My brother Norman McCubbin, who has died aged 77, was a scientist who worked at the forefront of experimental particle physics. A leading light in experiments that took place on the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Switzerland, he spent the last five years of his working life as director of the particle physics department at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire, until his retirement in 2012. Afterwards he became a tutor to undergraduates at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and was still in that role at his death.
Norman was born in Pinner, Middlesex, the first child of Hugh, an accountant, and his wife, Pat (nee Rosenberg). The family moved to Leicester, where his brothers, Richard and I, were born, and then in 1958 to Kenya for Hugh to take up a post as finance director of the Kenya Farmers’ Association . When Hugh joined the UN’s World Food Programme, the family moved to Lesotho and later, Taiwan, while Norman went to Repton school in Derbyshire as a boarder.
After moving on to New College, Oxford, he gained a first-class physics degree and took a PhD. Between 1973 and 1979 he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Lancaster and then at RAL, working with the laboratory on the first hadron collider at Cern to study the dynamics of proton-proton collisions. He then worked at Cern as a senior (then principal) scientific officer, where he concentrated on the collisions of heavy ions.
From 1990 to 1999 Norman led RAL’s Zeus experiment in Hamburg, studying the structure of the proton, and from 1999 to 2003 he was computing coordinator for the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Later he became divisional head of RAL’s particle physics department while continuing with some of his work at Cern until, in 2007, he became the department’s director. In retirement as a stipendiary lecturer in physics at Oxford, he was a popular tutor, relishing the core subjects of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, relativity and symmetries.
More prosaically, he relished answering questions, via video from New Zealand, from his ever-curious seven-year-old great-nephew Hugh, about issues such as gravity, centrifugal force and quantum entanglement. Despite his dedication to his work, family and friendship always came first for Norman. We all basked in his warmth, love, humour and kindness, as well as that illuminating intelligence he wore so lightly.
He is survived by me and Richard, two nieces, two nephews, three great-nephews and a great-niece.
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