My former mentor Brian Easlea, who has died aged 76, was an internationalist, a teacher and an advocate for a stronger world, whose scholarly and groundbreaking work was influential in lots of countries around the world.
Born within the village of Happisburgh at the Norfolk coast, Brian had a watch for detail that made him an avid birdwatcher. As a tender man he gained BSc and PhD degrees in mathematical physics from University College London, studied under the Nobel prizewinner Niels Bohr as a postgraduate and, within the early 1960s, studied and lectured, first at Bohr’s world-renowned Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen after which within the US on the University of Pittsburgh.
He joined the University of Sussex in 1964 to lecture in theoretical physics but his life was transformed visiting colleagues in Brazil. Grotesque social and economic inequalities, and the army regime’s brutal repression, moved him profoundly. As a theoretical physicist, he was also conscious of the grave ethical and political concerns of eminent scientists reminiscent of Bohr and Albert Einstein, and was haunted by the theory of nuclear warfare. Returning to Sussex, he transferred from physics to history and social studies of science, a field itself in upheaval within the late 1960s.
After devouring quantities of literature across all disciplines, he created an influential undergraduate “arts/science” course, Principles and Perspectives of Science. Brian’s lectures attracted hundreds of scholars from all parts of the university. He later wrote a ground-breaking book, Liberation and the Aims of Science: An Essay on Obstacles to the Building of an attractive World (1973).
In 1980 he published Witch Hunting, Magic and the brand new Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution 1450-1750 (described by the historian Christopher Hill as a piece that every one historians must read) and this was followed by Science and Sexual Oppression: Patriarchy’s Confrontation with Woman and Nature (1981). Brian’s important work Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race (1983) brought his critique of sexual politics and scientific reason home to his original field of analysis.
Brian retired in 1987. He was deeply attached to the flora and fauna and returned to his early love of birds, keeping a concerned eye at the ones inhabiting his local park, but additionally visiting Australia, Asia and South America inside the company of birdwatchers. In 2008 he published Birdwatching on the Seaside – Living with Peregrines and Other Birds in a Sussex Coastal City.
Brian is survived by his wife Kimi, brother Chris and sister Joan.
