I gave a talk on Zoom this morning to a group based in Athens, Greece. I didn't have to, or didn't get to, go to Athens for the talk, and was just sitting in my daughter's bedroom where I have a desk set up for home working. It's my first talk of this year, and I talked about some calcualtions I have been doing on octupole vibrations in nuclei around lead-208. I started work on them during the first lockdown, and have not looked at them too much in the last six months, but I would like to get them into a shape suitable for publication - which mainly means polishing off one last aspect of the calculation, and then deciding how best to present the "story" to the wider world.
It's nice to be able to give a talk to people in Athens without the time-consuming, carbon-consuming air travel to Greece, but I do slightly miss the whole experience of visiting another research group, joining them for discussions, joining them for lunch ...
I'm not sure I have anything very Greek in the house for lunch. It'll probably be a peanut butter and banana sandwich.
I at least did get a lesson on how to pronounce Greek letters properly. I have always said "Phi" and "Psi" to rhyme with pie, but the proper (Greek) way is to rhyme with tree. Well, I'll see if I can switch over to the right way in future.
Here's a snapshot my host took, on a very equationy slide. Normally I do not go into as much mathematical detail as this, but I wanted to how how "simple" the theory was. Hopefully the words I used to accompany it conveyed that okay. Just looking at equations without context is never simple.
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