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.