Subject: “Crystal Spheres”: Undergraduate
Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:21:12 EDT
Dear Myron, Please find below the latest page of Crystal Spheres.     Myron’s first lodgings were at Brig y Don, Sea View Place.  This was a bed and breakfast set up for three pounds a week, at a time when the full student grant was 262 pounds a year plus fees paid.  At Brig y Don there were six students crammed into one room, so study was not possible there.  In lectures, Myron found that students were not as spoon-fed as had been the case at school and some of the lecturers were not as inspiring as the teachers he had encountered in Pontardawe. Thus, Myron found it necessary to spend many hours polishing the lecture notes into shape, which he did in the EDCL Library and other libraries, because it was impossible to work in the student lodgings.  Aberystwyth has more students per head of population than anywhere else in Britain and as a result is blessed with a multitude of pubs and a plethora of chapels. In the sixties and seventies some chapels were closing and for the first time pubs outnumbered chapels. This meant that every pub had a chapel, but one poor vicar did not have a pub! To encourage students and locals to worship at the chapels, all pubs were closed all day on a Sunday until the late 1980’s.  This disappointed many a summer drinker from the midlands, who had taken the train all the way to Aberystwyth for a day trip to the seaside and had emerged from the railway station only to find all the pubs shut in a sixteen mile radius! The pubs shut at 10.30 in the winter and 11.00 in the summer, but students knew the pubs which had ‘lock-ins’ for drinking late into the night.  However, Myron was never ‘a great drinker’ and did not approve of some of the antics of his heavy drinking contemporaries who could behave in a less than delightful way on occasions.      Myron found that the most difficult aspect of the first year was organic chemistry, and some aspects of physics.  So it was a matter of slogging it out in what Myron found initially was a quite a hostile environment, far from what he had expected of the Premier College.  The first set of examinations at University took place before Christmas of 1968.  By that time Myron had spent a term on a diet of chips and green peas, so had lost a lot of weight, having spend a lot of his money on course books.  Myron was determined not to have to ask his parents for any additional support, and was very pleased to get back home again at the end of the first term. The second and third terms were no easier, but by building up a good set of notes through many hours of hard library work, Myron implemented his learning method again and memorized the whole year’s work, frantically regurgitating in the examinations.  Myron’s hard work paid off when he was surprised to learn that he had been awarded the Mathews Prize for the best first year undergraduate results.  There were some pleasant aspects of the first year, such as a bike ride to Devil’s bridge and back, but otherwise Myron concentrated on his studies and found achieving academic success very much a hard slog.      Myron’s second lodgings were at Powell Street and were even more of a hole than Brig y Don was, if that was possible.  Here Myron met his life long friend Roger Goodger.  In the second year Myron took chemistry and applied mathematics, and dropped physics which he found was taught in a rather uninteresting way.  The chemistry was split into different sections and soon Myron began to enjoy some of the courses being given.  The mathematics however was an interminable slog.  Only many years later would Myron self teach himself to the level of mathematics that he uses today.  Similarly, Einstein had not shown a great interest in mathematics until after he was famous and needed it to develop his theory of general relativity, which required the mastery of the extremely difficult Riemann mathematics of curved surfaces. Myron would eventually need to master Riemann geometry and in addition the more powerful Cartan’s tensor mathematics which had not been available to Einstein. Kerry
Many thanks indeed! Like Yeats in Dublin I never entered a pub in Aberystwyth, concentrating on the chippies for survival. As the photographic albums sent around show, there were pleasant occasions of course, like sliding down Pen Dinas’s snow covered hillside on the back of a chair and some photography under the music room, with the banshee wailing of a badly tuned violin resonating in the pitch blackness of the dark room. That would be an office ideal for a string theorist, weaving a fantasia with no guiding light. The waves off the Irish sea sometimes reached fifteen feet, with very strong winds at the harbour entrance. Everyone who has been to Aberystwyth remembers the boom of the sea against the wall. I think that the dark room was below sea level, at least it felt like it. In my fourth year there (first year postgrad) I managed to get into a hall of residence at Cwrt Mawr, which was much better. This was ideal for eight or ten mile road runs and track training over 3 and 6 miles (5 and 10 kilometres). At that postgrad time I started mountaineering in Eryri (Snowdonia) and Pumlumon, and Mull and Glencoe in Scotland. At undergraduate one always felt the great pressure of study and examinations, especially as I had to get the top first in order to get to Ph. D.
