Herbert Gush, In Memoriam

June 11, 2026

Information for this notice was graciously provided by UBC astrophysicist Mark Halpern and UBC alumnus and UC Berkely experimental physicist, Ed Wishnow. 

 

We are sad to announce the death of Canadian astrophysicist and prominent UBC scientist, Dr. Herbert Gush, who recently passed away at the age of 96. 

Herbert (Herb) Gush was a prominent Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. (1967-2000).  He is best known for his sounding rocket experiments in the 1990s, which provided definitive evidence that the cosmic microwave background has a thermal spectrum.

As a young post doc in France in the late 1950s, Herb and Jaqueline Conne published one of the earliest papers on Fourier Transform Spectroscopy--using a Michelson interferometer to measure the night sky emission spectrum.  Later, as Faculty at U of T, Herb and his colleagues were the first team to perform Very Long Baseline Interferometry, (VLBI) finding fringes between data recorded at the Dominion Radio Astrophysics Observatory (DRAO) in BC and the Algonquin Observatory in Ontario.  He made several rocket flights to measure the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, all of them designed and built in our department at UBC.  

In 1990, with Mark Halpern and Ed Wishnow, Herb successfully measured the Cosmic microwave background radiation with a ten-minute rocket launch from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. It was launched just a month after COBE whose principals were awarded the Nobel prize in 2006.  It produced data showing a clean Planck spectrum with smaller error bars, initially, than the COBE satellite, demonstrating that the Universe was in good thermal equilibrium when it was 10 days old.  Asked about coming so close to a Nobel Prize, Gush said,  “I don’t think about that.  It’s not useful to make that type of speculation.” 

Herb has been described as “gentle”, “amazing”, and a “marvelous physicist and person”. After retiring from UBC he moved to his dairy and olive farm in Sicily with his wife, Rosalia Guccione, also a former UBC Physics professor and the first woman to get a PhD in Physics from UBC.

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