We are all familiar with elastic bands and other soft, rubbery materials, but their properties should not be underestimated. What other solids can be stretched many times without breaking, then returned to their original shape?
Mark Warner, who died of cancer at the age of 69, was a theoretical physicist who predicted the existence and properties of new classes of soft materials. He imagined that combining the long, chainlike molecule that make up rubber with the smaller, rodlike molecule that are found in liquid-crystal displays would have consequences.
He realized that when flexible chains and rods are linked, they form materials with entirely new properties that defy classification into one of the traditional states of matter. Liquid crystal elastomers show extreme softness in specific, liquid-like directions.
His calculations predicted that by incorporating certain dye molecules, they could be made to change shape in response to weak stimuli. There is a new technology for creating artificial muscles.
Exploiting mathematics that Einstein had used to describe the curve of spacetime, Mark calculated that sheets of these new materials could be designed with an imprinted patterning that would cause them to form complex shapes, otherwise impossible to manufacture. He said that the material is the machine and that folding into these shapes could be triggered by small changes in lighting or temperature.
He showed how the inclusion of a molecule with a different handedness can be used to separate it from another molecule. Louis Pasteur's work on the problem of chiral selectivity is still important in the pharmaceuticals industry.
Mark arrived at Cambridge with many astute and imaginative theoretical foresights, which were later confirmed through collaborations elsewhere in the UK and Germany. The standard research text in the field was co-authored by Mark and Eugene Terentjev.
Mark was elected to the Royal Society in 2012 and the award of the Europhysics prize in 2003 was also won by Mark. Mark made important contributions to many areas of science, including the mechanics of foams.
Mark was an unflagging model of generous and selfless mentoring, as his supervision of his many graduate students and researchers was an example.
He was a founding director of the Senior Physics Challenge, a national project that provides intensive theory and laboratory classes at Cambridge to gifted school students.
Mark had a larger vision after that experience. Mark wanted a personal interview with Michael Gove, then education secretary, to explain the problem of UK school children not being able to study physics at a sufficiently quantitative level. A grant from the Department for Education launched a nationwide resource of graded physics problems and methods.
More than 200,000 pupils and their teachers in more than 3000 schools have participated in the scheme, which was started by Mark and Lisa Jardine-Wright in 2013.
Mark was born in Wellington, New Zealand, the son of a secondary and primary school teacher. He got his first degree in 1974 from Cambridge's Corpus Christi College.
He worked as an IBM research fellow in San Jose, California, and then at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford after graduating from a PhD at Imperial College London. He returned to Cambridge in 1986 as a lecturer and was appointed professor in 2001. He was a life fellow and senior tutor at Corpus Christi.
He married a woman named Adele Matthaus. His determination to overcome difficulties came into play when he contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome while they were on a holiday in a remote part of Greece in the early 1980s. He had to drive over rough terrain with his hand strapped to the gear lever so he could operate it, even though he was partially paralyzed. Mark had a strenuous swimming schedule and his doctors attributed his recovery to his fitness.
He is survived by his family.
Mark Warner died on December 24, 2021.
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