Post by Gordon Stove

It is with profound sadness that I share the news that my father, Dr G Colin Stove, passed away suddenly this morning, 20th July 2026, aged 77. Colin was the inventor of Atomic Dielectric Resonance (ADR) and one of the most inventive scientific minds of his generation. A brilliant experimenter and hardware developer, he was a master of remote sensing, mapping, imaging and signal processing, and he combined those disciplines in ways no one had before. Named inventor on three patents, he was the first person in the world to discover how to generate deep-penetrating radiowave signals capable of travelling several kilometres through solid ground — and then to apply spectroscopic techniques to classify the material beneath. It opened a window into the Earth that had never existed. Born into a croft in Sandwick, Shetland, Colin studied Geography at the University of Aberdeen, where he had the great fortune of learning under Professor R. V. Jones — Churchill's wartime scientific intelligence chief. It was Jones who lit his curiosity and set him on the path into radar that would define his life. He went on to pioneer satellite and airborne remote sensing at the Macaulay Institute, serving twice as Principal Investigator to the European Space Agency, before inventing ADR across three breakthroughs in 1982, 1992 and 1997. Together we co-founded Adrok to bring it to the world — a partnership I will always be proud of, and one he lived to see pass 25 years in business and hundreds of projects delivered. His inventiveness knew no borders, and neither did his technology. ADR has been used in oil, gas, mineral and geothermal exploration, in archaeology, and — most remarkably — in medicine, where he achieved genuine breakthroughs scanning blood samples. As a Geographer to his core, he took enormous pride in seeing his invention deployed on every continent on Earth, from the deserts to Antarctica and the Arctic circle. Colin was as much an artist as a scientist, and saw no contradiction in that. He was creative, musical, and a firm believer that the worlds of science and art intersect and intertwine. He had a rare knack for inspiring people, and loved talking about his experiments with anyone who would listen. As so many said of him: "I didn't understand half of what he was talking about, but I was spellbound by his passion." Yet he could also explain the most intricate ideas simply, so that anyone could grasp them. He is survived by his wife, three children and five grandchildren. A fuller tribute can be found below. Long live his technology.