Farewell

It was always bound to end like this, but it is still sad to have to say goodbye.  I can't even remember how long it lasted - but longer than I could reasonably have expected.  Today I left my hotel in Florence, packing my suitcase in the bedroom but forgetting about the stuff in the bathroom.  So - goodbye to my faithful wash bag, and all its contents.  Without fail you have helped me to wash, shave,  and smell nice.  I'm sorry that I left you in Florence.

INPC update: Encumbered by my appearance,

Sherlock Holmes	Nuclear Physicist

It's day three at INPC, which means that there has been a day and a half of talks since I last posted, along with the poster session and an excursion.  Before commenting on any of that, though, I should mention a funny thing that happened to me.

At the end of the poster session last night, I was milling around waiting to meet up with people to go off to dinner.  Someone came up to me and told me that they had a confession to make - that she had posted a photo of me to Facebook (unbeknown to me), but a mutual friend tagged me in the comments. She felt she would have to come clean as a result, as I would be bound to see a notification about it.

The reason she took the photo was the same reason that, last Tuesday in the Science Museum, two Chinese tourists asked me to have a picture taken with them - because "I look like Sherlock Holmes".  It's quite amusing, really.  I can certainly see the resemblance in certain shots of me and of Benedict Cumberbatch that we look similar.  The surreptitious shot posted to Facebook is shown above, with a picture of young Mr Cumberbatch for comparison.  Perhaps I ought to make more of this.  Maybe I should watch an episode of his Sherlock Holmes and copy his mannerisms.  Perhaps I can even give my talk tomorrow in the style of a Holmesian investigation.  Or maybe I just need to befriend a Martin Freeman lookalike and start hanging around with him.  Anyway.  Much hilarity ensued as a result of the exchange, and I am now Facebook friends with the photo-taker.  In fact, it seems I had to be to see the picture;  I received no notification and she had no need to worry.

Well,  as for the conference itself.  Yesterday and today featured a selection of talks of various natures which stirred various things in me.  The one that always happens in conferences is that of a reinvigoration of interest in nuclear physics in general.  I find it quite easy to get a bit jaded in my research, and to let other aspects of university life feed the feeling of jadedness, but a few conference talks that make me think "I can answer that question" or "this is what I need to do next" usually give me a kick to both talk to other researchers to collaborate on problems, and to go away and do some calculations that might prove useful to the community.  You may correctly point out that I'm in fact writing a blog post instead.

Aside from the spur in research ideas, it's also nice to meet up with old friends.  I saw that one such for me, Sait Umar from Vanderbilt University, was supposed to be attending and was disappointed that I didn't see him on the first day.  Fortunately he did come, and I bumped into him and his wife in the poster session.  That meant I ended up not looking at as many posters as I might have, but I still managed to look round quite a few.  Being accepted for a poster at a conference, rather than a talk, is generally considered a bad outcome, but really, a 12 minute talk in a 9-way parallel session (as in my case) is not necessarily better than a poster in a 2h long poster session in which an approximately infinite supply of free prosecco is provided.  I wandered around the posters chatting to quite a few people, and generally enjoyed learning about the broad range of things that are going on in nuclear physics.  I particularly enjoyed talking to a postdoc in Brussels working on the nuclear input to neutron star properties.  After we talked, realising that we have a lot research-wise in common, we discussed being in touch.  I said that I'd be able to remember her by thinking of Les Miserables - her surname is Fantina.  She laughed uneasily.  I am reading the book at the moment, on the suggestion of Matt Kelly, and am enjoying it very much.  I rather think - being 100 pages in - that I have not learnt yet what happens to Fantine.

That takes me to the end of yesterday.  A post for today may follow, but I should see if I can find anyone to have dinner with, being that I'm back at my hotel with no plans to meet up with conference attendees.  I suspect general wandering around will fix this. Ciao!

INPC Day One - bouncing neutrons

It's the end of the first day of INPC2013 here in Florence.  I must say that it has gone a lot more smoothly than many physics conferences, and I rather suspect that this is because it's being run professionally rather than by the scientific organisers themselves.  If only they had managed to organise for there not to be a thunderstorm at lunchtime when we were supposed to be off in town fending for ourselves in some nearby trattoria.

So I attended all the plenary sessions this morning and then wended my way through a selection of the parallel sessions in the afternoon.  I went for a combination of things that are very much up my alley (I hope I'm not mixing metaphors here) and some session which were a bit more alien to me.  

One talk I went to in the "new-to-me" session was about an experiment called qBounce.  It involves bouncing a neutron off of a reflecting mirror, ever bound to fall back down and bounce again due to gravity.  It's a pretty amazing combination of a gravitational potential and a tricky-to handle neutral elementary particle used to make a quantum bound state.  I was a bit sceptical at first, and was the only person to ask questions at the end.  It's still surprising to me that the experimental details all work out, and I have to accept to some extent that they do, and that other experimentalists have peer-reviewed their work competently.  For the more technically-minded readers, there seems to be an open access paper available here from an Elsevier proceedings journal that I haven't heard of.

