Queen Elizabeth II led a low-tech life—but knighted plenty of sci-tech figures

An Ars list of technologists and scientists honored by the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Queen Elizabeth II of England reigned for a record 70 years. She died Thursday at the age of 96.

Chris Jackson - WPA Pool/Getty Images

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II, the UK's longest-serving monarch, signals the end of an era not just for Great Britain but for the world at large. That includes the global scientific and technological community. Over the course of her long reign, the queen bestowed various honors on several leaders in science and technology—her very own knights of the sci-tech table. We mark her passing with a select list of some of the most prominent scientists and technologists thus honored.

The technologists

Apple CEO Tim Cook and chief design officer Jony Ive look at the new Mac Pro on June 3, 2019.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Jony Ive has had a massive influence on the design of Apple products, most notably the distinctive looks of the iMac, Power Mac G4 Cube, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. You can also blame his obsession with thinness for the problematic butterfly keyboard and the removal of the MagSafe power connector, HDMI port, and SD card readers from the MacBook. Nobody's perfect.

Ive started his career at a London design firm called Tangerine, where he was charged with designing common household products like microwave ovens, toilets, drills, and toothbrushes. But he found the work frustrating, given that clients often didn't share his streamlined modern tastes. After one such client rejected his design for a toilet and bidet, he decided to accept an offer to join Apple, even though it meant moving his family to the US. He had a rocky start and purportedly nearly quit. Steve Jobs convinced him to stay when Jobs returned to the company after his infamous 1985 ouster.

Ive became senior VP of industrial design in 1997, and his first major success was the iMac, introduced in 1998— noteworthy for its eye-catching clear translucent plastic case. That early design success led to many others. He and Jobs shared a similar vision and were so tight that there was a hidden corridor connecting their offices at Apple's Cupertino, California, headquarters. Ive also played a vital role in the design of Apple Park, which was completed in 2017. He left Apple in 2019 to start his own independent firm.

Queen Elizabeth II knighted Ive on New Year's Eve 2011 for "services to design and enterprise," making him Sir Jonathan Ive.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II invests Sir Timothy Berners-Lee with the insignia of a Member of the Order of Merit to Sir Timothy Berners-Lee at Buckingham Palace, central London.

Steve Parsons / PA Images via Getty

Where would we be today without the visionary work of Tim Berners-Lee? This is the man who invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in Switzerland in the 1980s. You can also blame him for the initial pair of double slashes in all web links, which he later admitted were "unnecessary." He started out as an independent contractor at CERN in 1980, where he proposed a system to make sharing and updating information easier among the lab's researchers, based on the concept of hypertext. He called his prototype system ENQUIRE.

Berners-Lee spent the next few years working for a computer company in Dorset, England, developing a "real-time remote procedure call." When he returned to CERN as a fellow in 1984, he drew on that experience in computer networking to link various existing individual elements together: hypertext, the Internet, multi-font text objects, and so forth.

"I just had to put them together," he said in 2007. "It was a step of generalizing, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system."

He and Robert Cailliau ended up building a system based on the bones of ENQUIRE. Berners-Lee built the first web browser and launched the first website on December 20, 1990, hosted on CERN's server. He ensured that his creation was freely available, eschewing any patents or royalties, so the technology could be used by anyone. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium to create compatible standards and continually improve the quality of the Web.

Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004; she also appointed him to the prestigious Order of Merit in 2007.

Tony Hoare

British computer scientist Tony Hoare is the man behind multiple fundamental advances in programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing, among other achievements. He initially studied classics and philosophy at Oxford University, and after a stint in the Royal Navy, he returned to the university in 1958 to study statistics. That's when he became interested in computer programming, even studying machine translation under Andrey Kolmogorov as an exchange student at Moscow State University.

Hoare is known for developing quicksort, a divide-and-conquer sorting algorithm still commonly used today. While working at a small computer manufacturing firm in London, he began developing major algorithms for the Algol 60 programming language. He is arguably best known for inventing the "null pointer," which he later called his "billion-dollar mistake" at a 2009 software conference.

