The amount of paper post that appears in my pigeon hole at work is a lot less than it used to be, but I still get paper copies of three professional magazines: Physics World, CERN Courier, and Nuclear Physics News International. I am also on the mailing list of the publisher World Scientific, as I succumbed to an offer from them some years ago and bought a little stash of discounted books.
They continue to send paper advertisements for new books, and I was interested to see one from the UK nuclear physics community appear in the latest Nuclear Physics mini cataloge. It's called "Skyrmions: A Theory of Nuclei" and is by Prof Nicholas Manton FRS. I can't say much about it as I don't have a copy, but the topic - the Skyrmion picture of nuclei, is an interesting one that I would like to learn about one day. Probably when I am retired, if ever. What I do know is that Skyrmions are topologically stable solutions to nonlinear field theories, and the solutions in the original Skyrmion model can be associated with different nuclei (while the theory is also now extended to non-nuclear systems). It's a theory that is not widely known or used in the nuclear physics community, and has been kept alive since Skyrme's time by the mathematical physics community partly because it is a beautiful and satisfying theory that seems too good not to contain some truth in it. Nicholas Manton has done a great job of taking the model to the nuclear physics community and showing how in detail it can actually describe real nuclei and related to the properties measured in the messy experiments that can seem far away from the abstract theories.
From my work computer, I cannot see information about the book on the publisher's website because my desktop computer IP as seen by the external world is shared by many other computers in the Uni (probably all the desktops and the laptops connected by wifi). As a result, World Scientific have blocked the IP address for "excessive usage". Fortunately they do not block me from reading their paper-based flyers.
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