Richard Elliss Bodenham Makinson (R.E.B. or Dick Makinson) was an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 (1913-1979) who contributed to the understanding of thermal conductivity

Thermal conductivity

In physics, thermal conductivity, k, is the property of a material's ability to conduct heat. It appears primarily in Fourier's Law for heat conduction....

 in crystal

Crystal

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions. The scientific study of crystals and crystal formation is known as crystallography...

s. His work is cited in the classical book Introduction to Solid State Physics by Charles Kittel

Charles Kittel

Charles Kittel is an American physicist. He was a Professor at University of California, Berkeley from 1951 and has been Professor Emeritus since 1978.- Life and work :...

. He also contributed to the physics of amorphous semiconductors. This work is cited in the book Quantum Electron Theory of Amorphous Conductors.

During the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

, Makinson was suspected of communist sympathies and explicitly denounced by noted anti-communist William Wentworth. As a result he was denied a number of teaching positions, including a research chair at Sydney University where he taught from 1939 to 1968.

Dick Makinson was a friend and colleague of John Clive Ward

John Clive Ward

John Clive Ward , was a British-Australian physicist. His most famous creation was the Ward-Takahashi identity, originally known as "Ward Identity" . This celebrated result, in quantum electrodynamics, was inspired by a conjecture of Dyson and was disclosed in a one-half page letter typical of...

 and assisted in the creation of the physics program at Macquarie University

Macquarie University

Macquarie University is an Australian public teaching and research university located in Sydney, with its main campus situated in Macquarie Park. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the metropolitan area of Sydney...

 where he obtained a position in 1968. In the late 1970s he also supported the Macquarie science reform movement

Macquarie science reform movement

Macquarie science reform movement refers to the successfultransformation of the degree system at Macquarie University in 1979which followed an academic and political campaign initiated in 1977.Macquarie University, founded in 1964, adopted a degree structure...

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