Subject: Fwd: Myron and The Twist of Fate!
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2008 06:56:26 EDT
Many thanks Kerry! This is a balanced historical account.
Dear Myron, Please find below the latest page of Crystal Spheres. I think you will find it interesting! Myron’s return to Aberystwyth was facilitated by a British Ramsay Memorial Fellowship award in 1976 as British Ramsay Fellow of University College London. The award commemorates William Ramsay’s 1904 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for discovering the ‘inert gaseous elements of the air’. This was Britain’s first Nobel Prize for Chemistry.      Myron’s first contact with Trinity College Dublin came when Bill Coffey phoned to point out that the Mori three variable theory Myron had applied to the far infra red was mathematically the same as a two dimensional itinerant oscillator theory which Coffey and Calderwood had developed. Myron was soon given the opportunity to meet his counterparts in Ireland when EDCL’s Professor Mansel Davies asked him to deputize for him at a conference in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS). The DIAS is a modern building whose first Director was Erwin Schrödinger, one of the world’s greatest physicists and contemporary of Einstein. During the conference Myron met Bill Coffey, and they walked back to Trinity College for lunch in the Senior Common Room. TCD has a large outside wall which opens out into quadrangles and an expanse of green.  It is similar to a large Cambridge or Oxford College with the exterior wall sheltering it from the noise of the Dublin traffic. TCD was founded by Elizabeth 1st Tudor and was the College of Hamilton, Fitzgerald, Walton and other able scientists.  Myron tested the theories produced by Coffey and his colleagues against a telling combination of far infra red and microwave data as soon as he returned to Aberystwyth. This led to a long term Celtic alliance between the workers and the papers of this era record this collaborative research work.  Coffey is now a professor and fellow of TCD..  The work with Coffey developed into Myron’s first monograph, “Molecular Dynamics”, number 108 on the Omnia Opera and the TCD group also contributed as well as they could to Project Delta of EMLG.      On the literary side the Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett also attended TCD, as did the poet Anthony Cronin and many others.. Oscar Wilde was born in number 18, occupied by the Department before it moved into the printing house.  James Joyce was student at University College Dublin.
    Myron’s Ramsay Memorial Fellowship covered the years 1976 to 1978 and as can be seen from the Omnia Opera on www.aias.us was a productive time, with Myron once more back in his preferred environment at the EDCL and amongst Welsh speakers in Aberystwyth.  During this time the correlation and memory function technique was developed by Laplace transformation of far infra red data, sometimes combined with microwave data and also from other techniques.  This was the basic method for the European Delta Project, to use all available techniques to look at selected molecular liquid samples.  The Delta Project was formulated in the EDCL at Aberystwyth on the SRC and Ramsay fellowships which Myron had in tough open competition.  In 1978, Myron won yet another fellowship, the SERC Advanced Fellowship of the British Government, for which he was graded top of his year for Britain in chemistry. On this fellowship Myron produced about one hundred and fifty papers from 1978 to 1983, as recorded on the www.aias.us Omnia Opera.      The SERC Advanced Fellowship enabled Myron able to maintain the continuity of work at the EDCL with a large grant from SERC for staff and equipment.  This grant was used to build up a submillimetre laboratory modeled on the National Physical Laboratory. The intention was to build up a laboratory with a far infra red interferometer and a submillimetre laser, staffed by postgraduates and post docs. In 1978 Myron was recognized for his endeavors in the far infra red with the Harrison Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1978, and its equally prestigious Meldola Medal in 1979.  In 1978 Myron was also awarded his D. Sc. degree at the youngest age recorded for the degree, the highest in Britain and the Commonwealth.  Myron went on to establish the European Molecular Liquids Group with the help of the NPL in 1980, and published his first and second monographs in 1982 and 1984.  The Delta Project Delta was described in chapter 12 of the first monograph, number 108 on the Omnia Opera.  The computer simulation work was greatly developed from the code TETRA (see www.aias.us website) which was developed by the Singer group of the SERC CCP5 project which was associated with EMLG.  Myron was soon invited to advise the US NSF on the Delta Project which was formulated in Europe, but due to lack of support and vision from management at the EDCL, did not flourish in the manner intended.  Myron subsequently and reluctantly moved to Bangor in 1983 and then Swansea on University of Wales Fellowships after fifteen years (1968-1983) at his spiritual home of Aberystwyth.  Meanwhile, with talent hemorrhaging from the Aberystwyth Chemistry Department, which just a few years earlier had been regarded as the leading solid state chemistry department in the world, the highly regarded Edward Davies Chemical Laboratories closed. The EDCL building had already been saved from destruction by Myron’s use of fire extinguishers and emergency call to the fire brigade during his time there. With the building now lying vacant it was scheduled for demolition, but was saved again by Myron and Gareth, who arranged for it to be listed by CADW to prevent its untimely destruction. Thus, the old 1907 building survived and came back into use as the now thriving Art Department.       At Bangor and Swansea (on a Pilcher Senior Fellowship), Myron lacked the support of a research team which meant practical work had to be curtailed. As a result the laser which in today’s prices was worth around a quarter of a million pounds was shipped to the University of Pisa where it could still be properly utilized.  However, the Delta Project could not now come to fruition! Nevertheless, Myron was able to work on the acclaimed volumes 62 and 63 of “Advances in Chemical Physics” which he co edited with Paolo Grigolini and Giuseppe Pastori-Parravicini and also organized a Nuffield Foundation conference.      With the demise of the Edward Davies Chemical Laboratories, Myron had to restrict his efforts to theoretical research.  Fortunately the UMRCC CDC 7600 supercomputer (University of Manchester) which Myron had used for simulation at Aberystwyth could still be accessed easily from Bangor and Swansea, so Myron was able to concentrate on computer simulation. Myron’s work at Swansea turned out to be productive and led to Enrico Clementi offering Myron an IBM visiting professorship at IBM Kingston in New York State. In a twist of fate, Myron’s reluctant move away from experimental research and away from Wales was to have far reaching consequences, which would change physics as we know it. Myron’s move to America, to work at IBM and Cornell which was combined with a year long sabbatical at the University of Zurich to develop his theoretical studies into the computer simulation of molecules would unexpectedly have relevance to Einstein’s uncompleted work. Myron’s com
puter simulation work on the inverse Faraday Effect at Zurich would lead Myron to discover that the light photon is inextricably linked to a previously unknown magnetic field in its direction of propagation. This revelation provided the missing part to the jig saw, which had prevented Einstein linking his curved space to Cartan’s twisting spacetime (torsion) in the nineteen twenties. In this twist of fate, Myron’s bad luck at not being given tenure at his alma mater, which had like Einstein turned him into something of a scientific nomad, had led directly to Myron docking Einstein’s Curved space to Cartan’s torsion to complete Einstein’s life’s work of finding the fabled theory of everything! This has been described as the greatest scientific achievement since man first walked the face of the Earth. Myron’s genius had not been enough to give him the secure job he so much wanted in Aberystwyth, but his enforced traveling going right back to his Ph D days had given him face to face contact with great scientists around the globe that ultimately facilitated him making the greatest scientific breakthrough in the history of science and which is ushering in ‘A New Age in Physics’!       Kerry
