Cyril Domb FRS was a British-Israeli theoretical physicist, best known for his lecturing and writing on the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena of fluids.
17 Facts About Cyril Domb
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Cyril Domb was known in the Orthodox Jewish world for his writings on science and Judaism.
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Cyril Domb's father, Yoel, who had shortened his name from Dombrowski to Domb, was a native of Warsaw, while his mother, Sarah, was from Oswiecim, Poland.
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Cyril Domb possessed both an excellent memory and skill in mathematics.
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Cyril Domb graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1941.
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Cyril Domb then joined the Admiralty Signal Establishment in Portsmouth as one of several young scientists working on developing radar systems during World War II.
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Until that point, radar operators were only able to determine the distance of an approaching object; Cyril Domb's group worked out a method for determining the height of an object as well.
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Cyril Domb earned his PhD in 1949 with a doctoral thesis on "Order-Disorder Statistics".
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Cyril Domb was a university lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University between 1952 and 1954 and professor of theoretical physics at King's College London between 1954 and 1981.
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In 1972 Cyril Domb began co-editing what would become a 20-volume series, Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena, considered a classic in the field.
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Cyril Domb began writing his views reconciling the apparent contradictions between science and Judaism in 1961, when The Jewish Chronicle of London asked him for a 1000-word article on how Jewish teachings accord with the Big Bang and Steady State cosmological theories.
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Unlike the Rebbe, Cyril Domb gave credence to the theory of evolution, but held that this and other scientific theories were "only tentative summaries of our situation, whereas religion deals with what is right and what is wrong, and with many of the major driving forces in one's life".
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Cyril Domb went on to publish a collection of articles on science and religion in Challenge: Torah views on science and its problems, which he co-edited with Rabbi Aryeh Carmell.
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In 1981, at the age of 60, Cyril Domb took early retirement from Kings College and made aliyah to Israel, settling in the Bayit Vegan neighbourhood of Jerusalem.
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Cyril Domb was a visiting professor at the University of Maryland, Yeshiva University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Weizmann Institute of Science, and academic president of Machon Lev, the Jerusalem College of Technology.
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In October 2011, the Journal of Statistical Physics published a tribute issue to Cyril Domb, commemorating his influence on the field of statistical physics.
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Cyril Domb married Shirley Galinsky in 1957; they had six children.