I'm glad I went to that session, though I'm not entirely sure where it fits in a nuclear physics conference.  Neutrons sometimes get knocked out of nuclei, I guess.  Mind you, a few of the plenary talks seemed to be more about mesons than nuclei, so what do I know?  Well, I know that I took the attached picture from the window of the conference centre in the afternoon.  The remnants of the lunchtime storm are still there to see in the clouds.

As one does at conferences, I went out to dinner in the evening.  As I do when travelling I managed, when eating bread dipped in oil, to spill some oil around the groin on my trousers.  At home it wouldn't matter as I'd have plenty of changes of clothes available.  Now I have to face walking round with conspicuous stains on my trousers.  Oh well.  It's a physics conference.  

Travelogue

Who would have thought that it would be June already?  Anyone with a basic grasp of the calendar and the passage of time, I suppose, though it seems to have taken me by surprise.   I've just had a week off during the half-term holiday of my daughter Flora, culminating in a train journey to Gatwick Airport where she met her mum, to go back to stay with her, and where I checked in for a flight to Florence to attend a conference.  In reverse to the usual way of things, I have already written the conference proceeding paper, so that I could upload it to the arXiv and help the case for my recently-finished PhD student in securing a fellowship, but have not yet written the talk.  I should probably be doing that now as I sit at the airport, rather than writing this... but there's plenty of time before I talk on Thursday.  It's only a 10 minute talk, and I've done all the preparation for the paper, so all will be well.

Fortunately, on the way to the train station in Guildford we had enough time to stop at the play park.  Flora was keen to have a go on the swings, and here she is in the picture, having what I hope is a good time.

The dreaded oral

After this morning, I have one fewer PhD student than I had at the start of the day.  Fortunately, that's because Chris Pardi passed his viva voce exam (the oral exam in which one defends ones PhD thesis) and is now Dr Pardi.  Well, technically, I think he is not really Dr Pardi until he submits the hard copy to the University with the approval of the internal examiner who will check for the minor changes asked for, but still, the hurdle of the exam has been overcome.  On the other hand, I don't think there's anything to stop anyone calling themselves "Doctor".  Certainly no-one has ever asked me for proof.

The oral exam is a strange experience for a supervisor.  At my university, PhD supervisors are allowed to be present in the exam, but can't really say anything.  I sat there and observed two eminent professors - Jim Al-Khalili as the internal examiner, and Joachim Maruhn as external - quiz my student about his thesis, while I resisted the temptation to interject on his behalf.  Fortunately, he'd done some very good work, with some impressive mathematical manipulations to calculate essentially analytic absorbing boundary conditions for solutions of the nuclear time-dependent Hartree-Fock equations, that the positive result was not much in doubt.  The equation in the figure is one such result, looking notationally awesome as only continued fractions can do.

The Hamiltonian Academics

To follow up from yesterday, here is the official team photo for the 5-a-side staff football team from the departmental competition.  I'm the tall one in white.

Football, bacon and a 7:30 start

A mixture of the Hamiltonian Academics and
the last team to beat us.  I'm the tallest one.

Well, it's been a year since the last departmental football tournament, and today was the day when teams from around the physics department contested the Al-Khalili challenge cup, named after the original organiser of the tournament, and renowned Leeds United fan Jim Al-Khalili.

I turned up a bit later than I might usually do, thanks to attending a committee meeting for the local UCU branch.  As usual, as someone who doesn't normally do enough exercise that looks much like playing football (though I do walk a lot, run a bit (but at a steady slow pace) and swim a bit) I got quite tired quite quickly, and soon moved to my usual position of playing in goal.  I can't remember exactly how many goals I let in, in the 3 halves I played in goal, but there were a few.  I did make some saves that I was reasonably proud of, though.

My day started much much earlier.  This morning, from 7:30 to 9:30 I had agreed to chair a "IoP business forum" event, organised by the Institute of Physics, and held at the Surrey Research Park, a Univeristy-owned business park adjacent to campus.  It was a good opportunity to wear a suit, though it did involve getting up early.  I don't particularly mind doing that, though the same thing happens as usually does when I set my alarm extra early - I don't really sleep properly and keep waking just in case it's really time to get up.  Of course it's not, and I set my alarm perfectly competently.  Then I dream I've missed the session, because I was having breakfast in one room, and was too polite to leave midway through a conversation to go and chair the session in the other room.  Oh the perils of being English.  In the dream I even ate the bacon roll that was provided for breakfast, though I don't eat meat in real life.  Well... of course I made the event just fine, and though the (internal) room was suffused with the odour of bacon and sausage sandwiches, I didn't eat any of them.

It was a pretty interesting event, even though it was all about funding opportunities for businesses, so not really relevant to me.  It was essentially about how to take taxpayer money and give it to private enterprise, which is of course what governments are for.  I'm not sure I chaired it desperately well, but the people who came seemed to engage with it, and it was interesting for me to see another side of life.  I always enjoy visiting companies when I go and see students on placement for some of the same reasons.  Then I enjoy going back to the university.