Gogny 5 meeting

 I'm in Paris this week for a meeting dubbed "Gogny Conference: Nuclear Structure and Reactions".  "Gogny" refers to the scientist Daniel Gogny who died in 2015.  Gogny was a French nuclear physicist who worked first in France, then in the US, and the series of conference named in his honour seem to be a joint French-US enterprise with many colleagues from the US - especially Lawrence Livermore National Lab where he worked - making the trip to Paris for the meeting.

The meeting covers "Structure and Reactions" which could cover a very broad range of topics.  Fortunately (for me) they are both up my street, and there is a strong focus on theoretical contributions, I guess reflecting Gogny's status as a theoretician.  It all conspires to help me understand the talks more than I would on average.  I'm here because I've been asked to talk about quantum computing, a topic I guess Gogny had heard of, but he never got to see it start to make some impact in nuclear physics. 

Here are a couple of picture: One of me at the conference venue (Sorbonne Uni) and one of a speaker (Pierre Capel) who credited the Univeristy of Surrey on his opening slide, thanks to his collaboration with us.

O God! O Montreal!

I came across a review of a couple of Penguin books on nuclear physics from 1972.  Written by Denys Wilkinson and published in the book review section of Nature, they were not especially positive.  I thought it quite telling that he disliked the comparison of the square well and oscillator potential, which is done to show how similar the level scheme is.  Not having that in nuclear structure textbooks seems like a lost battle, perhaps thanks to the ubiquity of the shell model and the nod to Meyer and Jensen's textbook on the matter, among other things.  The quote from the review is quite impassioned: