It's Christmas Day! Merry Christmas, people spending this morning catching up on blogs. As part of a Christmas message from my colleague Aru in India, he sent some old pictures of me, and my Surrey co-workers Paddy Regan and Phil Walker, which I copy here. How much younger we all looked!
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| Me (R), daughter (middle) and wife (L) attending the International Workshop on Nuclear Theory in Bulgaria in 2013 |
In the days before the pandemic I wasin the habit of keeping track of conferences coming up that I would potentially think about attending (or thought readers might). Since there are such things as conferences happening in the world again, then I figured I'd resume the tradition. I'll edit the post throughout the year as new things come up.
Since I now work on a combination of nuclear physics and quantum computing, I'm likely to post conferences about either of those areas, especially if I or a member of my group are actually going.
06/02/2023–11/02/2023: VI Topical Workshop on Modern Aspects in Nuclear Structure: "The Many Facets of Nuclear Structure", Bormio, Italy
A regular workshop organised by the nuclear physics group in Milan. A general conference where I am sure to find a welcome and some interesting topics. As I understand, the venue is also a ski resort, and there is ample time in the programme for skiing. This is not something that particularly attracts me, though I dare say I could get into it. In any case, no matter any other thoughts about it, the registration deadline has passed. [website]
04/04/2023–06/04/2023: IoP Nuclear Physics Conference, York, UK
This is the annual national conference organised by the IoP Nuclear Physics Group and the designated host University. We (Surrey) did it last year, and this year, the honour has fallen to York. As I rule I try to go to the IoP conference to meet up with the community, and support my students who are attending, and to get the latest news in nuclear physics research done in the UK, and the political news coming out of the STFC session that is usually included. This year, though, I've already booked a family holiday for these dates in the kids' Easter holidays. [website]
17/04/2023–19/04/2023: Quantum Computing Theory in Practice (QCTIP-2023), Cambridge, UK
This is an annual UK-based quantum computing conference which has a reasonable mix of computational scientists, mathematicians, and physicists, looking at anything from the very abstract to the very applied. I went last year (when it was in Bristol) and gave a poster about my student's work in using quantum computers to solve nuclear physics problems. I don't think I'll go this year, but will send one of my students along. [website]
08/05/2023–12/05/2023: Quantum-Classical Quantum Simulation (QCQS), Lausanne, Switzerland
A workshop on the use of quantum computers specifically as devices to simulate other quantum systems. This is the key aspect of a big chunk of my current work in trying to develop algorithms to be used on quantum computers to simulate / solve nuclear physics problems. [website]
22/05/2023–26/05/2023: Information and Statistics in Nuclear Experiment and Theory (ISNET-9), St Louis, USA
Part of series whose mission is to bring more sophisticated statistical analysis to nuclear physics, both in experiment and theory. I was involved in co-organising an earlier incarnation of the workshop, and have attended a few of them, though my actual research work on the topic is embarrasingly light. I'd like to attend, and feel a moral obligation to do so as part of the ISNET advisory board, but I am a little uncertain that I can justify the trip [website]
22/05/2023–26/05/2023: Advances and Challenges in Nuclear Fission and Quasi-Fission For the Superheavy Elements, Naples, Italy
A conference dedicated to understanding the reaction mechanisms during heavy ion fusion possibly leading towards complete fusion (i.e. the nuclei end up completely stuck), with understanding the competing mechanisms a necessary evil. One of my most recent publications was about this, and I'd be interested to go. [website]
21/05/2023–26/05/2023: 2023 CeNAM Frontiers in Nuclear Astrophysics Meeting, East Lansing, USA
CeNAM stands for Centre for Nuclear Astrophysics across Messengers. This looks to be a major new meeting, and the evolution of some previous major meetings on nuclear astrophysics under the JINA (Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics) banner. [website]
04/06/2023–09/06/2023: Advances in Radioactive Isotope Science (ARIS), Avignon, France
This one covers a wide range of nuclear physics, with a particular bent towards what can be done using radioactive beams – in other words, at most of the big nuclear facilities. I have been to a precursor meeting in this series: ENAM (exotic nuclei and atomic masses) which merged with RNB (radioactive nuclear beams) some years ago to form the ARIS series. I'm sure I would find a lot here of interest, but since I will likely go to the COMEX conference later in June, I doubt I will make it to ARIS. [website]
09/06/2023–14/06/2023: PLATAN-2023, Jyväskylä, Finland
I'm not completely sure what PLATAN stands for, but it's described as a meeting between the Poznan meeting on Lasers and Trapping Devices in Atomic Nuclei Research and the International Conference on Laser Probing. In any case, I am going for the L standing for Lasers. I have worked a bit on the nuclear structure that is probed through laser spectroscopy and trapping, and visiting Finland and Jyväskylä is always a welcome pleasure, but this clashes with the COMEX conference which I have more current published work relating to, and is higher up on my list of conferences to attend.
11/06/2023–16/06/2023: Collective Motion in Nuclei under Extreme Conditions (COMEX7), Catania, Italy
This is very on-topic for me, through my interest in different kind of collective state explored using time-dependent calculations. I've been working on such stuff recently, which is poised for acceptence in a journal, judging by the latest (final, surely) referee report, and I think there's a good chance I will try to get to COMEX7 to present the work, if they accept my abstract. I've been at other COMEXes, most recently COMEX6 in 2018. [website]
25/06/2023–30/06/2023: International Conference on Proton-Emitting Nuclei (PROCON2023), Warsaw, Poland
Proton emission is an exotic form of radioactivity for nuclei very far from stability, with such an extreme proton to neutron ratio that they can decay by emitting protons. I don't think I've ever been to a PROCON, though I've worked on proton emission, and students of mine, and collaborators, have all gone. I have papers in PROCON proceedings, dating back to my PhD work which my supervisor presented at PROCON2003 in Legnaro (paper here), followed by several papers at the 2007 PROCON in Lisbon since at that time Jim Al-Khalili and I had a student working on proton emission in collaboration with experimentalists in Liverpool. Hence I am co-author on one discovery paper, for Re-159, a related paper looking at more details of the Re-159 discovery, and a theory paper snapshotting what the student was working on. I remain interested in proton emission (and tunneling phenomena in general) but haven't done much direct work on it recently, except learning a bit about instantons, though not enough to publish anything. [website]
02/07/2023–08/07/2023: International Workshop on Nuclear Theory (IWNT), Borovetz, Bulgaria
An annual meeting organised by the University of Sofia. It's a nice meeting out in the countryside south of Sofia. I've been there a few times before and always enjoyed it. It's usually one of the first meetings at the start of the University summer holidays (though before the school holidays). Before my now-9-year-old was of school age she came along to the conference one year - I think the only time my family has come along to a conference with me, which we then turned into a holiday in Sofia. It's certainly a nice one to go to, though a luxury to take that time away from other things that I don't think I can afford this year [website]
10/07/2023–12/07/2023: IReNA Workshop on Weak Interactions in Nuclear Astrophysics, East Lansing, USA
[website]
10/07/2023–14/07/2023: Chiral and Wobbling in Atomic Nuclei (CWAN'23), Huizhou, China
A conference on the unique kind of excited states that occur in triaxial nuclei through the lack of any kind of spatial symmetry. The existence of chiral bands and wobbling motion is usually deduced through gamma ray spectroscopy and the resulting information about energy levels. I have some track record in looking at giant resonances as a probe of triaxiality - something a bit different to what I think they are mainly intersted in, but I dare say on-topic enough. [website]
17/07/2023–23/07/2023: Capture Gamma Ray Spectroscopy (CGS17), Grenoble, France
CGS is a venerable series of conferences, originating in 1969. Now, the theme is broadly defined as gamma ray spectroscopy and anything suitably related to it, with the "capture" bit - where the gamma rays are instigated by e.g. neutron capture - somewhat redundant. I don't think I've ever been to a CGS conference before, but I do happen to have a set of the proceedings of CGS9 from when it was held in Bucharest in 1997. These are particularly useful, as they are two volumes contained in a wide slip case, and they form an excellent bookend on my shelves, being particularly hard to push over (see picture at end of post). If I remember correctly, I have them because one of my colleagues ended up with two copies, and thought I might like them. To be fair, conference proceedings are about the hardest things to source, should you ever need an article from one, and having a virtual library of them spread across different offices is a good idea. I have never attended a CGS, but I have at least one paper in the proceedings (of CGS13) when one of my Surrey colleagues presented work containing some calculations of mine. [website]
03/09/2023–08/09/2023: Position Sensitive Detectors 13, Oxford, UK
This touches on nuclear physics but covers any area where one might want to detect particles following a nuclear or atomic reaction or radioactive decay. There is nuclear representation there in the list of invited speakers [website]
11/09/2023–15/09/2023: Nuclear Photonics 2023, Durham, NC, USA
The word "photonics" is, I think, a relatively new coinage, meaning what devices one can make using of light (photons) as the medium, in analogy with electronics and electrons. In the case of nuclear photonics, the idea of "devices" is a bit far away, but the ability to undertake direct controlled interactions between nuclei and light pulses has advanced a lot over the years with facilities like HIγS in North Carolina and ELI–NP in Romania. I've co-authored some work with a PhD student based on work done at HIγS and could imagine myself getting a lot of this conference.
17/09/2023–22/09/2023: 20th International Conference on Ion Sources (ICIS'23), Victoria, BC, Canada
Organised by TRIUMF lab, who no doubt know all about ion sources - the first stage in producing the nuclei, at the centre of the ions, which are accelerated into beams for nuclear physics experiments. TRIUMF is one reportedly very nice place that I have never had an opporunity to visit, but ion sources are not something sufficiently up my street for this to be the occasion when I come to visit. [website]
18/09/2023–22/09/2023: XIth International Symposium on Nuclear Symmetry Energy (NuSym23), Darmstadt, Germany
The nuclear symmetry energy is a global property of nuclear matter which can be applied to nuclei and to objects such as neutron stars. As such, understanding it from a combination of theoretical and experimental methods is of interest to a broader range of scientists than just "nuclear physicists". My most-cited paper(s) are about such nuclear matter properties, and understanding how to link specific properties of individual nuclei with these kind of global properties has been an ongoing part of my research. A tempting conference! [website]
26/09/2023–30/09/2023: 29th Nuclear Physics Workshop, Kazimierz Dolny, Poland
A biennual (I think) conference, which I first (and last) attended 20 years ago. The nuclear group at Lublin does a good job of organising a regular small internation conference in this beautiful location on the Vistula river. Taking place in years when the Zakopane conference does not take place, it means that there is a good nuclear physics conference in Poland at least once each year. The Kazimierz Dolny one is smaller and bit more theory-orientated. Magda Zielinska corrected me on Twitter: The Kazimierz conference happens every year, while it is the Mazurian Lakes conference that alternates with Zakopane, therefore there are at least two good conference in Poland per year! [website]
19/11/2023–24/11/2023: FUSION23, Shizuoka, Japan
A delayed conference which was supposed to be called FUSION20 before it got cancelled in the Covid-19 pandemic. I had submitted an abstract for FUSION20 on work I had done looking at the effect of the surface energy on fusion properties [here]. I'll have to decide if I want to pick back up on that and finish the work to present it at the conference and then write up as a longer paper. As with COMEX, mentioned above, I've been to a few conferences in this series already, as it's a core part of my traditional nuclear physics research. [website]
27/11/2023–29/11/2023: WNCP2023, Osaka, Japan
A Workshop on nuclear cluster physics, dealing with anything to do with the idea that cluster structures exist inside nuclei. I've worked a little bit on clustering, and to me, it's a fun topic, as well as one which helps challenge our pictures of what really goes on inside a nucleus. I will wistfully think of Japan during this part of November, wondering if I should have gone to this and to FUSION23. [website]
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| Proceedings of CGS9, at the end of my bookshelf |
With a cold clear frosty start to the day yesterday, the campus was looking quite pretty. I took a picture from one of the covered bridges between buildings (by dangerously holding my brand new phone outside the window with restricted opening) and here it is:
Lots of other people posted nice pictures on social media. Here's our Vice Chancellor with a view of some frosty wolves:
Frosty start @UniOfSurrey, with sunshine breaking through! pic.twitter.com/zNEeDtsQjr
— Max Lu (@uniofsurreyVC) December 8, 2022
and another from my colleague in virology
Good morning from round the corner
— Dr Lindsay Broadbent (@LindsayBbent) December 8, 2022
(I hope the lake freezes!) pic.twitter.com/fyNHykiT14
The 2022 Institute of Physics Ernest Rutherford Medal recipient has been announced, and it is Prof Kieran Flanagan from the University of Manchester. Prof Flanagan is a leader in the world of laser spectroscopy for understanding exotic (short-lived) nuclei through the hyperfine interaction in their atomic spectra. The experiments give among the most detailed precise values we have for nuclear properties - particularly the charge radii. Though the method is indirect, in that it is atomic electron spectra that are being measured to deduce what is happening to the nucleus, the theory linkning the measurement to the nuclear properties is reasonably free of model dependence and the method has become a standard one peformed at severeal labs across the world.
