A young, pioneering physicist who discovered a new particle but had to give up her PhD to start a family has been awarded an honorary doctorate by her old university in Bristol 75 years later.

Rosemary Fowler was a leading researcher at the University of Bristol in her early 20s in 1948, and her discoveries paved the way for critical discoveries that would rewrite the laws of physics. Her discovery of the Kaon particle helped revolutionize the theory of particle physics, and it continues to be proven correct – it predicted particles such as the Higgs boson, discovered at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland.

But in post-war Britain, Dr Fowler decided to leave academia behind when she married fellow physicist Peter Fowler in 1949, aged 23. Now, at a private graduation ceremony near her home in Cambridge, she has been awarded an honorary doctorate in science by the Nobel Prize-winning Chancellor of the University of Bristol, Sir Paul Nurse.

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The ceremony was attended by all of Rosemary’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of whom are scientists, along with friends and staff from the University of Bristol. Dr Fowler, now 98, said she felt “very honoured” but added: “I have done nothing since then to deserve special respect.”

Sir Paul praised Dr Fowler’s “intellectual rigour and curiosity”, adding that she “paved the way for crucial discoveries that continue to shape the work of modern physicists and our understanding of the universe”.

In 1948, Bristol’s cosmic ray physics team, led by Professor Cecil Powell, was on the hunt for new fundamental particles. They had already found the pion for which Professor Powell would win the Nobel Prize in 1950. Rosemary Fowler (née Brown), then just 22, saw something while looking at unusual particle tracks: a particle decaying into three pions, a type of subatomic particle.

She said: “I knew straight away that it was new and it was going to be very important. We were seeing things that had never been seen before – that’s what particle physics research was. It was very exciting.”

The trace they were looking at, later labeled “k,” was evidence of an unknown particle, now known as the kaon or K meson. Surprisingly, the k trace was the mirror image of a particle seen earlier by colleagues in Manchester, but the Manchester team’s trace broke down into two pions, not three.

Trying to understand how these mirror images were the same, yet behaved differently, led to a revolution in the theory of particle physics. The year after the discovery, Dr. Fowler left the university after publishing her discovery in three academic papers.

Born in Suffolk in 1926, she grew up in Malta, Portsmouth and Bath, while her family travelled for her father’s job as an engineer in the Royal Navy. During the Second World War, her school moved to the countryside and she remembers their family home near Bath being attacked by the Luftwaffe.

As a child, Dr Fowler found maths and science easy, but writing difficult. She was the only girl in her year to go to university. She became one of the first women to receive a first in physics and had three children, all of whom studied science, with Professor Peter Fowler, who died in 1996.

Their daughter, Mary Fowler, studied mathematics and then geophysics at Cambridge and had an academic career in Switzerland, Canada, London and finally Cambridge, where she was Master of Darwin College from 2012 to 2020. She said: “I’m very happy for my mother. As a child I wanted to be a physicist because it seemed so exciting. Because both my parents were physicists, physics and research were a normal topic of conversation around the kitchen table.”