Books of 2023

 

I use the GoodReads app / website to keep track of books I am reading.  I kid myself that I will use it to write wise and interesting reviews of each book I read, but I rarely do so.  Here, however, is an attempt to give a very truncated mini-review of each book I read in 2023:

1. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus: A book club obligation that was a kind of fun romp, set in a world adjacent to my own - scientists at Universities / research labs.  I didn't like the fantastic elements like the magic dog, and the plot was pretty ridiculous, with clichéd backstory and rather black and white portrayal of everything and everyone.  On one level, quite fun as mindless entertainment.

2. Solar by Ian McEwan: From a set of books with an environmental theme, though the environment is more of the backstory, while the book is about the people, their behaviour and their relationships.  More so than Lessons in Chemistry, this one had smatterings of my real life, with the main figure being a physicist.  The closeness to my own life was sometimes a bit uncomfortable: The physicist in the book is jerk, yet I could see parallels between my own life and his.  I used to read and enjoy Ian McEwan books around 30 years ago, and I do like his writing.  His portrayal of people and events is perceptive, though it feels to me like it is a kind of 30 year old, and more misogynistic way of writing than I have become used to in more recent years.  Is that just him portraying the world accurately?

3. The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi:  Another in the series of environmentally-tinged books.  In this case, it is set on the coast of Taiwan and the enviromental concerns are the inundation of land from the ocean, and an island of plastic and trash building up in the pacific.  In what seems like a more deliberate way than Lessons in Chemistry, the magic realism work well, and I felt immersed in the world of aboriginal Taiwan.

4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë:  I have read this before, but this year I read it to my 9 year old.  Possibly too early to have read it to her partly for the language and partly for the plot.  She seems to enjoy more or less everything she experiences, and this book was no exception.  A favourite of mine, too.  One of the (many) upsides of having kids is reading old favourites to them.

5. The Men by Sandra Newman:  I love Sandra Newman's writing and I've picked up and read each of her last few new books (though I still haven't got a copy of her latest, Julia).  I enjoyed The Men well enough, though not as much as, say, The Heavens. It is a favourite genre of mine - feminist dystopia, of the sort that publishers seem to be churning out since the TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale.  Enjoyable writing by Newman, as always, and nice to see how she had the characters deal with the premise (the sudden disappearance of all men from the world), but with a so-so plot hanging the whole thing together.

6. The School For Good Mothers by Jesamine Chan:  A book club obligation, and another feminist dystopia.  This time supposing that the American state polices parental quality to an extent that parenting lapses are punished by removal of a child and compulsory attendance in parenting boot camp.  Much of it was plausible and scary enough, though there was (I think unintended) magic with technologically implausible 'dolls' which had to be cared for in the boot camp.  I didn't enjoy the book that much, having to read it, figuratively, through my fingers at times as one thing after another went wrong for the poor heroine of the story.   It did a good job of getting into my head, and I was a bit devastated by the outcome for the heroine and her training doll.

7. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain:  This is what 9yo and I followed up Jane Eyre with.  I remember liking it a lot when I read it aged about 13.  Re-reading now, it was okay, but I saw neither the plot or the writing as exceptional.  Hard to judge older books which may have been groundbreaking and often emulated (and bettered).  Enjoyed reprising the kind of accent I used to hear when I lived in Tennessee.

8. Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh:  My first non-fiction book that I finished this year, which I actually started in 2022.  I was bought it as a present from my oldest daughter.  I recognised the author's name, recalling that he was a tutor at my Oxford college when I was there (and he still is).  Not that I ever knew him, as his politics and history did not overlap with my physics.  Very enjoyable book about a person and a piece of history about which I knew very litle.  Depressing to read it and reflect on the failed state that Haiti now seems to be. 

9. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk:  A present bought for me, but one I was looking forward to read.  I'd misplaced the book and it ended up taking longer to get the to the top of the pile.  Like many books, when I think back to reading it, I am transported to the place where I did much of the reading.  In this case, in a cramped fumey boat cabin where I lay quite ill while on holiday in Italy.  I think I had built up the book to be some kind of Tolstoyan epic covering lofty and broad ideas.  In fact, it's a darkly comedic book with an unreliable narrator whose character is the main draw, and the unfolding story a delight to read. 

10. Small Island by Andrea Levy:  A book club book.  I had tried to read this book once before, years ago.  This was in the days before kids when my partner and I would read a book out loud to each other.  I found the Jamaican Patois too hard to say out loud without me sounding silly.  Was no problem reading it and just having the words in my head.  It's set around the Second World War and features the lives of Jamaicans who come to the UK.  I can see why it was turned into a TV series, as the chapters are written as scenes, and the events are overdramatised.  Good fun.

11. The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:  As the shops in the Whitgift Centre in Croydon are closing down one by one, so the decaying branch of WH Smiths there has had a long-term sale of terrible books written and ghost written by minor celebrities.  Sometimes there are interesting books to be found there, and I picked up this for a pound or two, liking the sound of the investigative journalism looking at the transition of power by the Trump team (or effectively the lack of it).  I was drawn to it partly because of things to do with nuclear issues, so close to my work interests, though the book is broader, concetrating on several different goverment agencies, depening on testimony from a selection of people the author interviewed.  It reads like a half-written up summary of interview notes made by the author, in preparation for a fully-developed book, but was rather published quickly to get out there while it could still count as journalism.  Interesting, but would have rather read the full book, especially as I was reading it a couple of years after the event.

12. The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin:  I'd been bought these books (this is the first of a trilogy) by my ex-wife, whose taste I trust implicitly, and had slightly put of reading them by being a bit underwhelmed by another book of Jemisin's.  But this, and the following two books in the series, were great.  Glorious Sci-fi, exploring all the themes and beautifully written.

13. I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys:  A book club read.  This falls under Young Adult fiction, and is set in Romania during the last days of communism.  I remember that time well, following the news as it happened while I was a 15 year old - about the same age as the main protagonist in the novel.  The book has a compelling story, adroitly written in short chapters, developing the coming of age story intertwined with the historic events.  Full of pathos.  Waiting for the film adaptation.

14. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain:  I remember thinking this much superior than the simpler and more childish Tom Sawyer book when I read it originally.  With the changes wrought in my by 30 years, I no longer see the distinction so clearly.  