Hoare was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000 for services to education and computer science.

Sophie Wilson

Brits of a certain age might remember the BBC's ambitious computer education project launched in the 1980s. Sophie Wilson was the computer scientist who designed the machines used for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Wilson studied computer science at Cambridge and once spent her Easter break designing a microcomputer. She eventually joined Acorn Computers, where her work contributed to Christopher Curry's and Hermann Hauser's design of the first Acorn microcomputer.

When the BBC was considering bids to supply computers for its educational program, Hauser challenged Wilson to come up with a prototype in a single week. She had a prototype ready in five days but had to pull an all-nighter debugging the very buggy software while watching the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on the telly. Her prototype, dubbed the Proton, was a success. It became the BBC Micro, which went on to be a fixture in UK schools. Wilson also developed the associated BASIC programming language.

Wilson followed up that success by designing the ARM reduced instruction set computer (RISC), which was launched in 1985. The process remains one of the successful IP cores; by 2012, 95 percent of all smartphones used this type of processor. Wilson now works for Broadcom, and she even had a cameo playing a pub landlady on the BBC series Micro Men, about the rise of the British home computer market.

Queen Elizabeth II appointed Wilson Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2019 for her services to computing.

Clive Sinclair

One could say English entrepreneur and inventor Clive Sinclair was Wilson's arch rival in the 1980s; his company lost out to Acorn (and Wilson) for the BBC educational contract. Sinclair founded several consumer electronics companies over several decades after leaving school at age 18 to sell mail-order miniature electronics kits to hobbyists. His first company specialized in handheld electronic calculators, mini-TVs, and the digital Black Watch wristwatch (a major failure).

Sinclair started another company with Christopher Curry (a former employee), launching the MK14 teaching kit in 1978. Curry then left to join Acorn Computers, a direct competitor. Undeterred, Sinclair resolved to build an affordable personal computer with the ZX80 project. Its successor, the ZX81, was developed specifically for the BBC's educational project. While it lost out to Acorn, both computers became part of one of the most popular brands in the UK and the US. Next came the ZX Spectrum, which was hugely popular with so-called "bedroom coders," contributing to the rise of the UK's video game industry.

Sinclair's fortunes fell again after a string of commercial failures, most notably the C5 battery electric vehicle; a follow-up electric vehicle design announced in 2010 never made it to market. Ironically, Sinclair did not use computers himself, preferring calls to emails, and he avoided the Internet, as he found it to be a distraction from invention.

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1983.

Bill Gates

One of the pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, Bill Gates needs no introduction. He famously wrote his first software program at age 13, eventually dropping out of Harvard University to found Microsoft with Paul Allen in the 1970s. A contract with IBM to create an operating system for its IBM PC launched the fledgling company into the big leagues. Gates had foreseen the rise of IBM clones, and Microsoft's MS-DOS was soon the main operating system for that market.

Gates disentangled himself from Microsoft's day-to-day operations in 2008 to focus on his philanthropic work via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and by 2020 had left his board position as well. That work includes a vaccination campaign to help eradicate poliovirus in Africa, as well as efforts to combat climate change and improve global access to energy.

Queen Elizabeth II named gates an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005.

The scientists

Alec Jeffreys

Genetic imprinting and DNA profiling are now global mainstays of forensic science (not to mention paternity cases). Alec Jeffreys is one of the pioneers who developed some of the earliest techniques. Jeffreys was conducting genetics research at the University of Leicester in 1984 when he had what he called a "eureka moment." An X-ray image of one of his experiments revealed both similarities and differences between the DNA of his technician's various family members. It took him a mere 30 minutes to realize the significance of this: Variations in genetic information could be used to identify individuals.

His first big case came the following year when Jeffreys was asked to confirm the identity of a British boy whose family originally came from Ghana. The method also made the semen match analysis that helped convict Colin Pitchfork of the rape and murder of two young women in 1983 and 1986. Jeffreys' work also helped exonerate the other prime suspect, Richard Buckland, who otherwise might have been wrongly convicted.

