He recalled his father's casting of aluminum parts from scrap aircraft in a dining room fireplace that got his interest in molten liquids at an early age.
Before he returned to Australia, he embarked on a six-month adventure in a Volkswagen Beetle across Africa from Liberia to Sudan, venturing through the Sahara Desert, and back to the UK through Egypt and the east coast of Mediterranean Sea (via Jordan, Syria and Turkey).
[5] In 1964, Austen Angell joined the Argonne National Laboratory and worked with Dieter Gruen on transition metal spectroscopy and ionic solvent effects on cation coordination.
His postdoc Robin Speedy and he showed that water's compressibility and heat capacity, among other properties, exhibited anomalous behaviors, unlike all other molecular liquids, as it is supercooled.
The implications of the predicted singularity at -45 °C (known as Speedy–Angell conjecture[1]) have sparked tremendous scientific interest in the exotic aspects of the most common substance on Earth – water, which is still a matter of debate 50 years later.
[6] After about 20 years at Purdue, Angell moved to Arizona State University in 1989, while his concept of fragility had been popularizing in the scientific field, becoming widely recognized as a fundamental paradigm of glass and liquid sciences.
He placed water to a broader spectrum of anomalous liquids such as silicon, germanium, tellurium, and silica, and proposed that they undergo a fragile to strong transition on cooling.