Subject: Biography by Kerry Pendergast
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:48:12 EDT
This would be a suggested filmscript for the second film, due to start filming in October, and is also part of Kerry’s acclaimed “Crystal Spheres” on _www.aias.us_ (http://www.aias.us) . So this script is developing well and I will continue to put on various reminiscences on the blog, which alone is generating about 200,000 hits a month on average.
Dear Myron,
Please find below the latest page of Crystal Spheres.
Myron as a Postgraduate.       Between 1968 and 1977, Mansel worked with the National Physics laboratory’s (NPL) John Chamberlain pioneering the development of Fourier transform infra red spectroscopy. Mansel collaborated with the Grubb Parson Company in the development of commercial infra-red instruments and one of these became an important research tool at the Edward Davies Chemical Laboratories and was used greatly by Myron Evans at the start of his research career forhis Ph. D. with the help of Arnold Baise from Witwatersrand University in South Africa. This interferometer required the use of paper tape and a pack of cards and when in use the noise from the production of the tapes was deafening. Each pack had to be taken up to the Elliot 4130 computer half a mile away, which had a massive 48 kilobytes of memory for the whole College. So Myron’s Ph. D work started in a laboratory in the new extension of the Edward Davies Chemical Laboratories with a view of a bank rising up the hill where wild rabbits would often be seen feeding on this inaccessible part of the laboratory surroundings. The serene view of the rabbits would then periodically be shattered by the deafening noise of the punching out of the computer tapes as various far infra red spectra were run..      Myron worked on his thesis from 1971 to 1974 and the specialized nature of his work gave rise to opportunities to travel to liaise with specialists in other laboratories in Europe.  In spring 1973 Myron set with funding from the French Government to Nice to work at the CNRS laboratory at the Parc Valrose Campus, to work along side Pierre Sixou, Pierre Bezot, Francoise Fried and Bernadette Lassier and their Directors Professor Claude Brot who specialized in the physics of condensed matter and Professor Jean-Louis Rivail whose special interest was dielectrics and microwave. Their work included far infra red studies and very early revolutionary computer simulation by Bernard Quentrec of two dimensional itinerant oscillator motion in solids in which Mansel Davies was interested. The time correlation function was an intrinsic part of those studies and Myron saw this time as key to his intellectual development.      Nice is situated in Provence, where all the major artist of the French Impressionist school painted, and later post impressionists such as Matisse.  The CNRS lab staff had just arrived from Paris and Myron was shown around all the restaurants of Nice by them. Myron attended open air piano recitals and so on, one of which took place in the Roman amphitheatre of Cimiez, which houses the Musee Matisse.  Near this is a triumphal arch of Augustus and Roman archeology in good condition. Myron walked over to Cap d’Antibes, and visited the Musee Picasso.  The scientists visited the Maeght Foundation of modern art and the village of La Turbie above Monte Carlo.  Myron was able to walk over to Monte Carlo and back on the haute and moyenne corniches, a distance of about 30 kilometres. Myron preferred to walk because Brot was a hair raising driver.      The Mediterranean is intensely blue compared with the Atlantic, with warm offshore winds with no tide, so fish can be brought in directly to the restaurants and pizza ovens in the old Italian and Greek town of Nica.  Myron was pleased to hear Provencal being spoken and found it rather different from French.  Myron once innocently drank a cup of very strong Provencal coffee which sent him dancing around the Promenade des Anglais for days working off the caffeine.  He never broke the bank at Monte Carlo, but did take an interest in molecular dynamics simulation and intensely studied the time correlation function method.  This knowledge was subsequently brought back to Aberystwyth but first Myron spent some time in Nancy and Paris.  The accommodation in Nice was varied, random and various and Myron took time to read Solzhenitsyn’s then new novels there.  Kerry
