John Paul Wild - Latter Years

Latter Years

In 1991 Wild's wife of 43 years, Elaine, died. Soon after the VFT project ended, he went for a holiday in the US and took with him the address of an old colleague in radiophysics – only to find that he had recently died. A few months later he proposed to the widowed Margaret Lyndon, and they had 12 happy years together before Margaret died. During this time they alternated between Ann Arbor and Canberra.

When in the US Paul Wild spent hours with Margaret's son, Tom Haddock, also a research scientist, discussing general relativity, the origin of inertia, the clever way the Soviet scientists Landau and Lifshitz developed their arguments on field theory, and then-current experiments such as the Gravity Probe B satellite to detect the general relativistic Lense-Thirring frame-dragging effect from the Earth's spin. The origin of inertia was a special interest Wild had, which they discussed at great length. Haddock reflected, "Physics went well beyond being Paul's profession; it was his hobby as well."

The two also worked together on a paper in gravitational theory, 'Evaluation of the Cosmic Density Parameter, Omega', concerning the component of omega due to mass. The purely theoretically derived result was based solely on an equation of general relativity, given by Einstein, relating inertial and gravitational mass – independent of the values of the gravitational constant and the Hubble constant. The paper reflected the strong, creative interest Wild had in gravitation, relativity and cosmology right to the end.

That is not surprising. In a 1995 interview Wild nominated his most significant achievement to be the building of the Culgoora radio-heliograph and providing the world with a unique eye to view and record moving pictures of rapidly changing solar activity. He observed:

most scientific discoveries, had they not been made by the originator, would have been made by somebody else within a year or so or even less. To my mind the most significant discoveries or projects are those which would have eluded other researchers for decades or more. … The revealed a whole range of previously unknown phenomena at a wavelength millions of times longer than the wavelength of all other moving pictures ever taken of the sun. Today, nearly three decades later, the instrument has not been duplicated and the results remain unique. In saying this I do not want to give the impression that I did it all by myself. I owe much to the CSIRO and the Ford Foundation for providing the resources and to a wonderful bunch of colleagues who built it and made it all work.

Paul Wild was a knowledgeable classical music lover, enjoying Beethoven in particular; an expert at The Times crossword puzzles, chess and bridge; a railway enthusiast; a social cricketer and a "walking encyclopaedia of cricket knowledge". Although in his consummate professionalism he had an inherent dignity, not far from the surface there was always an innate sense of fun. His interviewer for the National Library of Australia oral history project, Ann Moyal, referred to "his story, with its humorous shafts".

Wild's humour also came through in the occasional light-hearted impersonation. It was evident from early days, such as in the Pacific, when the officers of HMS King George V entertained some American admirals and their staffs. It was, he related,

a very considerable gathering of gold braid. The British ships, of course, were very popular because they were wet and the Americans' were dry, and so they were all having a marvellous time when the captain grabbed hold of me. I had one talent in those days, in the amusement line, and that was to give a convincing imitation of the Führer and of Winston Churchill. And the captain grabbed me and said he wanted me to address them as Hitler. And so somebody got a burnt cork and produced the moustache and a comb on the hair, and there they were assembled before me, all this mass of gold braid. And I gave them several minutes of harangue in mock-German, and eventually I finished and a great roar went up with a mass of hands going up at forty-five degrees baying "Sieg, heil!, Sieg, heil!" over and over again, and it's the mass of gold braid on these arms that lives in my memory.

Wild engendered intense loyalties among the people he knew. His formative naval service gave him a strong sense of teamwork and obligation to others, and to seeking the fairest way ahead. His CSIRO successor spoke of "his generosity in sharing ideas", that he was "extremely approachable", with "the magical ability to reduce the most complex of concepts to simple terms understood by all"; and when these concepts "were realised in practice he never failed to acknowledge the role played in developing them."

Paul Wild died of natural causes in Canberra on 10 May 2008.