It's been a while since I've been moved to post a nuclear physics spot-the-difference, but how could I not when I have never seen Rocket Man Elton John and Knockout Man Wilton Catford in the same room together, despite both people having spent most of their lives at music venues? Are they, in fact, the same person?
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Last night I went to see the band Dinosaur Jr at the Troxy. Dinosaur Jr were around when I was a teenager when they released the album of theirs that is still my favourite (Bug, featuring their signature song Freakscene). They are still going today, and like many bands of that era they tour with special anniversary concerts of particular albums.
Yesterday they played the songs from their 1995 album Without A Sound from start to finish, then went on with another half dozen songs from their catalogue. That included Freakscene, which I sat listening to with a big grin on my face. They ended with their stylish take on The Cure's song Just Like Heaven.
The audience was about 50% bearded middle aged men (like me), with the rest made up (roughly in order of number) middle-aged men without beards, women, and teenagers either there with their parents, or apparently there because they are independently into these dinosaurs
I'd never been to the Troxy before. It's in Limehouse, and was once a cinema serving the local, relatively poor, population. The area was largely bombed and/or cleared of slums during and after the war, and the cinema audience then dwindled. After serving a couple of uses of the years, it is now an events venue. We had seating tickets up on the balcony and while Dinoaur Jr are something of a noisy band to which the audience can gainfully mosh, my 51 year old frame was happy enough with a seat.
Without wanting to turn this blog into one about quizzes, I went with a couple of friends to my local pub for their Sunday night quiz only to find that one of the regular rounds was very on-topic. Round 3 is always a "top 5" round in which there are two parts, each of which asks you for five answers. Often these are the top 5 in some category, though yesterday they were not quite that, but just categories with only 5 answers and we we were asked to list them all.
Question 1 was on the words use to describe the going on horseracing courses. We managed to pluck 4 out of the 5 of those. Question 2 asked "What 5 chemical elements begin with the letter H?" Should be a write-in for a nuclear physicist, right? Well, I immediately wrote down Hydrogen and Helium, then Hafnium (named after Copenhagen - Hafn and Hagen are cognate words meaning harbour, like our word haven). Then it took me a minute to remember the proper name and spelling of the element Ho (it's Holmium, this time named after Stockholm).
The last one was a bit trickier for me. Part of the problem is that I remember a series of element names that were widely used before international agreement. I couldn't remember if Hahnium (named after Otto Hahn) was one of these. In the end, I decided (correctly) that it was, and that the other element beginning with H is actually named after the German state of Hesse, where the GSI laboratory is situated. I wrote down Hessium but the actual answer is Hassium but the people marking liaised with the questionmaster and they decided this was good enough for the point. It's called Hassium because of the Latin spelling of the state of Hesse.
Anyway - quite a hard question, really, with three pretty obscure elements. Apparently there was a science teacher in one of other teams and he was outed as not having scored 5/5!
Obligatory picture: The GSI site with the upgraded FAIR project, in the German state of Hesse
One highlight of my week was attending the annual charity quiz run by the Quiz Leage of London. I play in a league team called Pineapple, and we put a squad forward for the charity quiz and ... won! I think it's fair to say that our captain, Dom, got more questions than the rest of us (possibly put together) but we each contributed some answers that only we knew and without which we would not have won.
The quiz was written and hosted by Paul Sinha, and here's a picture of him (centre) posing with our winning team - me on the right. Not the best backdrop, but hey ...
Through one of those more useful email services that send me a list of recent papers I might be intersted in, I came across a history of nuclear physics in Finland in the years from WWII to a decade or two afterwards.
I'm well aware of the excellent work now taking place at Jyväskylä where, thanks to an accelerator facility, support for theory, a great local group and access to international users, Finland punches well above its weight in nuclear physics. There's not much nuclear physics elsewhere in Finland, but the paper cited above gives in interesting account of the pre-Jyväskylä days, concentrating on the very few people who were involved in getting some nuclear physics activity established in the country, and setting it in the political context of wartime and post-war Finland. An interesting read, and of course much easier to read than the typical technical papers I am used to.
Here's a picture from the (open access) paper showing Lise Meitner (second from left in the front) visiting Finland
I've had a few emails forwarding the announcement of a conference celebrating the 40th annversary of Halo Nuclei. The circular is not a very colourful, but I paste the top of the pdf below.
Since the image is not clickable (except to see it at higher resolution), here is the link above if you want to follow it.
I have never worked on halo nuclei – light nuclei in which the last particle (or two or three) are not tighly bound to all the others, but which exist in a very extended halo – but that put me a bit at odds with much of the theory group here at Surrey when I arrived. They had been using their reaction theory expertise to really become the go-to group in the world for understanding and interpreting the experiments in which these halo nuclei are formed. If I look up the Google Scholar pages for some of my now-emeritus colleagues like Jeff Tostevin, Jim Al-Khalili, and Ian Thompson, you can see "halo nulei" in the title of papers from the 90s which are all very high-up in each of their all-time highest-cited papers.
Because of the peculiar structure of these halo nuclei, only a very few isotopes in the whole nuclear chart could ever be possible candidates, and it's no surprising that they are no longer at the cutting edge of nuclear research. That's not to say that there is nothing going on in the area of halo nuclei studies - they are still interesting systems both for experimental and theoretical study, but the lowest-lying fruit was picked some time ago and the number of people working on the remaining hardest problems is small.
Not having anything really to do with halo nuclei, I definitely don't intend to go to the conference, but I hope they invite one of the more-recently retired colleagues from Surrey to relate the theory work from 30-40 years ago. What you might find interesting to read is a Physics World article from 1996 which represents one of Jim Al-Khlalili's earliest public outreach works, entitled Nuclei on the Dripline.
