[2] Condensed matter physicist Richard E. B. Makinson lectured at the department, although was never promoted to professor, because, according to Phillip Deery, of his Communist political views.

[20][21] Its first research appointment was Paul George from Imperial College London, and one of the department's early experiments conducted by Donald Millar and Henri Rathgeber was two underground cloud chambers in an abandoned gun emplacement in Sydney Harbour at South Head.

[21] Other Falkiner Department experiments included measuring Cerenkov radiation at what was then Badgery's Creek Farm, but was later to be the Fleurs Observatory, using a telescope, photomultiplier, and reflector, all mounted in a dustbin.

[24] Australian radio astronomy pioneer Bernie Mills left CSIRO Radiophysics Lab (RPL) for the School in May 1960.

[30] U.K. astronomer Richard Q. Twiss worked with Robert Hanbury Brown at the School in the 1960s, on the Narrabri Stellar Intensity Interferometer.

The School of Physics recorded telemetry from Sputnik 2, but wouldn't release the data to Russian researchers S. N. Vernov and A. E. Chudakov, leading them to miss the discovery of a radiation belt.

[33] The departure of Mills for the School strained relationships between it and CSIRO RPL,[34] two institutions that were physically only a few hundred metres from each other;[30] although there was a large exodus of astronomers from RPL at the time, driven by funding cutbacks as research was concentrated upon the Parkes Radio Telescope and the Culgoora Radio Heliograph at the expense of smaller projects.

[36][28] There was a correction in a subsequent edition, but CSIRO RPL did not distance itself from the mistake,[37] and on the original manuscript of the letter as submitted for publication, someone had in fact written "delete" next to Hazard's School of Physics address.