Sir Brian Pippard was Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge University for 11 years and an expert on the electronic structures of metals who had a gift for making complex subjects simple.

Brian Pippard (he never used his first name, Alfred) was born in Leeds in 1920, the second son of Professor A. J. S. Pippard, who was a distinguished civil engineer. His early scientific interests, while at school at Clifton College, lay more towards chemistry than physics, but at Cambridge, after sampling both of these and some physiology in the traditionally catholic course for part I of the natural science tripos, he finally chose physics for his part II in 1941. He soon made his mark as an original experimenter at the wartime Radar Research and Development Establishment at Great Malvern between 1941 and 1945 and stood out among the lively young men who returned from the Second World War to take up more academic research at Cambridge.

He joined the Low Temperature Group at the Royal Society Mond Laboratory and chose a problem in superconductivity which enabled him to exploit his wartime expertise in microwave techniques. Superconductivity — the loss of all electrical resistance by some metals at low temperatures — was then still very much of a mystery and his work provided some of the basic clues which, ten years later, enabled John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Schrieffer to find a convincing solution to the mystery. An important by-product of this early work was his study of how metals at low temperatures react to microwaves in the “normal”, rather than the superconducting, state, and Pippard produced an elegant new way of understanding the so-called anomalous skin effect which occurs in these conditions. His interests soon broadened and he demonstrated how quite simple concepts could explain and predict a whole range of other interesting effects in metals, particularly in the presence of magnetic fields, and how these effects could be used to determine the electronic structures of individual metals.

He rapidly became a leading figure in this field and his characteristic style of looking in a simple physical way at the heart of a problem, without being distracted by the inessential complications which camouflaged the real issue, made him a brilliant expositor as well as a pioneer in research. He liked to quote approvingly the motto that Plato is said to have inscribed over the door of his academy: “Let none ignorant of geometry enter” and he showed a remarkable facility for visualising his problems in geometrical rather than algebraic terms. He claimed to be no mathematician, but could in fact handle quite difficult analysis when his simple geometrical pictures were no longer adequate. His elegance of style was not limited to the exposition of his results, but was also evident in the ingenious experimental methods that he devised to yield accurate results from quite simple equipment. Here he was aided by a natural manual dexterity, which enabled him to build his apparatus as competently as a professional mechanic and to get the most out of it by the delicacy of his touch. He was a very fair draughtsman and could produce beautifully clear freehand sketches on the blackboard without seeming to try.

His dexterity showed itself also in playing the piano, which was his favourite recreation; his standard was very high and he might well have become a professional had he not chosen to devote himself to science.

His ability to present physics in a lucid and stimulating way not only made him much in demand for keynote lectures at international conferences and summer schools, but showed itself in his teaching at the Cavendish Laboratory and at Clare College (of which he became a Fellow in 1947). He progressed from demonstrator in physics at the University of Cambridge (1946-50) to lecturer in physics (1950-59) to reader in physics (1959-60) to John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Physics (1960-71) and to Cavendish Professor of Physics (1971-82). He retired in 1982 as emeritus professor.

As he progressed through the academic ranks he became ever more concerned with questions about the fundamentals of teaching. He was behind several major reorganisations of the natural sciences tripos and was constantly experimenting with new ideas designed to teach students how to attack problems by the simple intuitive methods of which he was such a master himself. Here he was not always successful, perhaps because he did not sufficiently appreciate that lesser men could arrive at his methods only after considerable experience and long schooling in the more conventional approaches. More recently he advocated changes in a wider educational context, involving the possibility of two-year rather than three-year university degree courses for the majority of students, with four-year courses for the few who could really benefit from more specialist studies.

Pippard tried to bring to his administrative and organisational problems the same kind of simple and direct reasoning that made him so successful as a physicist. He was a passionate advocate of the causes he adopted and the force of his personality, coupled with the lucidity of his presentation of a case, usually carried the day. One such cause, to which he devoted much effort, was the building of a new Cavendish Laboratory in the more spacious environment of west Cambridge. It is fitting that he should have been appointed Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics and Head of the Department of Physics in 1971, as the new laboratory was nearing completion.

Perhaps his most successful venture in the educational field was the setting-up of Clare Hall, of which he was the first President from 1966 to 1973. Just as he was very much the opposite of a “stuffed shirt” himself — he was usually Brian even to his most junior graduate students — so in creating this new co-residential graduate college, he deliberately threw overboard many of the traditional monastic trappings of the older foundations. Under his guidance Clare Hall became a lively academic community with a delightfully informal, cosmopolitan and scholarly atmosphere. Characteristically, the families share in many of the activities and privileges of the members of Clare Hall and on social occasions the guests were made to feel that they had joined a happy family group, with Brian and his wife Charlotte as the genial hosts. Pippard’s lively personality and his wideranging interests and retentive memory made him an entertaining conversationalist and raconteur. He loved argument for its own sake and would instinctively take the opposite side in order to provoke a discussion. This sometimes spillt over from the purely social spheres to administrative and scientific matters and his more Machiavellian colleagues found it paid on occasion to start by advocating the opposite of what they really wanted Pippard to support.

In addition to papers in scientific journals, he wrote a number of books, including: Elements of Classical Thermodynamics (1957); Dynamics of Conduction Electrons (1962); Forces and Particles (1972); The Physics of Vibration (volume 1, 1978, and volume 2, 1983); and Magnetoresistance (1989). He was also a co-author of the three-volume encyclopaedia Twentieth Century Physics (1995).

Pippard’s achievements were recognised by many awards and distinctions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1956 (only two years after his father) and knighted in 1975. He became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1970 and was the institute’s president between 1974 and 1976.

He was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society (1959); the Holweck Medal (1961); the Dannie-Heineman Prize (1969); the Guthrie Prize (1970); and the Lars Onsager Medal of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim (2005).

His wife and three daughters survive him.

Professor Sir Brian Pippard, FRS, physicist, was born on September 7, 1920. He died on September 21, 2008, aged 88