About me

Welcome to my website. I’m a supposedly retired academic. I also play Irish fiddle music, and  have three volumes of transcriptions of noteable exponents of that genre.

I was born on June 21st 1940, in Whitby which is a resort and fishing town on the North-East coast.

By the time I was 17 I was studying maths, physics and chemistry at school, and playing the fiddle in a country dance band. A year later I was off to Manchester for a three-year physics degree and that’s where I met my wife Margaret. After Manchester we went to Oxford and  London for three years, during which time we married and I got a PhD in theoretical particle physics. After a year as a postdoc in Copenhagen and another year in Birmingham I joined the physics department of  Lancaster University as a lecturer. I retired in 2006 as a Professor of Astroparticle Physics.

Please look here for my academic activity and here for the Irish fiddle activity.