15. Strange People I Have Known by Andy McSmith:  I used to enjoy reading Andy McSmith's journalism when I was a reader of the defunct paper-based Independent newspaper.  When I saw this memoir pop up I ordered it and devoured it pretty speedily.  I enjoy autobiographical work.  As long as the author appears to honestly reflect over events in their life, then the expert perspective usually makes for a very satisfying read that helps me understand what it is like to be (a) human (that is not me), which is the subtext for why I read anything, I suppose.  This book did not disappoint. Interesting anecdotes about political life over the last half century, from a personal perpective.

16. The Kingdom of the Sea by Zohra Nabi:  A children's book that my partner bought for my 9 year old.  Partner read it it 9yo and recommended it to me, so I read it.  A nice adventure story as a girl discovers a secret existence and makes here way from contemporary UK to a magic part of the Earth.  So many good kids books available these days.

17. You're a Bad Man Mr Gum! by Andy Stanton:  A book I read to my 6yo.  I knew I'd like it because I'd read it before to my now-9yo and my now-16yo enjoyed it when she was younger too.  It's a silly book, with silly names and silly things in it, but pulls of the brilliant trick of doing silliness well and making it a great please to read as an adult and to listen to as a child.  

18. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi:  A book club obligation.  I previously read his The Drowned and the Saved and became an instant fan of his writing.  He is able to portray great feeling with rather formal and even abstract writing, like no-one else I have read.  This book uses stories from Levi's life as a professional chemist to link together autobiographical stories.  A real pleasure (despite the bleak occurences - Levi was in Auschwitz as an Italian Jew).  I could have down withouth the pure fiction chapters which I didn't think were up to the standard of the autobiographical writing.

19. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin:  One of the zeitgeisty books that everyone seems to be reading.  I was keen to jump on the bandwagon, and found it to be a very intense bildingsroman as we follow some a group of self-centred children grow up into self-centred adults.  Some gratuitous tragic life story and this reads like a kind of junior version of A Little Life. 

20. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears:  I've had this sitting on my shelf since a friend of mine left in my house (accidently, I think) many years ago, and it never got returned (Sorry, Gwilym).  Every now and then I hear people rave about it, and so again this year when someone mentioned it on Twitter in glowing terms.  Finally, then, I read it, and I'd say it's worth the hype.  A very well-crafted historical novel with four different witnesses recalling a series of events taking place in and around Oxford in the 17th Century.  A highbrow page-turner that I finished as quickly as anything else I read this year, despite it probably being the longest fiction book I read.

21. Hard Times - Charles Dickens:  A book club choice.  We discussed the possibility of reading a Dickens book, and this came up as the choice, thanks to it being one of the shortest Dickens books, and we having a deadline to read it by.  I could have sworn I'd read the book before.  I knew all about Gradgrind and "Now, what I want is, Facts", but it turns out that was just through cultural osmosis and the book was largely new to me. I like reading Dickens, though I rather struggled to enjoy it to begin with, thanks I think largely to reading single chapters and half-chapters in snatched moments, only really getting long reading sessions towars the end, which I enjoyed much more

22. The Mystery of the Whistling Caves - Helen Moss:  The first of a series of advernture stories.  I read this to my 6yo.  This series features a pair of boys on holiday in Cornwall where they befriend a girl and her dog and together solve lots of criminal cases.  It is a modern-day Famous Five, more or less.  I enjoyed reading the books to the now 9-yo and now I am reading them the to 6yo.  I also read the next couple of books in the series, not listed separately here.

23. The Northern Lights - Phillip Pullman:  Again, with the excuse of reading books I like to my 9yo, I started reading the greatest set of recent children's books.  The books only came out when I was an adult and I remember first hearing about Northern Lights on Radio 4 many years ago when Pullman was being interviewed about it.  I thought it sounded intruiging and I bought a copy and greatly enjoyed it.  Truly a children's book which is not simply a childish pleasure for an adult, but a great book.  Also not listed seperately, we read The Subtle Knife.  Book 3 (The Amber Spyglass) we are part-way through.

24. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou: Somewhere high up on the list of iconic books that somehow I have not read yet.  Rectified this year, thanks to it being selected for a book club.  I was expecting to enjoy it more than I did.  The writing style left me cold much of the time, and the lack of narrative in what is ostensibly a chronological autobiography did not do much to draw me in.  Despite it being a surprising slog, I had warmed to it considerably by the end, though I don't think I'll be reading the follow up autobiographies.

25. Minor Detail - Adania Shibli:  I heard of this short novel through a report that its publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions was making the eBook free to read in response to the Frankfurt Book Fair withdrawing it from the shortlist for a prize, because it dealt with the historic Israel-Palestine conflict in a way sympathetic to Palestinian people.  The book gives a fictonalised account of the true story of the group rape and killing of a Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers in 1949 and is written in two parts:  One, from the point of view of the leader of the soldier group in 1949, and the second from a Palestinian woman investigating the story today.  The prose in the first half is written in a very matter of fact and spare way, creating an odd effect for the subject matter.  I suppose it serves to dehumanise the victim from the point of view of the soldiers, though the lead soldier is not portrayed unsympathetically.  The voice changes for the second half, and the woman's inner monologue is centred as much on her own neuroses and difficulties in navigating life as it is on her investigation.  A book that will stay with me

26. My Fourth Time We Drowned - Sally Hayden:  I saw this come up on Twitter and fancied reading it, so I bought it and then tried to persuade the book group to pick it as one of our non-fiction books, but they wouldn't have something potentially so sad or harrowing.  I read it outside of book club, and learned a lot about the horror of the lives of those who try to migrate from Eritrea (mostly) to Europe via Libya.  In Libya they are detained by what amounts to a government, or controlling faction at least, in inhuman conditions, where their families are extorted.  All the while European countries and the UN contribute to the cruelty, coming out very badly from the whole sorry afair.  Vital reading for our times.

27. Flora and Ulysses - Kate DiCamillo: I started reading this to my 6yo, having bought it for my now-16yo years ago.  She didn't like it but I then read it to my now-10yo and she enjoyed it, as did I.  Now 6yo begged me to stop reading it after a while, but I finished it by myself, as I find it delightful.

28. A Shining - Jon Fosse:  A Christmas present which I read on Christmas Day.  Well, it's a short story or perhaps just about a Novella, coming in at around 50 pages.  50 pages of a single paragraph mind you, with the stream of consciousness of someone lost in the Scandinavian wilderness as they see (hallucinate?) a shining presence, then their own parents and then another being.  Fosse won the Nobel Prize for literature this year.  Enjoyable enough, but I'd take George Saunders for this kind of thing any day.

29. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:  Having read Hard Times, and pondered over the pile of unread Dickens books on my shelves, I started reading this, then carried on, then finished.  LIke Hard Times, I got increasingly more into in as I got through the book.  It ends up as quite an action packed adventure story: more like Hugo than Dickens, and certainly there are hints of Les Miseables (though that was published a couple of years after A Tale of Two Cities).  It does nothing to stop my slow and inexorable journey through all of Dickens novels.  

There we go.  In the end, perhaps not as "mini" for each review as intended.  Here's to 2024.

Cultural activities with Kim Wilde

Last night I took my brother out for his birthday present:  A visit to Union Chapel in Islington to see Kim Wilde.  My brother and I both grew up in the heyday of Kim Wilde's pop startdom, and without either of us being superfans, we both enjoy 80s pop, and I rate Kids from America as well up there as a pinnacle of the genre.  Neither of us had been to the Union Chapel before.  It is a beautful building (see below) with wooden pews that were comfortable enough to sit on for the duration of the show (well, I'd just been on an LNER train for 2h before the gig, so it seemed pretty comfortable to me.  There's something very odd about the seats on those trains).

I was vaguely aware that Kim's brother Ricky is also a musician, but not aware that he wrote many of her hits and that they play together still.  I was glad to find out, as he was there last night and is an excellent musician and performer, and along with his daughter Scarlett Wilde and a fourth unrelated band member whose name I can't remember (sorry), they played a lovely acoustic show mixing up their own songs, and well-chosen cover versions which suited them well.  I was probably one of the only people in the room who used to be a serious fan of the German band Münchener Freiheit, and recognised and enjoyed hearing a version of their English language hit Keeping the Dream Alive.  They picked another favourite song of mine to cover: Fleet Foxes' White Winter Hymnal, and they did a lot of Christmas songs.  

After booking the gig as a present for my brother, I had some doubts that it really was a good idea.  Would it be a dull affair watching an ex-star scrape together a show attended by a middle-aged audience who lacked the imagination to listen to contemporary music?  Fortunately not - the whole band was excellent, the music top quality, and the event was a pleasure to be part of. 

Nuclear Physics @ SciPost

 

A few years ago, we were looking for somewhere to publish conference proceedings for a conference held at Surrey.  We went for SciPost Proceedings, for a variety of reasons.  Mainly it boiled down to the overall SciPost philosophy - that high-cost traditional journals do not justify their high-cost, and asking all our participants to pay an increased fee to publish the proceedings was not justified.  SciPost follows on from the existence of things like the arXiv, which runs at low enough cost that scientists can deposit unrefereed preprints of their articles there for no charge to the scientists, and from where they can be downloaded at no-cost to the reader.  SciPost adds, effectively, peer review to the system, and the uniformity and citeability of a journal style.  Really the main addition - peer review - is something that the high-cost journals get the academic community to do for free anyway.  With SciPost, at least the results of our free labour are free for all to see.

The SciPost family of journals started out with what is still the biggest one (in terms of articles published): SciPost Physics.  It accepts papers in all areas of physics, and follows the classification scheme originated by the arXiv.  So if your paper can be reasonably deposited in the physics part of the arXiv, then it can be legitimately submitted to SciPost Physics.  So far, there are rather few papers in SciPost Physics that come from nuclear physics, particularly the sort of low-energy nuclear physics that I work on.  BUT... I can announce that I have joined the Editorial College of SciPost and hope to encourage some nuclear physics articles to head there.  If you are a nuclear physicist looking for somewhere to publish your next article, please let me try to persuade you to use SciPost Physics!

Daydream Nation

 I saw a couple of days ago that the album Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth was celebrating its 35th anniversary, having been released on 18th Oct 1988.  The Wikipedia page points out that it is considered to be "one of the greatest albums of all time" and it is certainly one that I have enjoyed over the last 35 years.  Though the band has now split up, I got to see them many times over the years, with the last time being when they played Daydream Nation in full at the Roundhouse in London.  Band member Thurston Moore has written his memoirs which are due out next month, and I think I will enjoy reading them, though I usually find a lot of music writing unbearably pretentious as a genre.  Fingers crossed for that, and happy birthday Daydream Nation.  Here's the most famous song from the album, Teenage Riot

Last Night's Farm Hall

Last night I watched Farm Hall at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre.  The play is set in the closing months of the Second World War, giving a dramatised account of the internment of a group of German scientists in a country house in Godmanchester.  I enjoyed the dramatisation very much, and thought the actors all did a good job of conveying the plausible and different characters of the protagonists von Laue, Hahn, Heisenberg, von Weizsäcker, Bagge, and Diebner, though I have no way of telling if the characters are authentic.  

I'm a nuclear physicist, and have grown up in a country whose culture is steeped with the legacy of the Second World War, so the general story is not particularly new to me:  I knew a group of German scientists was working on a fission bomb programme, and that they were ultimately not terribly close to producing a final result, and there has been much speculation as to whether Heisenberg, an intellectual leader of the project, effectively sabotaged the work - a question I don't think has ever been answered definitively.  

This re-telling of the story has the benefit of access to the transcripts of the listening devices placed at the house where the scientists were interned, so we can hear what they said about their involvement in the war and closeness to the Nazi Party, and their fears for the future.  

It seems that this is not the only play covering exactly the same situation, with Operation Epsilon currently showing (until Oct 21st) at the Southwark Playhouse, while Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, deals with another closely-related part of the story.  Then there is Friedrich Dürrenmat's somewhat older The Physicists, a more abstracted tale but still effectively dealing with the human consequences of having invented the atomic bomb.

Obviously I didn't take any photos as the play was going on, so here's a picture of me and my wife during the interval

 

Farm Hall next week

 

I've been enjoying an elevated amount of visits to the Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford recently.  After all, when you have the luxury of living in a 15 minute city town it's a shame not to make use of the facilities.  This week I've been to the ballet to see Swan Lake and Giselle on successive nights, presented by the "Classical Ballet and Opera House" company. 

Next week is something that plays more directly to my professional interests:  Farm Hall, a play set in the closing days of the Second World War when German nuclear physicists had been rounded up and interned at a house near Cambridge and left to associate with each other while their conversations were listened in to in order to see what could be learned about the German nuclear bomb project.

