Neil A Downie studied at the University of Oxford UK, and went on to join the TASSO team in Hamburg, Germany which discovered the gluon, the subatomic particle which ‘glues’ quarks together. He went on to work in R&D, mainly in the Industrial Gases Industry, most recently Air Products & Chemicals Inc. He has worked on radar, gas analyzers, mass spectrometers, laser optical particle counters, laser asbestos fibre counters, semiconductors, Xenon anaesthesia equipment, adsorbed gas-based aerosol cans, molecular mass meters and other sensors based on quartz tuning forks, ultra-hot burners, anti-jitter circuits… and many other things.

He was for five years Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Innovation with the University of Surrey in the UK. He has presented lectures and demonstrations on interesting and fun physics projects in the US, the UK, Europe, and China. He now works occasionally on consulting engineering work, with science clubs, and helps with the Physics Olympiad team in the UK, often working with his wife Diane, who was a prize-winning Oxford student who retired from her medical career recently. He has written five science books, Industrial Gases, and the four Saturday Science books, the latest being The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science from Princeton University. He worked with the IET Engineering & Technology magazine on their ‘Lockdown Challenges’, contributing 28 pieces in 2020 and 2021. He now works pro bono for the Exovent charity, which is helping to bring negative pressure breathing assistance, an important technology complimentary to regular hospital ventilators and for which he has made many prototype and lab tests rigs.

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On-line VDU display of Gluon produced in high energy electron-positron collisions at the TASSO experiment in Hamburg in the 1980s. There are two lower transverse momentum quark jets and a high transverse momentum gluon jet. Process is e+ + e- ⇒ q + q + G