There is a longer citation on the IoP announcement. Well done Kieran!
Last night's cultural activity was a visit to the Boileroom venue in Guildford for a gig by Bdrmm (pronounced Bedroom). They are a band that I didn't know particularly well when I bought the tickets but I'd come across them from emails from their record label, and had a listen on Bandcamp. They fall into the shoegaze genre - one that came into prominence in the late 1980s by bands like Slowdive, Pale Saints, Moose, and My Bloody Valentine. The popularity of the sub-genre appears to have waned since that initial heyday, though it may be just that my finger is not on the (slow) pulse, and indeed Wikipedia points out that there is, since the late 2010s, a renewed interest in the form of the "nu gaze" and "blackgaze" scenes.
Anyway, I enjoyed the gig a lot. They built up a beautiful droning wall of effects-pedal-enhanced guitar sound, managing to weave some catchy songs into the noise. They seemed like a lovely group of people whose delight and surprise that a packed-out venue of people actually wanted to come and hear them.
Here's a picture from my ageing phone, which struggles to focus in low light. I eyed, slightly enviously, all those people in front of me who were holding their phones up and getting nice clear shots
Through Google Scholar, I have come across the fact that someone has cited what is my first scientific article, which I had practically forgotten: It is a conference proceeding from a conference on fission that my UK PhD supervisor went to (but I didn't) and where she presented my work. As it was co-written with my US co-supervisor who worked at a national laboratory, it was filed with an official document number of Oak Ridge National Lab, and has since been uploaded to a US government research archive here.
Somehow, someone has seen this paper, and has begun citing it as an example of the use of stochastic mean fields methods in quantum chemistry, which it is not. The citing articles that Google Scholar has picked up are here, and the do seem perfectly genuine in the sense that it is really my article that is being cited, albeit for what appear to the wrong reasons. Here's a screenshot of the citation to my paper, nestled between two citations which I think are much more on-topic for the citing article.
Today is my brother's 50th birthday. He organised a party in London for friends and family, and I, of course, attended with my own family.
My brother, Mark, planned the party long ago, and long before Network Rail decided upon their maintenance schedule. It turned out that the train line serving the nearest train station (Forest Hill) was closed for the day and so the most obvious route for travelling was not possible. We decided to take our bikes on the train and cycle from Waterloo to Forest Hill. Any time we have tried cycling in London before has always been a lot more pleasurable than doing so around Guildford, with London offering much better cycling infrastructure.
In the end it was a nice ride, and cycling across London is a great way to see different parts of the city. I'm not sure I've ever been to Walworth before, but we rode through a most beautiful estate of houses that looked like a film set for a Victorian period piece. Here's the route we took (click for (a bit) more detail):
For my brother's birthday I tried racking my brains for a while to think of a good present - maybe taking him to a concert or other event, but I couldn't really find the right thing. In the end, I decided to buy every single that had been number one in the charts on his birthday since 1972. In the end, it was quite easy to get hold of physical media for them all up until about 10 years ago. It was fun collecting them, and then fun handing them over today. He seemed impressed and grateful.
We were the first to arrive at the party, and people steadily arrived during the couple of hours we were there. There were people from different parts of my brother's life, including a group of schoolfriends he keeps in touch with, and whom I remember from my own schooldays. He asked guests to bring a cake each, and so there was lots of nice cake to be had which was definitely fine with me, and most of my kids. One of my children does not much like cake, but he has, on the other hand, been caused to memorise the announcements on the train through frequent listening. He spontaneously came out with the following on the train, which we then asked him to repeat from posterity:
I saw from an email today that Don Perkins died. He was a professor of particle physics at Oxford when I was there as an undergraduate. At least, he retired when I was still early on in my undergraduate studies around 30 years ago, but became an emeritus fellow after retirement. I did not know Prof Perkins, but heard his name invoked, and treated his textbook Introduction to High Energy Physics as the bible for any particle physics studies I had to do as an undergrad.
I recal in one tutorial with Dave Wark that we had found what appeared to be a mistake in the textbook. Dave saw Don and said "Don! I think we've found a mistake in your textbook!" "hah! only one?" was his response. RIP, Don.
I have a new paper published today: "Mean-field Simulations of Es-254 + Ca-48 Heavy-Ion Reactions", Paul D Stevenson, Frontiers in Physics 10, 1019285 (2022). It's a rare single-author paper from me, reflecting my growing misanthropy with age.
