What Englishman?

In older scientific journals,  you get the situation where one paper would end half way down a page and the next article would start on the same page.  So when, in this modern age, we download a pdf of a paper, we sometimes get the start of another paper, and sometimes they can be interesting things, if only because they are very much of their time and not something that we would deliberately download to read for its enduring relevance. 

I was prompted, by a talk at the CNR*24 conference that I went to last week, to look at a paper by Eugene Wigner entitled "Nuclear Reactions and Level Widths", Am. J. Phys. 17, 99 (1949).  The journal it's in - the American Journal of Physics - is a long-running educational journal with articles aimed at those interested in teaching physics, generally at the undergraduate level.  I am yet to read through the paper, but I did see on the last page an extra thing which is a poem reproduced from the British satirital magazine Punch.  I reproduce an excerpt as (I hope) fair usage, since I think the poem is still in copyright.  It's about some characters in electromagnetism and begins:

and then in verse 4 we have

where the "Englishman" referred to is James Watt (scientist, not the BrewDog guy).  I'm sure Scots everywhere will snort Irn Bru out their noses at this claim of Watt's nationality. 

I do remember Punch from the final years of its existence.  It carried on until 1992 (and was revived briefly later).  I don't think I ever read it much outside doctors' waiting rooms but I did struggle to see what ever was funny about it.  Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it, but perhaps also it was a rather old and conservative kind of humour.  Anyway, the poem, lighthearted in style as it is written, has an unwelcome nationalism to it, as well as that affectation that still continues to this day – that it's just fine to be a kind of intellectual and at the same time to admit in a happy way that you don't understand science.

Oh Vienna

 I'm making my first trip to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), my first trip to Vienna, and my first trip to Austria.  I'm attending the CNR'24 (Compound Nuclear Reaction) conference on the IAEA premises which is part of the UN buildings in Vienna.  It's a pretty amazing and iconic venue, though having to go through airport-type security to get in is a slight pain.  

The compound nucleus is the name given to the state of a reacting nucleus that occurs typically after the capture of a neutron or a heavier ion to form a highly excited state which is relatively long-lived and which quickly redistributes the nucleons from the impinging system in such a way that details of the initial reaction are 'forgotten' by the system.  The picture is sometimes given of marbles sitting in shallow bowl, or depression, with another marble coming in from outside with enough energy to pass through the depression, except that it knocks into the marbles already in there, shares its kinetic energy with them so that it gets captured and no individual marble has enough energy to leave.  In principle there is enough energy there so that after enough collisions one of the marbles can be kicked out, and eventually, in a frictionless ideal situation, such an even will happen.  In real compound nuclei sometimes this does really happen, and very narrow neutron resonances can be found which correspond to very long-lived states.  

The term "compound nucleus" was coined by Niels Bohr in the early days of nuclear physics when trying to understand some of the first-observed phenomena in nuclei and its impressive that the ideas were sufficiently correct that they have survived today.  Some of the calculations I am interested in, such as those creating giant resonances, causing fission, or during fusion to make superheavy elements, have this compound nuclear state as an intermediate nucleus.  I've never really thought about the properties of this compound nucleus in detail, but having talked to one of the conference co-organisers earlier in the year, I realised that I would find the conference pretty interesting, and so it has been.

I've been to many conferences over the years, and one of the things I've seen is the people who enjoy meeting up with colleagues who they have seen throughout their careers at different occasions and throguh such meetings form friendships which endure over the years.  I've somewhat felt that that's part of the conference experience that I've missed out on, partly through a natural diffidence that has perhaps affected my ability to form friendships outside of my professional life as much as in it, but here I have indeed bumped into a few people who I have really been able to catch up with and talk about the last time we have seen each other, mixing up asking about latest work results alongside how they are doing and how life has changed since seeing each other last.  It's a nice part of the conference experience.

Here's my obligatory blogpost picture - me standing in the plaza area of the UN complex

 

Proceedings from COMEX

 Last year, I attended COMEX7 in Catania, Italy.  This week, I spied a big brown envelope for me in the post room at work, and saw that it was from Italy, and couldn't quite figure out what might be inside.  At first I wondered if it was a hard copy of the new NuPECC Long Range Plan document.  But, no, it was a hard copy of the COMEX7 proceedings, published in a special issue of Nuovo Cimento C. 

Nuovo Cimento is a famous journal from Italy, set up by the Italian Physical Society, in which many interesting articles have appeared over the years - particularly on theoretical physics, and particularly from some of the famous Italian names, such as Fermi and Majorana.  As happens with many journals the original Nuovo Cimento split into different series with different specialities, and eventually almost all of them merged with other European national journals to form the European Physical Journal series.  But a few rump Nuovo Cimento journals live on.  Nuovo Cimento C survives to publish proceedings of conference and workshops held (mainly? solely?) in Italy.  And so, I have a hard copy of a special edition of this famous and historic journal, which includes my first, and perhaps only, Nuovo Cimento paper

The front cover

My paper!