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.