The play got good write-ups from it's run in London, and I'm looking forward to seeing it next week.  If any readers are in the vicinity of Guildford, there are plenty of tickets left:  Please come along and support me having a great theatre within walking distance of my house :-)

RIP Keith Huddlestone

 I learnt the news today that my physics teacher at secondary school, Keith Huddlestone, died at the weekend.  My school, a relatively small comprehensive in north-west Essex, had two physics teachers that I recall during the time I was there, and though I was taught by both, I recall that Mr Huddlestone was the main one I had teaching me.  I was at the school between 1985 and 1992 and I took physics classes the whole way through, leaving with an A level in the subject before going off to university to study yet more physics.  Mr Huddlestone was a kind person and a good teacher, who helped me learn the subject that I ended up making my career in.  I remember his close involvement with running the Old Newportonians society of ex-pupils.  He only stood down from this role a few months ago, having been doing it for 50 years(!) so predating my time at the school, which already feels like a long time ago to me.

I don't know how old Keith was when he died, but he had a long and I hope happy life.  When I learnt that he was stepping down from the old pupils' society earlier this year, I sent a message letting him know that I was promoted to professor this year, and I hope he took some satisfaction in the success of this particular ex-pupil.  RIP Keith.

arXiv on hold

 On Thursday I finished writing a short paper that is destined to appear in the conference proceedings on Comex7, a conference I went to in Italy in June.  As I typically do, I sent it to the arXiv so that people would be able to see it straight away, and so it is easily found, the conference proceedings being somewhere that people wouldn't stumble across.  

The paper should have appeared in arXiv on Friday, but it didn't, as it is "on hold"

The meaning of on hold is: 

Submissions may be put on hold for a variety of reasons, ranging from questions about proper classification, pending moderator approval, presentation issues, copyrighted PDF, etc., to editorial concerns. Most of these do not require any further input from the submitter and will be dealt with in due course. arXiv urges submitters to be patient. Due to the large volume of submissions, it may take several days before a resolution is reached.

I think there can be no doubt about proper classification: I submitted to nucl-th and it is a straight nuclear theory paper of the sort I have sent there without problem many times before.  I can't really see that there would be any presentation issues - it's a LaTeX-prepared document that looks just fine.   I can't see how copyright issues could be flagged.  The text is not pasted from anywhere else and the single figure was prepared specially for this article.  As for editorial concerns - I'm not sure what these could be or how they could be flagged. 

My guess, which may be totally wrong, is that the fact that one of the authors is Indian is the problem.  He comes from a community where people have only a single name, with no family name.  It has caused other problems with western-designed gatekeeping systems, and it's the only thing I can think that is at all out of the ordinary.  Unfortunately I don't think arXiv communicate any of the actual reasons for putting papers on hold so I'll never know.

Ultimately, this instance doesn't really matter too much, and it probably will never matter to me whether my article appears the day after I submit it or a week later.   The corner of the academic world I inhabit seems too low-stakes in terms of competing groups striving for priority over discoveries that I cannot imagine being disadvantaged by such delays.  It for sure doesn't matter with this conference proceeding... but I am aware that other people do get annoyed by this opaque delay in papers appearing.

New Academic Year

 It's the last working day of September, and the last day of week 1 of our semester.  I've now given my first classes in the Special Relativity module that I have been teaching in one form or other since 2006.  I keep begging to be able to give it up and to teach something else, as part of the enjoyment of teaching is to keep learning new things myself, but so far my continuing duties have been required.  It's not to say that I don't enjoy teaching Special Relativity.  It's even led to a fun publication when a keen student enjoyed the course so much that he wanted to do his bachelor's final year project on the topic, and we managed to do something publishable.  

On the other hand, the other module I usually teach this semester, Modern Computational Techniques, is a course I had been teaching (under different guises) since 2004, and I am glad that I have managed to move on from that.  That module is discontinued, though some of the mateial lives on in a course combining advanced computational and experimental methods, on which I still teach.  Part of this new module is an optional project on quantum computing, which I am looking after.  That's pretty exciting for me, and I'm looking forward to the first subset of students in the class embarking on that project with me and my PhD student Lance next week.  

In non-physics news, it's also the start of the new season of the Quiz League of London, and I'm pleased to have been involved in our team's first match, which we won reasonably comfortably.

For a picture to accompany this post, I looked at my camera roll for this week.  Probably the most appropriate is the room in which my 40 students were supposed to come for my Special Relativity Lecture.  I'm glad I went a couple of days before to check it out, as there is was definitely not room for 40 students in there.  I managed to get the class moved to a room with capacity, even if not all students attended.

 

Isle of Wight

 I'm back from a holiday on the Isle of Wight.  It was the second-to-last week of the school holidays for my kids, and we went with my parents, and my brother's family, to share a house in Cowes for a week, visiting different places on the Isle of Wight.  For excursions, we went to Blackgang Chine, a theme park in existence since the mid-19th century that I remember fondly from my own childhood trips to the Isle of Wight (albeit in the late-20th century), on the Isle of Wight Steam Railway - once part of an extensive rail network on the island, now largely removed - and Osborne house, one of Queen Victoria's principal residences.  

I had a lovely week away from work, and noticed no particular nuclear physics things to post about upon my return.  The Isle of Wight's scientific fame mainly lies, as far as I am aware, in the discovery of dinosaur fossils, in common with the nearby mainland Jurassic Coast. 

Here's a picture of one of my sons, Kit, with a professor from a Punch and Judy show in the grounds of Osborne House.

Group meal

 Last night the nuclear theory group at Surrey went out for a meal for a bit of team bonding, and to celebrate the end of the week, my getting promoted, and Esra's paper in Nature Communications.  In the picture below are (L-R) Bharti, Esra, Paul (me), Alexis, Natasha, Matteo, and Abhishek.  Bharti and Abhishek are postdocs, Esra, me, Alexis and Matteo are the four faculty members in the group, and Natasha is my wife.  Missing is another Natasha, our senior research fellow, who was not able to make it.  It's rare for us to get a group photo like this (albeit missing one of us), so it definitely requires a blogpost to share it

RIP Bikash Sinha

I am saddened to hear of the death of Bikash Sinha, who was a nuclear physicist from India who rose to the role of the director of major research institutes (Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics).  I remember him from a visit to India – I think to a conference in Shimla in 2005 – where he was kindly hospitable to me and the other English visitor, especially when the latter was suffering from food poisoning.  At that time, he was already a bigwig in the Indian research world, and it was, I think, my only direct interaction with him.  In reading his obituaries (In the Indian Telegraph and via Facebook friends who knew him) I learnt that he spend some of his early career in King's College, London, back in the day when nuclear physics was more widely studied in the UK.  He was, like me, a theorist, and he was closely involved in optical potential theory.  He might have been interested to know that some of the current work in the group is on optical potential theory, using some quite different methods to those Sinha used in the 70s, but nevertheless, showing that the problem is still a current one. 

