John Clive Ward, FRS (1 August 1924 – 6 May 2000) was an Anglo-Australian physicist who made significant contributions to quantum field theory, condensed-matter physics, and statistical mechanics.

He was one of the authors of the Standard Model of gauge particle interactions: his contributions were published in a series of papers he co-authored with Abdus Salam.

[1] He was the son of Joseph William Ward, a civil servant who worked in Inland Revenue,[3][4] and his wife Winifred née Palmer, a schoolteacher.

He took the Higher School Certificate Examination in 1942, receiving distinctions in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Latin, and was offered a postmastership (scholarship) to Merton College, Oxford.

[3][5] Although the Second World War was raging at the time, Ward was not called up by the Army, and was allowed to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree in Engineering Science with first class honours, studying mathematics under J. H. C. Whitehead and E. C. Titchmarsh.

He received a bursary from the Harmsworth Trust, and in October 1946, with the war over, secured a position as a graduate assistant to Maurice Pryce, who had recently been appointed a professor of theoretical physics at Oxford.

[3][8] Andrei Sakharov said Ward was one of the "titans" of quantum electrodynamics alongside Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Gian Carlo Wick.

"[1] In 1947, Ward and Pryce published a paper in Nature, in which they were the first to calculate, and use, probability amplitudes for the polarisation of a pair of quantum entangled photons moving in opposite directions.

[3][16] Pryce arranged for Ward to receive an award from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) for two years.

[1][3][17] This result in quantum electrodynamics was inspired by a conjecture of Freeman Dyson,[18] and was disclosed in a one-half-page letter typical of Ward's succinct style.

In their book Quantum Electrodynamics, Walter Greiner and Joachim Reinhardt [de] state in their discussion of charge renormalisation: "the Ward Identity has a much more fundamental significance: it ensures the universality of the electromagnetic interaction.

"[19] In his book The Infinity Puzzle, Frank Close wrote: "Ward's Identities are the basic foundations on which the entire edifice of renormalisation rests.

[1] He then accepted an offer of a lectureship at the University of Adelaide from Bert Green, where he worked for a year before taking up another membership at the Institute for Advanced Study.

[3] Noting a recent paper by Keith Brueckner and Murray Gell-Mann on the ground state energy of an electron gas, Ward gave a lecture in which he proposed a different approach.

[31] In 1955, Ward was recruited by William Cook to work on the British hydrogen bomb programme at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston.

[32] "I was assigned", Ward later recalled, "the improbable job of uncovering the secret of the Ulam–Teller invention ... an idea of genius far beyond the talents of the personnel at Aldermaston, a fact well-known to both Cook and Penney.

"[33] After working through a large number of proposals, Ward hit upon a workable design incorporating staging, compression and radiation implosion.

This program had a strong experimental emphasis and Ward himself (who originally was trained as an engineer) "had great admiration for anything practical".

[35] In the late 1970s Ward participated, with Frank Duarte, in the successful Macquarie science reform movement,[36] and considered this a "most important accomplishment".