Egil Sigurd Lillestøl (19 March 1938 — 27 September 2021) was a Norwegian experimental elementary particle physicist.

Education and early career

Lillestøl graduated in 1964 from the

University of Bergen The University of Bergen () is a public university, public research university in Bergen, Norway. As of 2021, the university had over 4,000 employees and 19,000 students. It was established by an act of parliament in 1946 consolidating several sci ...

and obtained his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

from the same university in 1970. He was appointed associate professor at the university the same year and appointed professor in 1984. Leading up to his professorship in Bergen, he had been a fellow at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

(1964–1967) in

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, Switzerland and a guest researcher at

Collège de France The (), formerly known as the or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment () in France. It is located in Paris near La Sorbonne. The has been considered to be France's most ...

(1973) in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

Career

Lillestøl was involved in experiments carried out at

DESY DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (English: ''German Electron Synchrotron''), is a national research centre for fundamental science located in Hamburg and Zeuthen near Berlin in Germany. It operates particle accelerators used to ...

Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...

, Germany, where he was central in the PLUTO Collaboration, and at CERN, where he was member of the DELPHI Collaboration. Furthermore, he was instrumental in the process to develop a long-term funding model allowing Norwegian research groups to participate in the

LHC The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, and ...

experiments

ATLAS An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of world map, maps of Earth or of a continent or region of Earth. Advances in astronomy have also resulted in atlases of the celestial sphere or of other planets. Atlases have traditio ...

and

ALICE Alice may refer to: * Alice (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Literature * Alice (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''), a character in books by Lewis Carroll * ''Alice'' series, children's and teen books by ...

. Still affiliated with University of Bergen, Lillestøl took up positions at CERN. He was Deputy Head of CERN's Physics Division from 1990 to 1992. After this he split his time between the university and CERN. From 1992 to 2009 he was Head of the European School of Particle Physics, CERN Schools of Physics.

Physics communication

Lillestøl put a strong emphasis on physics communication. In addition to teaching at university level and giving presentations at international conferences, he also communicated complex physics concepts to both school children and the general public. He was a regular lecturer at the

European Space Camp European Space Camp (ESC) is a summer camp for youths aged 17–20, which focuses on giving a hands-on experience into the field of aerospace engineering and space sciences. Participants from all over Europe and the world stay at the Andøya Spac ...

from 2001 onwards.

Energy and climate

Lillestøl was also interested in global energy issues and an opportunity to solve the world's energy problems using thorium-based nuclear power. He advocated establishing the use of nuclear power to solve the international energy crisis, and that Norway should build a prototype of a

thorium reactor The thorium fuel cycle is a nuclear fuel cycle that uses an isotope of thorium, , as the fertile material. In the reactor, is transmuted into the fissile artificial uranium isotope which is the nuclear fuel. Unlike natural uranium, natural tho ...

. He was founding member of the International Thorium Energy Committee. Lillestøl was critical of the Norwegian climate debate and pointed out that the Earth's climate is very complicated, and climate science is young and still has a long way to go before one can hope to find complete explanations for the Earth's climate variations.

Bibliography

Lillestøl co-authored the popular science book ''The Search for Infinity'' (1994), which has been translated into eight other languages. He also contributed to the preparation of the Norwegian textbook ''Generell fysikk for universiteter og høgskoler'' (General Physics for Universities and University Colleges) (2001). Furthermore, he was also one of the main drivers behind the

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

-supported traveling exhibition “Science bringing nations together”, organised jointly by

JINR The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, ), in Dubna, Moscow Oblast (110 km north of Moscow), Russia, is an international research center for nuclear sciences, with 5,500 staff members including 1,200 researchers holding over 1,000 ...

and

. His scientific output, as recorded by the database

Inspire-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1 ...

, amount closely to hundred works.

Awards

In 2007, he was awarded the Research Council of Norway's Award for Excellence in Communication of Science for "dissemination of basic physics to schoolchildren and the public". Egil Lillestøl was a member of the

Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences The Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences (, NTVA) is a learned society based in Trondheim, Norway. Founded in 1955, the academy has about 500 members. It is a member of the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technologica ...

and the

Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (, DKNVS) is a Norway, Norwegian learned society based in Trondheim. It was founded in 1760 and is Norway's oldest scientific and scholarly institution. The society's Protector is King Harald V of ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lillestøl, Egil 1938 births 2021 deaths Members of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences People associated with CERN Norwegian physicists Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters Particle physicists Science communicators Academic staff of the University of Bergen