The work for the paper started a few years ago, when I attended a workshop in Japan on the subject, partly, of what one could do with a target of Einsteinium-254, which they had at JAEA (Japanese Atomic Energy Agency). I took a look at some simulations of Es + Ca collisions which gives a compound system of element 119 - the next one beyond the highest-certified element 118 = Oganesson.
The calculations showed some intersting cases where fusion occurred, and I have sat on them ever since wondering whether to publish them as is, or turn them into a more extensive set of calculations. In the end, prompted by a call in Frontiers in Physics for a special issue on the subject of superheavy element synthesis, I decided to write what I had up as a "brief research report" and see if the referees would like it. They did, well enough, and so it is now out there in the research record.
Here's a zoom in of one of the pictures, where the reacting nuclei look like avocados:
On Tuesday night I took part in a quiz in a pub in London that was more than just a pub quiz. Part of the Quiz League of London, I was in a team competing in a fixture against another team in the league. This is pretty serious level quizzing and whenever I go, I am always slightly conscious that I don't want to let the team down by any lack of knowledge of trivia. I don't think I will ever get to the stage of knowing many of the sports people or sports facts that come up - it's a huge subject that I am not very intersted in, but I was pleased/fortunate that I had a nuclear physics question -
"Which New Zealand scientist won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908, for hiswork on investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistryof radioactive substances?".
I was tempted to jump in after the first four words, but in the quiz format, there is no benefit to doing so, and this was a question specifically for me. You can see the scores on this page from which you can also download the quiz and the friendly quiz following it (see links at the top middle of page). In the main quiz I was asked the 2B questions in rounds 1-4 and the 2A questions in rounds 5-8.
After the quiz and the first friendly, we did one more friendly themed quiz whose theme was animated tv & film, though many of the questions were also gettable through general knowledge by the way they were phrased. One of the answers, asking about an actress in Bedknobs and Broomsticks was Angela Lansbury. At the end of the quiz, we hear that she had died earlier that day. One of those coincidences...
He was a collaborator of David Brink, who I did know, and who died last year. In fact, I was searching a second hand book website recently for a book including a chapter by David Brink which I wanted to read. I found the book and ordered it, but also saw available a copy of Brink and Broglia's Nuclear Superfluidity, which I ordered too. I have not properly read it yet, but when I heard of Broglia's death, I picked it up and had a look through, wistful for the future nevertime when I will have a chance to study it in detail. Attached it a picture of me pretending to read it while actually concentrating on taking a selfie of me reading it.
The Milan group website has a more informative biographical picture of him.
One nice thing about working at a University is the diversity of things that goes on there. For example, I can go and listen to a talk from some erudite expert in something far from my own field or I can attend the weekly classical music concerts put on by students in the Music Department.
Today, the thing I could do (and did do) was to visit the farm animals that were brought onto campus for us to pet. There were three pens of happy-seeming goats, pigs and donkeys. They all seemed pleased enough with the attention of cooing students and staff, and we all got a pleasant distraction from our cares.
Thanks to Miller's Ark for bringing them along
I have just spend the last couple of days in Newport News, Virginia, USA. I'm here, because it's where Jefferson Lab is. Jefferson Lab is a major nuclear physics research facility in which electrons are accelerated to very high energies and smashed into nuclear targets to understand in particular the quark-gluon structure of protons and neutrons, though there are other physics goals too.
My University has a master's student, Rocco, on placement there, working with Jerry Gilfoyle from the University of Richmond who has kindly taken Rocco on as a salaried researcher for 10 months to help develop new algorithms to help disentangle real signals coming out of the complex detector system from the noisy background.
As part of the scheme where we (University of Surrey) send student on placements, we also make a couple of visits during the year. I made the first as a virtual visit, and make the second one, this week, in person. After the visit, Rocco, Jerry and I met in the centre of Newport News for dinner. Here's a picture of Rocco by the fountains in downtown:
I also used the fact I was at the Lab to meet the new deputy director for scientific, David Dean. I know David from my PhD days when I spent quite a bit of time at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. David was there at the time, and was a kind of surrogate supervisor for a time. It was nice to catch up with him. I didn't take a picture of him, so I can't post one here, but one day when I go through my old photographs of the time, I might be able to dig one out and post it to the blog.