The development of DNA amplification by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) led to the automation of DNA profiling and greatly increased the method's sensitivity. Jeffreys used the most common markers (short tandem repeats, or STRs) to confirm the remains of Josef Mengele for German prosecutors. There is now a national database with the DNA of some 5.6 million people, although Jeffreys has voiced opposition to government access, believing such access should be in the hands of an independent third party.

Queen Elizabeth II knighted Jeffreys in 1994 for services to genetics and to science and technology.

Jocelyn Bell-Burnell

Jocelyne Bell-Burnell addresses astronomers during the vote on the Resolution for Planet Definition on August 24, 2006, in Prague during the closing ceremony of the 26th General Assembly of International Astronomic Union.

*Michal Cizek / Getty Images*

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Northern Ireland in 1943. Her father, an architect, often took her to visit the Armagh Planetarium, which he helped design, and the staff there encouraged her to pursue astronomy. But girls weren't allowed to study science at the local school, so her parents sent her to a boarding school in England. There, she flourished under the tutelage of an inspiring physics teacher, and she continued to place at or near the top of all her classes. She majored in physics at Glasgow University and was accepted to Cambridge University as a graduate student to help her thesis advisor, Antony Hewish, build a new kind of radio telescope.

The new radio telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory was finished in July 1967, and the team immediately began taking data. Just before Christmas, Bell Burnell spotted a signal arriving every 1.25 seconds. She found two more signals right after the holiday from different parts of the sky. Clearly, this was a new type of star. She and Hewish dubbed them "pulsars"—a type of neutron star, a close cousin to black holes. Bell Burnell received her Ph.D. in 1969. Hewish won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 for the discovery of the first pulsars, sharing the honor with fellow astronomer Martin Ryle. Noticeably absent from the citation was the woman who pored through all those records and made the actual discovery.

Bell Burnell is now Chancellor of the University of Dundee in Scotland. In 2018, she was awarded a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which she used to set up a scholarship fund to counter "unconscious bias" in the physics community by making it easier for women, under-represented ethnic minorities, and refugee students to become researchers.

Queen Elizabeth II appointed Bell Burnell a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to astronomy. She was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2007.

Jane Goodall

It's a rare scientist who ends up being spoofed by name in a Far Side cartoon, but primatologist Jane Goodall is such a rarity. Goodall gained worldwide fame for her work on chimpanzee social and family life in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park—research that spanned 60 years. Gary Larson's infamous comic showed one chimp grooming another and finding a blonde hair. The caption: "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?" Instead of being offended, Goodall thought it was hilarious, and now, if you buy a T-shirt with that cartoon on it, all proceeds go to the Jane Goodall Institute.

Goodall's father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee when she was a child, igniting her love of animals. She went to Africa in 1957, working as a secretary in Kenya, and called Kenyan primatologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey on a whim one day, hoping to talk to him about animals. She ended up working as a researcher for Leakey and his wife, Mary, and Leakey supported her throughout her education as she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis covered the first five years of research at the Gombe reserve.

Goodall's work challenged two longstanding scientific beliefs, showing that chimps could construct and use tools much like humans and that they were not vegetarians. They forage for termites and hunt and eat smaller primates like colobus monkeys. She also chose to name her subjects instead of assigning the primates identifying numbers and was thus able to form close bonds with the chimps. She remains the only human ever accepted into chimpanzee society.

Queen Elizabeth II named her Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004.

Stephen Hawking

The late Stephen Hawking is probably the second-most famous physicist after Albert Einstein, and he was immortalized in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne. Hawking was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease as a graduate student at Cambridge and was given just two years to live. He defied the odds and went on to make numerous seminal contributions to physics, and he also wrote multiple best-selling popular science books, starting with 1988's A Brief History of Time.

