Gwyn Owain Jones CBE (29 March 1917 – 3 July 2006) was a Welsh physicist and academic, who moved from being a professor at the University of London to become director of the National Museum of Wales.
He became a member of the secret British nuclear weapons research programme, code-name Tube Alloys, in 1942, moving back to Oxford in 1946 as a Nuffield Foundation Research Fellow at the Clarendon Laboratory before becoming Reader in Experimental Physics (1949) and then Professor of Physics (1953) at Queen Mary College in the University of London.
His department in London was one of the few places where experiments could be carried out within a couple of degrees of absolute zero, using helium as a refrigerant.
Jones designed some equipment, made out of a motorcycle engine, to liquefy small amounts of helium for use by individual researchers, as opposed to the large-scale liquifiers used in other laboratories.
[2] He caused some surprise by leaving academia and becoming director of the National Museum of Wales in 1968, holding the post until 1977.