Yesterday I read a Ananyo Bhattacharya's biogrophy and popular science book about the life and work of John von Neumann. Here's the review I posted on goodreads:
I just got an email from Angela Bonaccorso to say that the biographical article about David Brink has appeeared today in the Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society journal: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2022.0020
Thanks to the algorithmic wonders of Google Scholar, I get sent an email every few days with updates on wheter people are finding my past research interesting, through citing my papers. Today I got an email with details of three new citations, including something I'd not noticed in these emails before - an extra addition of highlighted text saying "100th citation". This means that according to Google Scholar my student Phil's paper with me and his other co-supervisor Arnau, "Fission dynamics within time-dependent Hartree-Fock: Defomration-induced fission", has been cited 100 times.
I received in the post yesterday a book that I ordered second hand online. It is the Proceedings of the International School of Physics «Enrico Fermi» Course XXXVI, edited by C. Bloch. Here's the (rather dark) cover:
The book was sold as an ex-library book and indeed inside I see it stamped with "University of Salford", and there is even still the place where the librarian used to stamp the return date. The single date stamped is 11. OCT 1968:
I bought the book because (a) I saw it online for £1 + postage and (b) different lectures in it are referenced in a couple of places in papers I come back to quite often: One is paper 4 in the series introducing the Lipkin Meshkov Glick Model: D. Agassi, H. J. Lipkin and N. Meshkov. Nucl. Phys. 86, 321 (1966). There, they reference "K. Bleuler, seminar delivered at Varenna Summer School (1965) unpublished", but the seminar was published presumably after Agassi et al. submitted their paper, in 1966 in these proceedings.
The other paper I know of referencing the book is one in the generator coordinate method is used to describe giant resonances: H. Flocard and D. Vautherin, Nucl. Phys. A264, 197 (1976). It's a method that I think bears revisiting with modern time-dependent Hartree-Fock codes as the generator of the basis states, so I go back to this paper whenever I am working on this new application. There is an expression in the paper which is supposed to be found by "A straightforward calculation [see for example the appendix of ref. 6)]". I have managed to work out the expression, though I'm not sure I would call my method straightforward, so I was interested to see the sppendix of ref 6, which of course is an article (by David Brink) in "Proceedings of the International School of Physics Enrico Fermi Course 36 ed. C. Bloch (Academic Press, New York, 1966)."
Now at last I have the book, and I can read the articles referred to, or more likely, look at the book on my shelf and realise I can, at some point, read those articles.
The book contains a picture with an overlay legend showing attendees at the conference. Here are photos of the picture, and the overlay. If you click on them you should see them in as good a resolution as I was able to take with my phone camera. If anyone is really interested in seeing the best resolution I can get, please leave a comment and I'll see what I can do.
A couple of days ago the death of singer/actor/activist Olivia Newton-John was announced. I was aware, thanks I think to my colleague Jim Al-Khalili telling me many years ago, that she was the granddaughter of Max Born.
Max Born was a big name in quantum mechanics, famous amongst other things for the interpretation of the modulus-squared of the wave function as a probability density (the "Born rule"). Born was German and Jewish, and in 1933 almost as soon as the Nazis came to power he was suspended from the University of Göttingen. He managed to obtain a temporary position in Cambridge, England, and so emigrated to the UK where he remained until retirement, having secured a professorship at Edinburgh.
Born's daughter Irene married a Welshman called Bryn Newton-John, and they had children including the famous Olivia.
What I didn't know before reading about Olivia following her death is that she is also related to my predecessor in the nuclear theory group here at Surrey, Lewis Elton. The link is flagged up on Wikipedia because Lewis was the father of Ben Elton and the connection to Ben is mentioned, rather than to Ben's (less famous) father.
A little digging on Wikipedia allows the full family link between Olivia Newton-John and Ben Elton to be worked out, and hence the family link between Max Born and Lewis Elton:
Max's father-in-law, Victor Ehrenberg (jurist), had a brother Otto Ehrenberg. Otto's sons include another Victor Ehrenberg (historian), and this Victor was the father of Lewis. Here's the relevant section of the family tree:
My sort-of relation to Max Born can be seen in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. It shows a kind of family tree of supervisor-student relationships for PhDs in Mathematics and related areas, including theoretical physics. Max Born was my great-great-grandsupervisor, through his student Viktor Weisskopf, then Arthur Kerman, Mike Strayer, who was one of my PhD supervisors. "Family" tree below:
Today is the day my University has slightly moved away from the traditional UK University job titles (as many other Universities in the UK have done). The academic ranks used to run Lecturer → Senior Lecturer → Reader → Professor. Now they have made the rather minor change to Lecturer → Senior Lecturer → Associate Professor → Professor.