Here is the picture in a direct link to the Telegraph of India file (so if it stops showing in later years, it'll be because they've removed access to the file!)

End of the Clebsch-O-Matic

 The University of Surrey's IT Services has announced that it is shutting down the web server that lets users put stuff in their own ~/public_html directory to be served directly on the internet.  I received an email a while ago to tell met that this was happening, as they could see that I was making use of it.  It is not going to cause me any great problems since my personally-run work webpage moved to github a little while ago (though I don't really understand how to use it properly).

The other page that I have is the Clebsch-o-Matic, which is an old java-based quantum angular momentum coupling calculator that I wrote when I was supposed to be dong my PhD, but had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and so decided to learn Java, as it was the computer language du jour (I also learned some Perl at the same time, which was then very popular).  I wrote what were then called Java applets which were computer programs which could be embedded into web pages, to be run in a Java virtual machine on the user's computer, within the web browser.  Through a combination of various factors to do with computer security, fashion, the demise of Sun Microsystems and the purchase of their technologies including Java by Oracle, Java applets no longer work in modern browsers, so my online calculator probably works for no-one currently living in 2023.   It'll be a shame for the page to disappear, but there is no real point me migrating it unless and until I re-write the calculator in whatever language one can use these days.

It's probably of historical interest to no-one, but before I completely forget it, I could mention that I had actually written an earlier version of the calculator in  bc, the standard Unix calculator tool, that I still use on an almost daily basis on the command line on my Mac to do quick sums.  It is also powerful enough to write programs, and has the benefit that it can deal with arbitrary precision integers, which is very useful for the calculation of these angular momentum coupling coefficients. The bc program was accessed via the CGI mechanism which first called a Perl script which did some munging of the CGI input to pass to the bc program.  The bc program output some hand-coded html to format the result, and because of the way the CGI mechanism worked, the code was run on the web server, not the user's client.  The CGI part of the Surrey web server was closed down in the distant past, but I think I had already written the java version by then. 

Probably the only remaining thing that will be a very minor problem for me when the web server is shut down, is that I occasionaly put files there to share, or pictures that I use in places like this blog.  Things in computing have changed a lot in the last 30 or so years (that being around the time I started doing things like writing web pages), and the days of allowing users to do things "directly" are fast becoming a distant memory.  

At the time of writing, they haven't finally shut down the server, and I can still see the Clebsch-o-matic page, which looks like this:

Professor

Today is the first of August, which means my job title has changed to Professor, following a successful attempt at promotion.

In the UK system these days, the title of Professor is one you can work towards and hope to get promoted to during your career.  In the past, professorships (aka chairs) were rarer and something that you couldn't necessarily expect to be able to attain in an academic career.  Often they were named chairs (e.g. the Lucasian Professorship at Cambridge) and one could only get this role if the incumbent left, or died.

Fortunately, no-one had to die for me to become professor.  Instead, I had to convice the promotion panel that I was hitting the appropriate targets and satisfying the role requirements of the professor role well enough.  Apparently I managed to do this.  I've been at the University of Surrey since 2000, first as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate, then a temporary Lecturer, then a permanent Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, then Reader, and now Professor.   I think that my official designation during the lecturer period changed from Lecturer A to Lecturer B.  

I can't deny that is is nice to be promoted, though as with many things in academia, it is just a proxy for real successes - like doing well in supporting students and staff and in achieving good things in teaching and research, which are the truly satisfying results.  I have not always been the most adept at navigating the career structure of academia, and my not-Earth-shattering 23 year journey to professorship is partly to do with this.  On the other hand - that's not far past the half-way mark of my career.  Assuming I retire when my state pension kicks in, I have about another 20 years left working - so plenty of time to justify my new job title with great acts.

The picture attached to this post is of a Punch and Judy show, the practitioners of which also go by the name of Professors.

Class of 2023

 It's undergraduate graduation day for Physics students at the University of Surrey.  I came dressed in my fancy robes (Open University MSc) and enjoyed seeing the students in their University of Surrey robes walk up to the front of Guildford cathedral to get their degrees.  Often I would stay for the reception after the ceremony, but not today.  The reception is the place where I can catch up with now-departed students and meet their proud parents.  That's really the best part of the day, but I had another appointment today and couldn't stay for it.  Usually, I would be able to get a picture of me with some of the students, but today, I only managed to be in a picture with other staff members as we waited outside the tradesman's entrance, as tweeted by my colleague Caroline.  I'm the tall one in blue:

Ready to celebrate with @SurreyMathsPhys 😀 Congratulations to all graduating today! pic.twitter.com/76G06lX3Vl

— Caroline S-T (@Dr_CST) July 19, 2023

There was no mention of the Marking and Assessment Boycott at the ceremony, as has happened at some other Unis:

Thousands of us graduating this year will do so with no mark, no classification….

Due to Universities failing to meet @ucu demands thousands of us will walk across the graduation stage with an empty degree.

So here’s what @SussexGlobal at @SussexUni did.

We protested pic.twitter.com/yuUPdnOKEW

— Jess Leigh she/her (@jessjleigh) July 19, 2023

The good news, announced cooincidently today, is that the USS pension scheme is now in surplus, and the industrial action we have been taken to restore our lost benefits looks like it might have succeeded in part.

Car fire in Guildford

 I am working from home today, and during a break I took for lunch I went for a walk through the town centre in Guildford.  I was just heading back to home when I noticed a big plume of black smoke coming from somehere in the centre of town.  It turned out to be a raging fire on Bridge St, which as I got closer looked like a car fire.  Perhaps it was foolish to walk towards it, but I saw a crowd already assembled, and a police cordon to keep people at what I suppose was deemed a safe distance.  I guess the police have ample experience with car fires and how explosive they can be.  

I hope that no-one was trapped inside, as the car was fully engulfed and looked quite ruined by the time I got there - which was at least long enough after it started for the police to have arrived and cordoned off the road.  As a modern spectator with a cameraphone, I took a photo, below.  

What is ab initio?

The title of this blog post is also the title of a paper on the arXiv today by Ruprecht Machleidt from the University of Idaho: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06416.

