| Administrative History | According to a note from Dan McKenzie, the contents of the folders "date from the time I was writing a PhD and a Fellowship dissertation for King's College. Most of these never came to anything and were not published". McKenzie graduated with a BA (2:1) Class Natural Sciences, Theoretical Physics in 1963 and the following October entered the Department of Geodesy & Geophysics, Cambridge University as Edward 'Teddy' Bullard's [head of department] graduate student, having been awarded a Shell Scholarship on the recommendation of Bullard and his departmental colleague Maurice Hill.
Teddy Bullard was keen that McKenzie carry on with a problem which he himself had previously worked on, that is of trying to use the atomic force laws to calculate the seismic velocities in the mantle. Although he found that it wasn't fully possible at that time, McKenzie wrote a fellowship dissertation on the subject in the autumn of 1964 and was awarded a King's Fellowship in 1965. Don Lynn Anderson, the Director of the Seismological Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, tried to persuade McKenzie to publish the work [when he was based at the US institute in the first half of 1967] but McKenzie declined as he was not happy with it.
By this time, McKenzie wanted to become more involved in the debates concerning continental drift which were happening within the Cambridge department and elsewhere and decided to look at theories of Walter Heinrich Munk and Gordon F McDonald regarding the shape of the Earth, which became his PhD dissertation 'The Shape of the Earth', 'published' in the autumn of 1966. The contents of the PhD resulted in McKenzie's first published papers and ultimately put him onto the track of his seminal plate tectonics paper of December 1967. |