This seems a slightly odd thing to do, as in the US, which rather dominates the world in higher education, the job title of Associate Professor is more like our Senior Lecturer, while our Reader roughly corresponds to the lower half of the US professor grade.
Well, the changes make little material difference to anything. Being a Reader (my grade) is a bit of a strange job title, as people not familiar with universities must wonder how someone's job can be to read stuff, and "associate professor" at least includes the recognised word "professor". Still... those already on the disappearing Reader grade were given the option to keep it for now (until promoted to professor). In the end, I decided I would keep the reader title that I've had for a while. I have around 20 years left to fail to get promoted, and I might just end up the University's only Reader in the mid 2040s since anyone newly promoted to the grade will have to take the new associate professor title.
Yesterday the death of Nichelle Nichols was announced. Her link to this blog is a bit tangential. She was an actor, singer and model whose iconic acting role ended up being as Lt Uhuru in the original Star Trek series. I was a fan of Star Trek (and still am) from a young age, watching it with my mum, and over the years I've probably watched the episodes of "TOS" (the original series) many times. In fact, I am in the middle or revisiting them all with my 8 year old daughter, and we watched the episode The Return of the Archons together last week.
I don't know if my interest in Star Trek was related to my interest in things sciency in general, or whether it even promoted my interest in science things, but I certainly am not alone in the world of physics being a Star Trek fan, starting from watching TOS with my mum, and then the Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and Voyager.
When watching Star Trek as a child, I had no understanding of the racial politics in the US and how groundbreaking it was to have a black woman in such a major role in a primetime TV show. There's a nice story on her wikipedia entry about how she wanted to leave Star Trek after the first season to take up a role in a play on Broadway, and Martin Luther King Jr asked her to stay in Star Trek, as he recognised the important role model she had become to black people, and so she stayed throughout the whole run of series, and all the spin-off films, too.
RIP Nichelle Nichols 1932-2022
Mainly she seems to be enjoying it, and I am too, but one phrase in the introduction did jar with me when reading it out to her. The author talks a bit about time travel in popular culture, mentioning Doctor Who and how audiences "thrilled to the adventures of the time lord Dr Who and his attractive lady accomplices."
I didn't stop reading or start talking about why the "lady accomplices" should have been described as "attractive" when they are no doubt lots of other things, and she didn't stop to ask, but I certainly gave a huge inward sigh, realising that this is the world she is living in. We're still reading through the book together, and I think I indeed must say something to her about it. Perhaps when we've finsihed we can talk about things we thought about the book, and I can give my thoughts then.
The Daily Mail and General Trust's publication New Scientist has a report in it, here, that the Home Office has commissioned a report on supposed scientific methods to determine someone's age. The "someones" in question are those who come to UK seeking asylum. The UK government has come up with a high-profile scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda while their claims are being dealt with, despite being technically competent to look after people and process their asylum claims in the UK.
One sticking point with the process is that children are not supposed to be sent to Rwanda, but the exact ages of asylum seekers (who are quite possibly without documents) can't be verified by the government, who may doubt the claim of someone to be still a child. Their bright idea, then, is to find ways of accurately determining age, and so a report has been commissioned.
According to the New Scientist story, which includes some details of the yet-unpublished report, one of the methods is in the use of dental X-rays. I'm not qualified to comment on whether any of the physiological measures of age are reliable (but it strongly looks like not) but the idea of giving someone ionizing radiation for a non-therapeutic purpose is totally immoral. Ionising radiation is damaging. It carries a risk of causing damage to the body, which could result in cancer. The effect is small, but giving X-rays is a calculated risk if there is a medical reason for it. In this case, there is no medical reason, simply a political one, and there can be no justification for it at all.
I hope when the report appears that it is not implemented, and that if there is an attempt to implement it, no medical practitioner would agree to do it, but it's bad enough that it's even being thought about.
It has just been announced that my colleague at the University of Surrey, (emeritus) Prof Phil Walker, has received the 2022 Lise Meitner prize for his work on nuclear isomers. A good description of the significance of isomers is given in the announcement from the European Physical Society. It points out that the discovery of isomers happened 100 years ago (actually 101), and Phil co-organised a meeting in Berlin in the place where Hahn made that discovery. The workshop took place this year and was able to happen in-person, though Phil only attended remotely thanks to the general ongoing difficulties in international travel through the pandemic.
