Cross-country physicist

Yesterday I had an enjoyable trip to Birmingham to visit a student on a sandwich-year placement.  He is working at Cross-Country Trains, effectively doing logistics work.  As it happens, there is a single Cross-Country train service from Guildford to Birmingham per day, so I took it (though at 06:02 it's a little earlier than I needed to travel).

Once there I met the student, and we had breakfast together at a place near his office called Boston Tea Party which, I can report, does an excellent vegan cooked breakfast.  He's been getting on well and enjoying the challenges of the business world;  not just the technical work that he is doing that draws upon his analytic, problem-solving and numerical skills that he has been picking up as a physicist, but the networking, dealing with work relationships and getting involved in the structures and reporting lines that business use.  It's not an atypical placement for a physics student on our BSc programme, though it does not involve directly doing physics.  Our sandwich-year students end up going to more or less any kind of place that wants to employ graduate physicists, and that include train operating companies.

Because I ended up meeting the student as soon as I arrived in Birmingham, I was done with the meeting with him, and later his supervisor, quite early in the day.  I therefore had a wander round the city.  Parts of it have changed a lot since I first got to know Birmingham (when I was an undergraduate in Oxford and my then-girlfriend went to study in Birmingham).  The renovations are rather nice.  Particularly impressive is the new library, which is beautiful inside and out.  I went there for a couple of hours to do some work.   The picture above is taken from the balcony on the third floor of the library.

NuPECC Long Range Plan 2017

Every few years, the Nuclear Physics European Coordination Committee (NuPECC) publishes a Long Range Plan (LRP) to try to give a unified community picture of what the broad goals are for nuclear physics research in Europe for the coming years.  The most recent one was published a couple of days ago and is available to download.  It's a pretty lengthy document (236 pages) and I can't say that I've read the whole thing yet, but the recommendations seem broadly sensible.  I don't know how much influence it will have, but at least we have a kind of official-looking document to point policy-makers at, and amongst the recommendations are support for nuclear theory, so I should be (and am) glad about that.

More new isotopes

Since I subscribe to Michael Thoennessen's isotope newsletter from his Discovery of Isotopes Project, I learn that two papers have just been published which between them give details of observations of new isotopes of Mn (Manganese), Fe (Iron), Co (Cobalt), Cu (Copper), and Np (Neptunium).  The Neptunium isotope was created and observed in China, with all the others from a single experimental run in Japan.  

Welcome to the world, new isotopes! (though you decayed fractions of a second after you were created)

Towards the end of the Semester

My blogging rate has slowed down somewhat of late, related I think to the subject matter of the last post.  Actually, it's probably possible to use blogging as a kind of cognitive behaviour therapy in which you set a small goal to write something every day (or week or whatever) and make sure that you include it as a must-do task.  Providing you make the target, and it should be achievable, because it could just be a matter of pointing out an interesting new paper you have come across, then it should be of some positive impact on one's mental health.  I dare say, though, that authors in general would not highlight the mental health benefits of making a career of writing.

I don't have such a recent interesting paper to highlight, though I expect that if I looked at the latest edition of Physical Review C or Journal of Physics G or similar, then I'd find many interesting papers.  One thing I can report is that I just finished my marking of exam papers, it being the end of semester (though I've got plenty of coursework assignments still to mark).  That means the students in their final year are on the cusp of becoming graduates and moving on to the next stage of their lives.  I wish them all the best of luck!  I know at least a few of them will be going on to PhD study, including one to my previous employer, the University of Tennessee (pictured).