It's his work on black holes—most notably the black hole information paradox—that captured the imagination of physicists and the general public alike. Once upon a time, physicists believed that black holes had no hair. That is, all you needed to describe black holes mathematically was their mass and their spin, plus their electric charge. So there would be no noticeable change if you threw something into a black hole—nothing that would provide a clue as to what that object might have been. That information is lost.

But in 1974, Jacob Bekenstein realized that black holes also have a temperature. Hawking tried to prove him wrong but wound up proving him right, concluding that black holes, therefore, had to produce some kind of thermal radiation. So black holes must also have entropy—technically, a means of determining how many different ways you can rearrange the atoms of an object and still have it look pretty much the same. Hawking was the first to calculate that entropy. He also introduced the notion of "Hawking radiation."

Hawking's final paper revisited black hole entropy and the no-hair concept. He and his co-authors found a gap in the mathematical argument concluding that black holes had no hair. They showed that you could record the entropy of a black hole in the photons (particles of light) bouncing around the event horizon. Those photons make up a kind of halo around the black hole that the authors dubbed "soft hair." That soft hair can account for the entropy.

Hawking never let his illness keep him from an adventurous life. He rode the infamous "vomit comet," in hopes of being one of the first to take a commercial flight to space, but he died before that future had been realized. He played a holographic simulation of himself in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation—playing poker with Data, Isaac Newton, and Einstein—and had a recurring role on The Big Bang Theory.

Hawking declined an offer of knighthood—an objection to the UK's then-policy on science funding—but Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Companion of Honour in 1989.

Peter Higgs

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was the biggest science story of 2014. One of the scientists who predicted this final piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics is the boson's namesake, physicist Peter Higgs. It took a good 50 years to get there, but the somewhat reclusive Higgs was at CERN when the discovery was announced to see that prediction confirmed.

As Ars Science Editor John Timmer previously reported, the Higgs boson is a manifestation of the Higgs field, an invisible entity that pervades the Universe. Interactions between the Higgs field and particles help provide particles with mass, with particles that interact more strongly having larger masses. The particle has its roots in studies of the weak force, which controls the decay of radioactive elements. The weak force only operates at very short distances, which suggests that the particles that mediate it (the W and Z bosons) are likely to be massive.

There were models that included massive W and Z bosons, but they invariably came with a hitch: a massless partner, which would imply a longer-range force. In 1964, however, a series of papers was published in rapid succession that described a way to get rid of this problematic particle. If a certain symmetry in the models was broken, the massless partner would go away, leaving only a massive one. Higgs wrote one of those theoretical papers and shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of the Higgs mechanism.

Like Hawking, Higgs turned down a knighthood, but Queen Elizabeth II appointed him to the Order of the Companion of Honor in 2013.

James Lovelock

The fictional scientist Q is a mainstay of the James Bond film franchise, but he does have something resembling a real-world counterpart, if you believe The Sunday Times: environmentalist, inventor, and futurist James Lovelock, who spent decades working at MI5 while conducting independent research.

Lovelock earned a Ph.D. in medicine and conducted cryopreservation experiments on rodents early in his career, which proved influential to the field of cryonics. He also invented the electron capture detector and used it to detect chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere for the first time. In addition, he invented numerous scientific instruments for NASA's planetary exploration program. He did not invent the microwave oven, as is sometimes suggested, but he admitted in a 2012 interview that he had created something similar in concept for heating up frozen hamsters used in his cryo-experiments.

But Lovelock is perhaps best known for his development of the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that the Earth functions as a self-regulating complex system. His neighbor, Lord of the Flies novelist William Golding, suggested the name, and the hypothesis was inspired by Lovelock's NASA work on detecting life on Mars. The hypothesis has prominent supporters and equally prominent critics, and it has yet to be widely accepted within the scientific community.

Queen Elizabeth II appointed Lovelock a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990 and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2003.

Queen Elizabeth II led a low-tech life—but knighted plenty of sci-tech figures

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Queen Elizabeth II led a low-tech life—but knighted plenty of sci-tech figures

An Ars list of technologists and scientists honored by the late Queen Elizabeth II.

The technologists

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