. After William Francis Giauque had carried out the first successful magnetic cooling in 1933 at Berkeley, Simon in 1934 allowed Kurti to repeat this experiment using the same salt, gadolinium sulphate. In 1935 they reached the much lower temperature of 0.038K, using iron ammonium alum with the largest magnetic field available. Higher fields up to 2.5T could be produced at Bellevue, near Paris, using the 100-ton iron-cored magnet there. This magnet was then used with experiments until 1939, being literally carried from Oxford to Paris, while the infrastructure for a low-temperature laboratory was being built up by Lindemann and Simon.

Kurti became a naturalized British citizen just before the outbreak of the Second World War, by which time he had amended his name from Miklos Kurti to Nicholas Kurti. He became involved with the Tube Alloys (atomic bomb) project, in particular with the development of the gaseous diffusion process for the separation of the isotopes of uranium in the hexafluoride gas, working first in Oxford and then, from 1941, in the United States. He remained in the United States in 1944-5 to set up membrane testing for the Kellex Corporation at Columbia University, New York. During the war, he met his future wife, Georgiana (Giana) Shipley (b. 1913), daughter of Brigadier-General Charles Tyrell Shipley, an army officer. They married on 24 September 1946 and had two daughters, Susannah and Camilla.

Kurti returned to his academic studies after the war. He was appointed university demonstrator in physics at Oxford University in 1945 and was elected to a senior research fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1947. His aim to build a high-current, high-magnetic-field facility was not fully realized until 1949, when a 2MW DC generator (bought from Manchester corporation) was finally installed and commissioned. One disadvantage was the need for night-time working only, to keep down the power costs, using the off-peak tariff. In order to realize the full benefit of this generator, to produce magnetic fields using high-current, water-cooled solenoids in the absence of iron cores, Kurti had to create a multidisciplinary team of academic and technical staff and postgraduate students. From 1950 onwards this team enabled him to explore, very successfully, the applications of high fields to quantum physics, the thermodynamic properties of paramagnetic salts, nuclear orientation with all its facets of nuclear physics (including proof of the non-conservation of parity in beta decay), and nuclear thermometry. His crowning glory, in 1956, was the successful adiabatic demagnetization of nuclear spins with cooling down to one millionth of a degree kelvin. He repeated the experiment live on television for Tomorrow's World in 1960.

Kurti was an inspiration to his students and also great fun. On midnight picnics he would introduce his students to some of his gastronomic delights. 'Meals with the Kurti family, including the young Susannah and Camilla, were a revelation ... Nicholas and Giana demonstrated their culinary talents from a kitchen which, to students in the 1950s, resembled a science laboratory'  (private information). The multidisciplinary team which Kurti ran was unique in the 1950s in marking a break from the tradition of a research scientist working on his own with one or two students. It was also extremely successful and productive in research output. Kurti was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1956 (serving as its vice-president in 1965-7), and promoted reader in physics at Oxford in 1960 and professor of physics in 1967 (emeritus professor from 1975).

Kurti soon found that his team had a research momentum of its own, allowing him to devote an increasing proportion of his energy and enthusiasm to membership of national and international committees and panels, including the Electricity Supply Research Council (1960-79), the Advisory Committee for Scientific and Technical Information (1966-8), and the Advisory Committee for Research on Measurements and Standards (chairman, 1969-73). In recognition of this work he was appointed CBE in 1973. In his modest way he described himself as an irritant, but he was much more effective than that. For example, he became treasurer of the committee on data for science and technology of the International Council of Scientific Unions (1973-80); a member of council of the Royal Society (1964-7), the Societe Francaise de Physique (1957-60 and 1970-73), and the Institute of Physics (1969-73); and editor-in-chief of Europhysics Letters (1985-9).

Kurti chaired the cryogenics panel of the Science Research Council throughout the 1960s, playing a leading role in cryogenic developments in the UK. The cryogenics panel also enabled him to exercise his human touch, in view of his own hard experience in getting established as a research scientist in the 1930s. He was particularly supportive of young lecturers, providing priming research grants and suggestions-unsolicited support which bore fruit in many successful ventures. For example, his support from 1956 for Martin Wood, as a research student and later as an industrial entrepreneur working from within the university base, paved the way for the Oxford Instrument Company to develop into a successful industry in the 1960s, pioneering the later growth of University Science Parks. Kurti was also supportive in the establishment of postgraduate courses in cryogenics and in the creation of the Mullard Cryomagnetic Laboratory at Oxford and the Institute of Cryogenics at Southampton, unique establishments in the 1970s. Having helped his students, Kurti continued to keep a watchful eye on their careers, and to give a prod where appropriate. Many came to regard him as a distant parent in Oxford.

Throughout his life Kurti had a preoccupation with 'cooking, enjoying its results and judiciously applying physics to the noble art of cookery'  (WW). In 1968, when he was invited to give one of the regular Friday evening discourses in the Royal Institution, he chose the subject 'The physicist in the kitchen'. His discourse was a memorable event, with dramatic cookery demonstrations, and attracted the attention of both the gastronomic world and the media. It included his famous remark, 'I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we do not know what goes on inside our souffles'  (Kurti, 'The physicist in the kitchen', Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 42/199, 1969, 451-67). It also led to many further gastronomic adventures which absorbed his energy and talent as a showman after his retirement. For example, he collaborated with Herve This-Benckhard of the College de France in organizing a series of international workshops on molecular and physical gastronomy, held in pleasant surroundings at Erice, Sicily. These workshops in 1992, 1995, and 1997 were restricted to 65 participants and were attended by chefs and scientists from around the world. Subsequent workshops in 1999 and 2001 were dedicated to his memory.

As he approached ninety, Kurti made a remarkable recovery from a hip replacement operation, when cancer was first diagnosed. Six months later his other hip joint was replaced, but this time recovery was slow: he died a few weeks later at Sobell House, Churchill Hospital, Oxford, on 24 November 1998. His body was cremated after a private service in Oxford on 30 November 1998. He was survived by his wife and two daughters. A memorial meeting, attended by friends from Britain, Hungary, France, and the USA, was held on 27 March 1999 in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. On 14 May 1999, the anniversary of his birth, his ashes were placed in a part of the Hungarian national cemetery, Budapest, reserved for members of the Hungarian National Academy of Sciences, to which he had been elected in 1970.

Ralph G. Scurlock 

Sources  J. H. Sanders, Memoirs FRS, 46 (2000), 301-15 + R. Berman and N. Kurti, video interview, 1996, U. Oxf., Clarendon Laboratory, archive + R. Evans and N. Kurti, video interview by R. Evans, 1996?, U. Oxf., Clarendon Laboratory, archive + The Times (27 Nov 1998) + The Independent (27 Nov 1998) + The Guardian (28 Nov 1998) + Daily Telegraph (4 Dec 1998) + WWW + personal knowledge (2004) + private information (2004) + m. cert.
Archives University of Bath, National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists | Bodl. Oxf., corresp. relating to Society for Protection of Science and Learning + CAC Cam., corresp. with R. V. Jones + CUL, corresp. with and relating to Gordon Sutherland + CUL, corresp. with Peter Mitchell FILM Clarendon laboratory archive, R. Berman, video interview + Clarendon laboratory archive, R. Evans (BNC), video interview
Likenesses  photograph, 1956, repro. in Memoirs FRS, 300 · photograph, 1960, repro. in The Independent · photograph, News International Syndication, London [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in The Guardian · photograph, repro. in Daily Telegraph · photographs, RS · photographs, priv. coll.
Wealth at death  under £200,000: probate, 26 Oct 1999, CGPLA Eng. & Wales