Donkeys, pigs and goats

One nice thing about working at a University is the diversity of things that goes on there.  For example, I can go and listen to a talk from some erudite expert in something far from my own field or I can attend the weekly classical music concerts put on by students in the Music Department. 

Today, the thing I could do (and did do) was to visit the farm animals that were brought onto campus for us to pet.  There were three pens of happy-seeming goats, pigs and donkeys.  They all seemed pleased enough with the attention of cooing students and staff, and we all got a pleasant distraction from our cares. 

Thanks to Miller's Ark for bringing them along

Visit to JLab

 I have just spend the last couple of days in Newport News, Virginia, USA.  I'm here, because it's where Jefferson Lab is.  Jefferson Lab is a major nuclear physics research facility in which electrons are accelerated to very high energies and smashed into nuclear targets to understand in particular the quark-gluon structure of protons and neutrons, though there are other physics goals too.

My University has a master's student, Rocco, on placement there, working with Jerry Gilfoyle from the University of Richmond who has kindly taken Rocco on as a salaried researcher for 10 months to help develop new algorithms to help disentangle real signals coming out of the complex detector system from the noisy background. 

As part of the scheme where we (University of Surrey) send student on placements, we also make a couple of visits during the year.  I made the first as a virtual visit, and make the second one, this week, in person.  After the visit, Rocco, Jerry and I met in the centre of Newport News for dinner.  Here's a picture of Rocco by the fountains in downtown:

 I also used the fact I was at the Lab to meet the new deputy director for scientific, David Dean.  I know David from my PhD days when I spent quite a bit of time at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.  David was there at the time, and was a kind of surrogate supervisor for a time.  It was nice to catch up with him.  I didn't take a picture of him, so I can't post one here, but one day when I go through my old photographs of the time, I might be able to dig one out and post it to the blog.

The man from the future: book review

 Yesterday I read a Ananyo Bhattacharya's biogrophy and popular science book about the life and work of John von Neumann.  Here's the review I posted on goodreads:

David Brink in Royal Society's Biographical Memoirs

 I just got an email from Angela Bonaccorso to say that the biographical article about David Brink has appeeared today in the Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society journal: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2022.0020

Happy 100th Citation

 Thanks to the algorithmic wonders of Google Scholar, I get sent an email every few days with updates on wheter people are finding my past research interesting, through citing my papers.  Today I got an email with details of three new citations, including something I'd not noticed in these emails before - an extra addition of highlighted text saying "100th citation".  This means that according to Google Scholar my student Phil's paper with me and his other co-supervisor Arnau, "Fission dynamics within time-dependent Hartree-Fock: Defomration-induced fission", has been cited 100 times.  

For my field, 100 citations is pretty good.  In other fields it would not be considered great, but I can at least feel like the work I am doing is making some impact.  According, again, to Google Scholar it joins a mere 8 other papers I have (co-)written to break the 100 citations mark.

Happy 100th Citeversary!

A new old book

 I received in the post yesterday a book that I ordered second hand online.  It is the Proceedings of the International School of Physics «Enrico Fermi» Course XXXVI, edited by C. Bloch.  Here's the (rather dark) cover:

The book was sold as an ex-library book and indeed inside I see it stamped with "University of Salford", and there is even still the place where the librarian used to stamp the return date.  The single date stamped is 11. OCT 1968:

I bought the book because (a) I saw it online for £1 + postage and (b) different lectures in it are referenced in a couple of places in papers I come back to quite often:  One is paper 4 in the series introducing the Lipkin Meshkov Glick Model: D. Agassi, H. J. Lipkin and N. Meshkov. Nucl. Phys. 86, 321 (1966). There, they reference "K. Bleuler, seminar delivered at Varenna Summer School (1965) unpublished", but the seminar was published presumably after Agassi et al. submitted their paper, in 1966 in these proceedings.  

The other paper I know of referencing the book is one in the generator coordinate method is used to describe giant resonances: H. Flocard and D. Vautherin, Nucl. Phys. A264, 197 (1976).  It's a method that I think bears revisiting with modern time-dependent Hartree-Fock codes as the generator of the basis states, so I go back to this paper whenever I am working on this new application.  There is an expression in the paper which is supposed to be found by "A straightforward calculation [see for example the appendix of ref. 6)]".  I have managed to work out the expression, though I'm not sure I would call my method straightforward, so I was interested to see the sppendix of ref 6, which of course is an article (by David Brink) in "Proceedings of the International School of Physics Enrico Fermi Course 36 ed. C. Bloch (Academic Press, New York, 1966)."

Now at last I have the book, and I can read the articles referred to, or more likely, look at the book on my shelf and realise I can, at some point, read those articles. 

The book contains a picture with an overlay legend showing attendees at the conference.  Here are photos of the picture, and the overlay.  If you click on them you should see them in as good a resolution as I was able to take with my phone camera.  If anyone is really interested in seeing the best resolution I can get, please leave a comment and I'll see what I can do.
 

Olivia Newton-John, Max Born and Lewis Elton.

A couple of days ago the death of singer/actor/activist Olivia Newton-John was announced.  I was aware, thanks I think to my colleague Jim Al-Khalili telling me many years ago, that she was the granddaughter of Max Born. 

Max Born was a big name in quantum mechanics, famous amongst other things for the interpretation of the modulus-squared of the wave function as a probability density (the "Born rule").  Born was German and Jewish, and in 1933 almost as soon as the Nazis came to power he was suspended from the University of Göttingen.  He managed to obtain a temporary position in Cambridge, England, and so emigrated to the UK where he remained until retirement, having secured a professorship at Edinburgh. 

Born's daughter Irene married a Welshman called Bryn Newton-John, and they had children including the famous Olivia. 

What I didn't know before reading about Olivia following her death is that she is also related to my predecessor in the nuclear theory group here at Surrey, Lewis Elton.  The link is flagged up on Wikipedia because Lewis was the father of Ben Elton and the connection to Ben is mentioned, rather than to Ben's (less famous) father.

A little digging on Wikipedia allows the full family link between Olivia Newton-John and Ben Elton to be worked out, and hence the family link between Max Born and Lewis Elton:

Max's father-in-law, Victor Ehrenberg (jurist), had a brother Otto Ehrenberg.  Otto's sons include another Victor Ehrenberg (historian), and this Victor was the father of Lewis.  Here's the relevant section of the family tree:

 

My sort-of relation to Max Born can be seen in the Mathematics Genealogy Project.  It shows a kind of family tree of supervisor-student relationships for PhDs in Mathematics and related areas, including theoretical physics.  Max Born was my great-great-grandsupervisor, through his student Viktor Weisskopf, then Arthur Kerman, Mike Strayer, who was one of my PhD supervisors.  "Family" tree below: