Andrew Huxley worked in physics at a period when the field was still deciding what counted as an answer.
Andrew Huxley was born at Hampstead in 1917. His recorded nationality is United Kingdom. He was educated at Imperial College School of Medicine and Trinity College.
Twentieth-century science was collaborative, expensive and political: the questions were pursued by teams, and the answers had consequences that reached well past the laboratory.
The institutions that housed his research were University College London, where the work centred on physiology.
In physics the decisive move is usually not the theory but the apparatus built to test it.
The United Kingdom setting is not incidental. National academies, funding and language decided which findings travelled and which stayed local, in this period as in ours.
Formal recognition came in the shape of the Order of Merit, Copley Medal (1973), Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1963) and Fellow of the Royal Society (1955).
The measure that matters is durability. Results that survive re-examination become the floor of a discipline, and it is on that floor that everything afterwards is built.
A number of his statements have been preserved; they appear below.
Death came in 2012, at 95. By then the contribution had passed into the settled body of physics, where it is used without being credited - the surest sign that it was right.
Achievements
- Order of Merit
- Copley Medal — 1973
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — 1963
- Fellow of the Royal Society — 1955
- Held posts at University College London
- Educated at Imperial College School of Medicine, Trinity College and University College School
- Fields of research: physiology