This is not the first time I have blogged about Phil winning a prize. He was also awarded the 2019 IoP Rutherford medal. When I mentioned that, I pointed out how kind and helpful Phil has been with me in my career, and that I had 14 co-authored papers with him and hoped that I might be able to increase that number. In fact, that has happened - last year Phil and I published a paper together on gamma decay of isomeric states.
Congratulations Phil!
Last night was the Covid-rescheduled visit of Laura Veirs to Guildford's premier music venue, the Boileroom. I was bought a ticket by my mother-in-law for my birthday last year, and the original date for the gig was in October 2021. That got pushed to last night, and I went along to see her play. The support act was Joni - a singer-songwriter from LA, now living in London, who sung a set of sweet folky songs, a little reminiscent of Edie Brickell (though looking up the blurb for tonight's gig in Brighton, I see she is also described as "evoking the feelings of indie darlings Cat Power, Feist and Charlotte Gainsbourg.").
Then came Laura Veirs. The last time I saw Laura Veirs was a few years ago also at the Boileroom. Last time, I'm pretty sure, she came with a band. This time she was by herself, so although she is overall quite a folky and acoustic artist, some of her songs are a bit rockier and she did not play those ones last night. There was quite a range of material played covering her many albums, including from the period of hers that I know best (around the time of July Flame and Warp and Weft). She played some new songs from her soon-to-be-released album which (she explained) were a bit more experimental, using alternative tunings, and playing off beat for example. I liked the new stuff and look forward to listening to the album.
Near the end she said she'd take requests and I didn't shout anything out, but she finished pre-encore with the song I probably would have shouted for, I can see your tracks. I see that I posted a video to that before when I went to see Laura Veirs play. This time, I'll post another one. It's from the same album (July Flame) and she played it about half way through the set last night. It's called When You Give Your Heart. This version is a live-on-radio take:
Hot on the heels of my trip to GLive on Monday to see the Unthanks, I was back to see Lord of the Dance. This was quite a different event to the minimalist and intimate folk music of Monday night. Lord of the Dance featured a giant projected screen starting with a mini hagioraphy of Michael Flatley, dancer and founder of the show. After that the live dancing started, along with grandiose scenic accompaniment on the projected screen.
The dancing was very impressive, with a mixed group of dancers playing out scenes in story of a battle between good and evil (loosely, and to the extent that I understood the story). The music was augmented by the rhythmic sounds coming from the dancers' hard shoes, and I enjoyed seeing brilliant well-practiced artists doing their thing. Monday night was more my scene, but I'm glad I came to see the dancing.
From where we were sitting we had a good view, but it was quite far back, so my picture taken as the cast were coming on to take their bows is not the clearest
Last night I went to see The Unthanks play at GLive in Guildford. I was excited when I heard that they were coming and managed to be online when the tickets were released, so I and my partner were right in the middle of the front row. They played a 2x1hr set with a break in the middle, where I had the pleasure of talking to my colleague Wilton and his wife Andrea at the bar.
This is the start of an unusually hectic week for me. I'm back at GLive on Wedensday for Lord of the Dance, out for my ice skating lesson on Thursday and at book club (for Elena Knows) on Friday. Perhaps once this would not have been so unusual, but since having children it is. I guess the youngest is now getting to the age that going out and leaving him with a babysitter is doable. Still, the fact that he wakes us up at least an hour before we want/need to get up is still a hindrance to having too many late nights!
Here's a picture taken from our plum seats in the front row:
Coming up soon is the Qiskit Global Summer School which is something I'm suggesting some of my students attend.
I was wondering whether at least some of it might be far too elementary for them, as the summer school is open to students aged 14 and over, with a prerequisite of knowledge that attendees know some basic maths including matrices. One of the co-supervisors I was discussing this with, who is a bit younger than me, commented that he'd never come across a 14 year old who knew about matrices, which reminded me that today's students indeed don't come across them at that age.
I happened to have on my desk a copy of Book 4 volume 2 of the School Mathematics Project textbook that I used at school. Indeed, it has a stamp in it of my secondary school, and it is presumably a copy I should have, but didn't, give back to them after using.
Here's a picture of the first page, the start of chapter 11 (it being volume 2, after all)