The phrase ab initio to my mind, and to Ruprecht Machleidt's, is sometimes used quite loosely.  He describes is at synonymous with "microscopic" nuclear physics in the following way

The tenet of microscopic nuclear theory is that atomic nuclei can be accurately
described as collections of point-like nucleons interacting via two- and many-body
forces obeying nonrelativistic quantum mechanics—the forces being fixed in free-
space scattering.
The microscopic or ab initio approach to nuclear structure and reactions is then
defined as calculating the properties of nuclei in accordance with the tenet.

To me, a microscopic approach is one which works at the level of individual nucleon wave functions - so e.g. the shell model would be a microscopic approach, while the ab initio approach is the particular microscopic approach that uses free-nucleon forces to build up nuclear structure.  In that sense there is such a thing as an ab inito shell model that can be different to the generic shell model.  

I also would allow "ab initio" to be used, perhaps even more legitimately, for those theories that consider nucleons to be more than point-like, and to acknowledge the substructure.  

One of the points made in the paper is an assessmnet of some so-called ab initio work which is judged, by Machleidt, not to be ab initio by his criteria, and he gives a kind of roadmap of what the future should hold for real ab initio calculations.  

I enjoyed his historical perspective of the battle between what-he-calls-microspic and the effective interaction communities, and I don't much mind that people use phrases like ab initio to mean different things, when it can be seen as either a general and somewhat ill-defined class of theories, or as brand marketing. 

My favourite journal letters

 Many scholarly journals come in multiple editions catering to different (sub-)fields.  E.g. The Physical Review for many years had Physical Review A, Physical Review B, Physical Review C, Physical Review D, and Physical Review E, as well as a letters journal.  Now, there are a few others which are not denoted by single letters, and one that is: Physical Review X.  

But taking all journals from all publishers I have ever published in, what have I appeared to favour?  Well, the graph below reveals all:

 

C is a clear leader, mainly thanks to Physical Review C, while G is a distant second (entirely due to Journal of Physics G).  A, B and E all have a showing, but D and F and anything after G have yet to appear.  There we go - it's always good to have something to aim for in one's career.

Welcome to astatine-190

 I received an email today from the Isotope Discovery Project to say that the discovery of astatine-190 has been announced by a publication in Physical Review C.  It was made at Jyväskylä in Finland at their accelerator lab via the bombardment of strontium-84 on a silver-109 target, along with the emission of three neutrons.  

This is the lightest astatine isotope now known.  It decays via alpha emission to bismuth-186, as the start of a decay process which the team followed as far as platinum-178.  At-190 was measured to have a half-life of 1.0 ms.  So - I would say "welcome, At-190", but you didn't stay around long enough to hear me say it.

Section of isotope chart where At-190 will be added.  From the Colourful Nuclide Chart

Up Etna

 I am still at the COMEX 7 conference, and enjoying the physics talks.  Yesterday (Wednesday) there was an afternoon off, with an optional excursion organised, taking willing attendees up to near the summit of Mt Etna.  Etna last had an eruption only a matter of a few weeks ago.  In fact, one of my colleagues, Jim Al-Khalili, told me he recently had a trip cancelled as all planes were stopped from flying into Catania airport because of the eruption.  I saw on the web that ash had fallen all over the city, including on the runway.  Well ... I trusted the tour guides to know whether it was safe for us to go up, and the excursion did go ahead.  It involved a pretty long coach journey up as far as it is possible to drive a coach, followed by a cable car trip up to a higher elevation, and finally a kind of bus-cum-moon-buggy to take us even closer to the top.

That 'closer to the top' was tantalisingly not quite up to the crater that erupts, but pretty close.  The ground was desolate and we were walking on ash that had only recently fallen there.  In fact, some of it had covered the winter snow fall, and we could see patches of snow just below the "soil".  The snow was protected from melting by the soil.  That was a bit weird.  It was pretty cool being up there, but kind of a shame not to see lava, or steaming vents, or a crater ... Here are some photos of the trip

At Comex7 in Catania

 I'm at the COMEX7 conference in Catania.  COMEX = collective motion in exotic nuclei, and the conference is mainly about giant resonances.  In fact the COMEX series follows an older series called "Giant Resonances" with the name change indicating a expansion of the topic to other collective motion.  Having said that, I don't think something like fission (a collective motion of nucleons) would be considered on topic while, in common to all conferences, there are plenty of (perfectly good and interesting) talks which are squarely off-topic. 

I travelled on Sunday, and the conference started yesterday.  As always happens at conferences I get reinvigorated with the excitement of the field; hearing the new results; getting ideas for ways I can contribute.  I'm here with my colleagues Abhishek and Esra, the latter of whom gave an excellent keynote talk yesterday:

My Surrey colleague Esra Yüksel talking at COMEX7

Catania is very pretty.  It is full of grand buildings though is also a bit run down and chaotic like big cities can be.  It feels like a big city when you are in the centre, though the official population is around 300k - so not so big, but the whole metro area is over a million.  

The conference is at the University in the outskirts of the city, and we have a conference bus taking us from the city centre where most delegates are staying.  I'm talking on Friday in the last session of the conference before heading off to the airport for the trip home.  Here is me last night with the city cathedral in the background

The author, and Catania cathedral

Greggs vs Pret

 A nuclear physics colleague of mine – Robin Smith of Sheffield Hallam University – Tweeted a little while ago about a tongue-in-cheek (or oxtongue-in-bap) study he made of the relative density of Greggs Bakeries vs Pret-A-Manger sandwich shops, using machine learning to define the optimum line dividing England into a Greggs region, a.k.a. "The North", and a Pret region, a.k.a. "The South".  The study was then mentioned by a colleague of his at The Cheltenham Science Festival, and lo and behold the Daily Mail has picked it up.  Here's a tweet from yesterday by Robin with a link to the story, and the map.

It may have taken 10 years as a practicing scientist but I have finally been mentioned in the Daily Mail 👌 🔥 🥐 🤖 Thanks @vicky_dmail ! For anyone interested in baked goods and Machine Learning, take a look 👇https://t.co/YdM4rJk97A

— Dr R☢️bin Smith (@UnclearPhysics) June 7, 2023

It's been quite a while since any light-hearted studies I did were picked up for news coverage.  I hope Robin doesn't suffer too much ire from Daily Mail readers thinking scientists are spending research funding doing things like this when it is clear (even from the story in the Mail) that he did it all in his own time.  Now... what similar study could I do.  I think Waitrose vs Morrison has already been done.

