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