Monday, 3 March 2014

End of Fusion'14 and on to NPGP


I am back from Delhi now. Following my last post we had two more days of talks, and one more part of the "cultural programme" (though of course science research is a cultural activity).  This was a musical recital by sitar player Pandit Prateek Chaudhuri.  I enjoyed this very much.  He gave a kind of lesson about the rules and styles in Indian classical music and gave many examples, but did plenty of uninterrupted playing as wells as talking.  A YouTube clip of an earlier performance can't really do justice to a live performance, but I've included one above, and it gives you an idea.

The last couple of days of talks featured a range of theoretical and experimental work on fusion, and I came away from the whole thing with a resewed sense of some of the interesting questions.  My background does not really feature much work in fusion, but enough to justify coming.  I learned a lot from a community for whom it is their main thing and am going to enjoy making some calculations in the upcoming months.

Now, as I write, I am sitting on a train to Reading, where I will pick up a train to Swindon.  It's day one of the Nuclear Physics Grant Panel meeting.  I'm not really looking forward to the job.  I think it's clear from the proposals that there is no "dead wood" in the already well-pruned nuclear physics community, and to have the job of distributing a very limited pot of money won't be a fun one.

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