Jim Jam

 On Friday we (School of Maths and Physics at Unversity of Surrey) hosted a celebration of the (still-ongoing) career of our colleague Jim Al-Khalili on the occasion of his 60th birthday.  There was a slightly more formal daytime conference with a series of talks by people who have worked with Jim over the years, either on academic things or on media and outreach activities.  I gave a short talk, going over the period of our work together where we started looking at proton tunnelling in nuclei - including on papers which announced the discovery of new isotopes (Re-159,  Ta-155, W-157 and Os-161), then moving on to more detailed work on tunnelling mechanisms in quantum mechanics which ultimately led to further developments on proton tunnelling in DNA, though I didn't talk about that much as I knew others were covering it.  

Following the more formal conference-like event, we ended the day with a more informal "In Conversation" in which Jim was interviewed by Roger Highfield, the author, journalist, and Science Museum director.  That gave the chance for audience members to ask questions, and ended with a round of "Happy Birthday".  I knew it was coming, so I was all set to record it on my phone.  Results are in the embedded tweet below

The moment when @RogerHighfield led the audience in singing Happy Birthday to @jimalkhalili at yesterday's celebration of Jim's 60th birthday pic.twitter.com/pwWFP2MrHz

— Paul Stevenson gleet@mastodon.social (@gleet_tweet) May 27, 2023

Strikes and Boycotts

 As I cycled home from dropping two of my kids off at school this morning, I stopped by a picket line outside the Royal Grammar School, a private boys' school in the centre of Guildford.  Teachers there are striking because the management are pushing through a withdrawal of staff from the teachers' pension scheme as they no longer want to pay the employer contributions.  Alongside this, they wish to "fire and re-hire" staff, moving them to worse contracts.  The striking staff understandably object to this, and have asked the management to negotiate, which I understand so far they have not been willing to do, and so this last resort of a strike is taking place.  

I was happy to stop and lend what words of support and encouragement I could.  One of my tasks today has been to fill in the form my employer asks me to fill in for those taking part in the legal industrial action currently happening in Universities.  The Marking and Assessment Boycott is not affecting my activities too much, as I don't teach in the spring semester.  However, I've been asked to do a small amount of marking and assessment related activity - amounting to something like one day of work.  I have refused, in accordance with the current industrial action, and now face being on half pay.  As with the union members following their own industrial action, so too the Universities are facing recommendations from UCEA to respond in a punitive manner and most are following through with that.

Skyrmions book

 

The amount of paper post that appears in my pigeon hole at work is a lot less than it used to be, but I still get paper copies of three professional magazines:  Physics World, CERN Courier, and Nuclear Physics News International.  I am also on the mailing list of the publisher World Scientific, as I succumbed to an offer from them some years ago and bought a little stash of discounted books.

They continue to send paper advertisements for new books, and I was interested to see one from the UK nuclear physics community appear in the latest Nuclear Physics mini cataloge.  It's called "Skyrmions: A Theory of Nuclei" and is by Prof Nicholas Manton FRS.  I can't say much about it as I don't have a copy, but the topic - the Skyrmion picture of nuclei, is an interesting one that I would like to learn about one day.  Probably when I am retired, if ever.   What I do know is that Skyrmions are topologically stable solutions to nonlinear field theories, and the solutions in the original Skyrmion model can be associated with different nuclei (while the theory is also now extended to non-nuclear systems).  It's a theory that is not widely known or used in the nuclear physics community, and has been kept alive since Skyrme's time by the mathematical physics community partly because it is a beautiful and satisfying theory that seems too good not to contain some truth in it.  Nicholas Manton has done a great job of taking the model to the nuclear physics community and showing how in detail it can actually describe real nuclei and related to the properties measured in the messy experiments that can seem far away from the abstract theories.

 From my work computer, I cannot see information about the book on the publisher's website because my desktop computer IP as seen by the external world is shared by many other computers in the Uni (probably all the desktops and the laptops connected by wifi).  As a result, World Scientific have blocked the IP address for "excessive usage".  Fortunately they do not block me from reading their paper-based flyers.

Barrioke and other cultural activities

 I returned on Friday from my trip to Lausanne to attend the QCQS conference just in time to attend an event at my local music venue.  Called Barrioke, it is like Karaoke, except Shaun Williamson (aka Barry from Eastenders) is on stage to sing along with you.  Unfortunately, we arrived a little late (albeit before Shaun was onstage) and seem to have missed the sign-up part of the event, so we just watched and listened, rather than actually get up on stage ourselves.  A missed opportunity.

Barrioke

Saturday was "Surrey Day" in celebration of the county where I live.  The one thing we did in its honour was to go to Watts Gallery in Compton, just outside Guildford.  They were offering free entry to anyone who lived in Surrey, and so we cycled there (over a big hill) to take part.  We arrived a bit late in the day (because of various kids' activities) and didn't get to see the whole thing, but enjoyed what we did see - the chapel, and the restored house where Watts and his wife and collaborator Mary Tytler lived and worked.  Here, to show off, is the elevation profile of the cycle ride to the gallery, along with a picture I took inside the chapel of my family enjoying the visit

Elevation profile from Guildford to Compton

Watts Chapel, Compton

From Lausanne

 I am at a workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland for three days, today being the middle day.  The workshop is called Quantum-Classical Quantum Simulation, concerning the use of quantum and/or classical algorithms to simulate quantum systems.  Since this one of the things I have been working on, I thought it reasonable to attend and to share my work - or at least the work of my PhD student Lance.   Yesterday I gave a talk, and I think it went down okay.  I certainly had a few questions, mainly about the nuclear physics content.  

Lausanne seems like a nice place.  It's not a huge city in terms of population, with around 140k people, which is the population of the borough of Guildford where I live, but it feels a lot more metropolitan.  Indeed, it has a metro, and is apparently the world's smallest city with a metro.  It's interesting being at a conference where there is a combination of people from different backgrounds in computer science, mathematics and physics.  Some of the talks have been pretty hard for me to understand, perhaps as a result of not having enough background in the area, but to be fair that includes some of the physics-heavy talks.  

Lausanne is also pretty.  I like the architecture, not least the EPFL campus.  Across the lake is a view of mountains including Mont Blanc - at least, there is a view when it is not too cloudy. The picture below is a view from the balcony of the conference site.  Perhaps not the pretties of the shots I've taken, but you can at least kinda see the mountains in the distance.

A trip to Strathclyde

    Yesterday I took a (slightly gruelling) day trip to the University of Strathclyde to have a brainstorming meeting with Andrew Daley, Callum Duncan.  Joining us were some colleagues I work with down in these parts, and Chris Hooley from St Andrews.  It was a fun and, I think, productive day, with some concrete plans for how to push forward a research project we've been talking about for while through some sporadic online meetings.  

