Sir Harrie Stewart Wilson Massey FRS (16 May 1908 – 27 November 1983) was an Australian mathematical physicist who worked primarily in the fields of atomic and atmospheric physics.

He joined Oliphant's British Mission at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, where they worked on the electromagnetic isotope separation process.

Massey returned to University College London, in October 1945 to find it badly damaged by bombing, and the Mathematics Department in dingy temporary accommodation.

At a meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science in Perth in August 1925, he met a schoolteacher, Jessica Elizabeth Bruce.

[1] At that time, the university did not offer a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) program so Massey undertook a Master of Science (MSc) course, with both experimental and theoretical components.

[3] In 1929, with the benefit of an Aitchison travelling scholarship from the University of Melbourne, Massey went to Trinity College, Cambridge to perform research at the Cavendish Laboratory led by Ernest Rutherford.

In 1932, Cavendish laboratory scientists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the atomic nucleus, James Chadwick discovered the neutron, and Patrick Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini confirmed the existence of the positron.

Despite having to give nine lectures a week,[1] he found time to write his second book, Negative Ions (1938), and began working on upper atmospheric physics.

[12][13] Massey was appointed Goldsmid Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London, in 1938, following the death of L. N. G. Filon the previous year.

[1] Soon after the outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, the Germans began an airdropped naval mine campaign against Britain.

[14][15] In December 1939, Massey joined a group at the Admiralty Research Laboratory in Teddington led by Stephen Butterworth.

While Bates worked on packaging to protect the mine when it was dropped from an aircraft, Buckingham and Gunn calculated its theoretical effectiveness, and Crick designed the circuitry.

In November 1943, Massey set out with Oliphant for the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley in a B-24 Liberator bomber.

Massey was in charge of its Theoretical Group, which included American David Bohm and Australian Eric Burhop.

[18] Wartime papers produced by the group were collected and published in The Characteristics of Electrical Discharges in Magnetic Fields (1949).

[19] Massey returned to University College London, in October 1945 to find it badly damaged by bombing, and the Mathematics Department in dingy temporary accommodation.

[2] When Massey took over the Physics Department, most of his physicists, including Bates, Buckingham, Burhop and Robert Boyd, moved with him.

A new building was under construction, but to develop the technical infrastructure, Massey hired Harry Tomlinson, who had worked for him in the British Mission in Berkeley.

He arranged with Andrew Booth for a copy of his All Purpose Electronic Computer, and recruited two programmers, Joan Lawson and Jane Wallace.

[24] Rockets had seen enormous development for military purposes during the Second World War, and Massey saw their potential for studying the upper atmosphere.

He was involved in the testing of balloons for upper atmosphere research at the University of Melbourne's site in Mildura, Victoria.

[27] After a long illness, Massey died at his home in Esher, Surrey,[20] which Jessica had named "Kalamunda", from the Australian Aboriginal word for the area in Western Australia where she had once lived,[1] on 27 November 1983.