Born in Cornwall, Hewish attended King's College, Taunton, and Cambridge University. Upon graduating in 1948, he went to work for the Telecommunications Research Establishment before returning to Cambridge to become part of a team undertaking solar and interstellar research by radio. At first, Hewish used radio telescopes to study the atmosphere of the Sun. He determined the electron density of the Sun's corona and studied the hot plasma that comprises this part of the Sun's atmopsheres.

After 1950, new instruments became available that allowed for studies beyond the Sun. Hewish examined how radio sources were received on the Earth; often these sources were disturbed by ionized gas in the Earth's atmosphere or by interstellar disturbances. The study of these disturbances led to the discovery of pulsars. In 1965 Hewish designed a new kind of radio telescope to detect quasars and assigned Jocelyn Bell, one of his graduate students, the task of...