Bull Sessions

 My colleague Jim Al-Khalili, who exceeds my 21 years in the Department of Physics at the University of Surrey asked a question about the term "Bull Sessions" on Twitter a couple of days ago:

And while I'm in 'ask my tweeps' mode, for many years I have been involved in and run informal discussion meetings of my research groups called Bull Sessions. Does anyone know the history and etymology of the term?

— Jim Al-Khalili (@jimalkhalili) May 24, 2021

I first heard the term, I think, after arriving at Surrey, when I found that the nuclear group had these informal talks in which lots of discussion was intended, called "Bull Sessions".  Usually they were based on talks from researchers in the group, and differed in style from the kind of more formal invited seminar from a visiting speaker.

You can follow the replies to Jim's tweet to see what other people know about the term.  I was slightly surprised to learn the following in the Oxford English Dictionary, which mentions the phrase, dating it back to at least 1920.  It appears unrelated to the animal, or the papal bull, but is related to the sense of bull meaning "Trivial, insincere, or untruthful talk or writing; nonsense" from which bullshit derives.  So, in that sense, it means an informal discussion.  It's a US term, originally.

The etymology of bull in this sense is listed as unknown according to the OED, but lists some similar sounding and meaning words in Old French, Modern Icelandic and Middle English which might (I suppose one is supposed to infer) be related. 

Interesting!  I don't know how it got into the Surrey group, but my guess is that possibly Ron Johnson brought it back from the US after doing a postdoc there and becoming head of the Surrey group (as well as one of Jim's PhD supervisors).

RIP Steven Moszkowski 1927–2020

 

I just heard the news that Steven Moszkowski died in December.  I heard of his death from my PhD supervisor, Jirina Stone, who has been working with him in recent years (with a highly-cited paper co-authored by Moszkowski, Jirina Stone, and her husband Nick Stone published in 2014).  I met Steven once, as far as I can remember, but I knew his name for his work on effective interactions for use in nuclear structure calculations - particularly the surface delta interaction (SDI).  I was reminded of him recently when a final year project student I've been working with this semester was working on a solvable model of octupole states in lead-208, as worked out by Piet van Isacker.  It made use of this SDI interaction, since although it is not a fundamental nucleon-nucleon interaction, still captures enough of the correct physics to be very useful, and is conceptually and mathematically simple.

Like my meetings with many of the older generation of nuclear physicists, I felt a bit inadequate to collaborate with them, and have clearly now missed my opportunity.  As I say, I only met Moszkowski one time (that I recall).  From the short memorial page to him at his institution, UCLA, it sounds like there were a lot of interesting stories he could have told me.  RIP, Steven.