My father, Arnold Bodmer, who has died aged 90, fled Nazi Germany as a child refugee. In Britain and later in the US he was a scientist renowned for formulating many innovations in nuclear physics, notably through his work on the behaviours of nuclei.
His pioneering work, which he completed while on sabbatical at Oxford University in 1970-71, suggested the possibility of collapsed nuclei – a crucial part of the study of quark matter, known as the “strange matter hypothesis”. His ideas continue to have relevance in theoretical physics and are used to explain the behaviours of neutron stars.
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