     It was my first visit to the University of Strathclyde - well, more or less.  Part of the University campus is a garden which is the site of demolished maternity hospital where I was born.  An archway of the building is preserved, and I stood there yesterday to have my picture taken, so you can see what remains of the building.

The demise of IOP SciNotes

 I just noticed that the journal IOP SciNotes has announced its closure.  It's a shame, as I though the basic idea of the journal was good:  as a place to deposit small units of research that are not suitable for publication as a full paper but which would otherwise be lost to the research record.  Since the website for the journal does not include instructions for authors any more, I cannot see the list of example cases that are (were) suitable for the journal, but they were things like prelimimary results; repeated results; desriptions of a new method, protocol, or data; negative results; or registered methodologies for a new piece of research.  I published one thing there:  A note on how to use a major existing code that I coauthored for a new purpose by making a slight adjustment to it [P D Stevenson, IOP SciNotes 1, 025201].  It definitely did not seem like a full paper's worth of content, and I would not have expected a regular nuclear physics journal to accept it, but it seemed to hit the mark for this journal (as a description of a new method or protocol).

If the journal was a good idea, why has it failed?  I don't know about any of the discussions that took place about it, or what the rate of submission is, but it seems to me like there are rather few papers submitted and published of the sort the editors had in mind, and instead a lot of essentially full papers reporting full projects whose results and scope and interest are perhaps too modest to be of interest to a regular journal.   The subject area spread permitted in the journal was enormous - essentially all areas of science (except astronomy), and so a reader from any specific discipline or subfield was never going to get in the habit of browsing the journal to look for relevant papers.  Anything published there would have to be advertised by the author for the rest of the relevant research community to know about.  And then ... it is an open access journal with article processing charges (APC).  I submitted my paper during the initial period when there was not fee to publish there, presumably in order to kick-start the new journal.  More recently one had to find the APC in order to publish, which no doubt put people off, especially when high impact research is by definition not going to be sent there.   

It was on my to-do list to submit a short note describing a code to decompose real square matrices into tensor products of Pauli matrices that a summer student worked on, and which we stuck on arXiv (2111.00627).  With the current IoP Publishing agreement with UK Universities, there would have been no APC to pay (by me at least).  Now I guess I will just leave it in the arXiv. which is ... fine in any case, and more findable that if I just published in SciNotes without putting it on the arXiv. 

Here's the one figure from my IOP SciNotes paper - the potential between two interacting O-16 nuclei as a function of separation

RIP Bill Newton-Smith

 Through a friend's Facebook post, I learn that Bill Newton-Smith has died.  Bill was one of the four people who interviewed and subsequently accepted me for a place at Balliol College, Oxford, to read Physics and Philosophy.  Bill was the philosopher in the room, and was joined by Johanthan Hodby, Dave Wark, and David Brink, whose death I recently commented on.  

As far as I remember, Bill asked one question in the interview, along the lines of "When I say something is red and you say something is red, how can we agree that we are talking about the same thing?"  I remember giving some kind of answer based on sets of red things, and perhaps more physical argument based on wavelengths.  I don't know how good an answer it was, but I was accepted as a Physics and Philosophy student.  Actually, I think the acceptance was based almost entirely on my admission examination performance in maths and physics, which I later learned I completely aced.  I also sat a general paper for the philosophy-based part of my admission, where I wrote a pseudish stream-of-consciousness set of answers, not really knowing how to answer essay-type questions.  I suspect these were not read.

Anyway - I had Bill Newton-Smith for philosophy tutorials every week in the first term, and the subject was formal logic, which I enjoyed.  I liked mostly the study into the extent that language is used to convey ideas more than the mathematical logic aspects which in the first semester were quite trivial.  I enjoyed the tutorials and got the feeling that Bill liked the questions I asked about language.  I found him fun, and intimidating.

At the end of the first term I went home for the vacations and did not want to return to University.  A depression that I had not named as such was manifesting itself in a bleak and horrific way and I felt happier at home with my old friends.  Though I had made friends at Uni, I didn't feel settled there, and I didn't feel at all prepared to go back.  I didn't feel like I understood anything much, and had never learnt good study skills, having found school easy.  My sympathetic tutors had no magic bullet, but the suggestion that I switch to straight Physics, which I tried, was a kind of mental reset to help me start again, and I suppose to some extent it worked.  Well, at least I stayed at University.  It meant no more philosophy tutorials with Bill Newton-Smith, and a lingering sense of failure.  

His name, Bill, was short for William, as usual, and his middle initial was H., so he appeared on documents as W H Newton-Smith.  I idly speculated that the inclusion of Newton in his name was in order not to be called "WH Smith" after the stationer. 

I'm aware from the testimony of others who interacted with him in a more extended way than I did, that he was a fine man.  RIP Bill.  

Bill Newton Smith (from CEU news report)

New nuclear Rutherford Fellow: Dr Kara Lynch

STFC have just announced the new round of Erneset Rutherford Fellows. There are 10 of them, spanning the STFC research areas of Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics, and Astronomy.

The new nuclear fellow is Dr Kara Lynch who will take up her fellowship at a University of Manchester.  Here is the blurb from the STFC press release:

Probing the charge radii of proton emitters for the first time

Dr Kara Lynch, The University of Manchester

What is the shape of the nucleus in the moments before it emits a proton? How does the shape of the nucleus change when the proton becomes unbound?

Dr Kara Lynch aims to answer these questions by performing the first laser spectroscopy studies on proton-emitting nuclei, bringing a powerful technique into a new research domain.

At the edges of the nuclear landscape, a rare form of radioactive decay occurs where the nucleus emits a proton.

Studying proton-emitting nuclei with laser spectroscopy provides a new and exciting opportunity to test the fundamental properties of the nuclear force.

Laser spectroscopy measures the hyperfine structure of atoms, an atomic fingerprint that allows nuclear properties to be measured in a nuclear-model-independent way.

For example, the charge radius tells us about the proton distribution in the nucleus.

Dr Lynch aims to understand the effect of the proton on the nucleus before it is emitted. Dr Lynch will gain a unique insight into how this single proton can influence the behaviour of the whole nucleus by measuring nuclei across the proton-drip line (beyond which proton decay occurs).

These measurements will provide a powerful test for state-of-the-art nuclear theories, constraining the nuclear wave function and providing a significant insight into the complex system that is the nucleus.

and here is the best picture of Kara I could find (from her Google Scholar profile):