Tom McLeish (1962-2023): natural philosopher

I was very sad to hear last month that Tom McLeish died of cancer. He was an extraordinary person and scientist. Tom can been characterised as a polymath or a "renaissance man".

Tom's career is briefly sketched in an obituary from the University of York, where for the last few years he held a position, created for him, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the physics department.

A small measure of Tom's influence on me is that there are eight posts on this blog about his work and another seven posts on my soli deo gloria blog.

Tom was best known in the scientific community for his work on the theory of soft matter, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. I highly recommend his Very Short Introduction on the subject. But the influence and recognition of his intellectual contributions go far beyond his work on soft matter. For example, after the publication of The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art by Oxford University Press in 2019, the following year the journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews devoted a whole issue to seven different reviews of the book, with a response from Tom. 

In 2015, Tom visited the University of Queensland for two days. During this time he gave three different seminars, including in the School of Chemical Engineering, and the Centre for the Study of Science, Religion and Society in Emmanuel College. I wasn't game to also ask him to give a seminar in the physics department, although now I wish I had.

One of my fond memories of Tom was being with him in Cyprus at a small interdisciplinary meeting on the science of human flourishing, sponsored by CERN (Rolf Heuer) and the Templeton World Charity Foundation (Andrew Briggs). Tom was so excited that he was able to race off and go scuba diving during an afternoon break to a particularly choice spot. To me, Tom lived with the passion, excitement, and wonder of a little kid, as he encountered the world of nature and ideas. There was no jadedness, no cynicism, BS, no self-promotion, no exclusivity, just excitement about life in all its richness.

I love the moments in this video, during his recent Boyle lecture, where he talks about the physics of rubber, entropy, emergence, and the importance of choosing appropriate scales to investigate phenomena.

My condolences to Tom's family, friends, and colleagues. He died much too young and will be sorely missed.