Andrew Lang (physicist)

Andrew Lang was the son of Ernest Frederick Stephen Lang,[2] technical engineer with Beyer, Peacock and Company and Susannah C E A Guterbock, a naturalized German citizen.[3]

As a child, he suffered from repeated respiratory infections. Although he was accepted for entry to Trinity College, Cambridge, ill health postponed his start, and he went instead to the University College of the South West, now the University of Exeter, in 1942. He graduated two years later with a first class honours external BSc in physics. In February 1945 he started his war-time ‘essential work’ at Unilever Research Laboratories in Cheshire, where he carried out X-ray crystallography on crystals of pure soaps. In addition, part-time study earned him a London University external MSc in 1947. Later that year he took a one-year position at the Cavendish Laboratory and in 1948 started on a PhD under W H Taylor,[4] working on developing new and improved techniques for X-ray powder diffractometry. He finished writing his PhD thesis in 1952, and immediately sailed on the Caronia in April, bound for the Philips Laboratories at Irvington-on-Hudson, NY, where he continued the study of diffraction techniques.[1]

While in Irvington, Lang received two job offers, one of which was in Harvard. He accepted the position of instructor in the Division of Applied Science, starting in late 1953. The following year he was appointed assistant professor of physical metallurgy in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, a post he held until 1959. While at Harvard, Lang developed a technique for observing images of defects in nearly perfect crystals, known as X-ray topography, regarded by many as his most important achievement.[1][4][5][6]

Lang was invited by Charles Frank to join the H H Wills Physics Laboratory at Bristol. He started as a lecturer in 1960, and progressed there for the rest of his career. He was appointed reader in physics in 1962; professor of physics in 1979; professor emeritus in 1988; and senior research fellow in 1995.

Andrew Richard Lang never married. He died in Bristol in 2008.