Antony Hewish was born May 11, 1924, in Fowey, Cornwall, England. He grew up in Newquay, a popular resort town known for its sandy coves and surf. His father was a banker, and he had two brothers.
In 1942, he was admitted to the University of Cambridge. One of his teachers was Jack Ratcliffe, who introduced Hewish to electromagnetic theory.
During the war years of 1943-1946, Hewish served in the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough and the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern, on projects dealing with electronics and antennas. Hewish again met Ratcliffe, his former teacher, who was then with the Cavendish Laboratory.
In 1946, Hewish returned to Cambridge and graduated in 1948. In 1948, Hewish joined Sir Martin Ryle at the Cavendish Laboratory. He was part of the radio astronomy team that designed and built the first antennas using aperture synthesis.
In 1950, Hewish married. In 1952, he received a Ph.D. and became Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. In 1961, he transferred to Churchill College as Director of Studies in Physics, first as Lecturer from 1961 to 1969, then as Reader from 1969 to 1971, and then as Professor of Radio Astronomy from 1971 until 1989.
According to Hewish, "I... showed how interplanetary scintillation could be used to obtain very high angular resolution in radio astronomy, equivalent to an interferometer with a baseline of 1000 km - something which had not then been achieved in this field. It was to exploit this technique on a large sample of radio galaxies that I conceived the idea of a giant phased-array antenna for a major sky survey. This required instrumental capabilities quite different from those of any existing radio telescope, namely very high sensitivity at long wavelengths, and a multi-beam capability for repeated whole-sky surveys on a day to day basis."
The antenna was completed in July of 1967. Two pieces of good luck ensued. The parameters that Hewish specified for the antenna exactly matched what was necessary to detect pulsars, and Hewish was advisor to a graduate student named Jocelyn Bell. It was Bell's observational talents and Hewish' understanding and analysis of the significance of her findings that led to the discovery of the first pulsar, and a new classification of stars. Hewish and Ryle, a pioneer in radio telescope construction, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974.
In 1977, Hewish took over management of the radio astronomy group, and was the head of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory from 1982 through 1988.
Hewish has been active in disseminating scientific information to audiences outside the university setting. He has given public lectures through the Royal
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