Subject: Filmscript by Kerry for the film: “The Life of Myron Evans”
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:41:38 EDT
Dear Myron,
Please find below the latest page of Crystal Spheres.
   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. However, it was now time for Myron to move on to Nancy to study microwave interferometry with Professor Jean-Louis Rivail’s group.     Myron traveled up to Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, on an overnight train from Nice through Marseilles, Dijon and Avignon and was greeted by Jose Goulon of Jean-Louis Rivail’s group of the CNRS Labo de physique theorique situated in University Nancy II in a modern architect designed building. Jose and Myron worked on the labs microwave interferometer and the results were published in an early Molecular Physics papers (now available on the www.aias.us Omnia Opera), an early precursor to Project Delta using several techniques in coordination. Myron liked the CNRS system, and later the Italian CNR system, and some years later as EMLG coordinator tried to get such a system established in Britain. Jose was always very helpful and completed two doctoral theses, later rising high in the French research system. Lorraine is very different from Provence, displaying greener, forested country without hedges and with large rivers such as the Meuse and Moselle. Myron attended Son et Lumiere in the Place Stanislaw, with its gilded ironwork, cobbled square and distinctive architecture, and Professor Jean-Louis Rivail took Jose and Myron on trips to Alsace and the Vosges. Myron appreciated that the Alsatian language is again very different from either French or German, and the Vosges looks down on the flat plain of Alsace leading up to Strasbourg.      Myron, Jose and Rivail also traveled down to Mulhouse to visit Jose’s grandmother, who was getting on in age and confused Myron with a soldier from the Great War – un Anglais, not a Galois like Charles de Gaulle of Colombe les Deux Eglises.      The Staff of the CNRS lab at Nancy were very friendly, and Myron was often invited to lunch, which extended for two or three hours in a leisurely manner, with chess games and good French food.  Madame Roussy made a delicious Quiche Lorraine, and Roussy himself, as his red haired name suggests, was as volatile as ether.  The local supermarket provided half cheese varieties, thus vindicating de Gaulle’s well known description of France.  There was much ham and sausage, and the town of Metz had its distinctive architecture intact.  Graham Davies arrived in Nancy when Myron was there, and they visited Fort Vaux near Verdun, which in the Great War provided grim memories on all sides.       From Nancy Myron traveled to spend a week in Paris with the Nancy CNRS group, and stayed in a flat provided by Brot close to the Arc de Triomphe.  The Parisians converged on the patisseries each morning and for breakfast drank a bowl of chocolate and croissants.  The mirabelle liqueure which was Myron tried out at Nancy was more powerful, especially when innocently drank down like coke, a memory function that retains its effect to this day.      Finally Myron traveled back to Calais with a backpack full of books, which were subsequently ceremoniously deposited on Mansel Davies’s desk back in the EDCL.  These French visits were formative, and thereafter Myron went on to develop the correlation and memory function methods learned in France to the level which earned him both the Harrison Memorial Prize and the Meldola Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1978 and 1979.      The year from early summer 1973 to early summer 1974 was a happy time for Myron and produced many treasured memories.  As soon as he got back to the EDCL he began to apply the methods he had learned in France to his far infra red spectra, using a single sided Laplace transform in Algol code to produce time correlation functions which could be compared with theoretical models such as Gordon M, J diffusion and so forth.  The far infra red combined with the microwave proved to be a severe test for the then known theory.  The Debye theory failed completely and produced the Debye plateau in the far infra red.  This was already known to Mansel Davies’s group before Myron had started his Ph. D., for example in the Thesis of G. W. F. Pardoe.  However, no time domain analysis had been carried out prior to Myron’s return from France.  Myron wrote the Algol code for the Laplace transform and inputted the data and drawing the results by hand.  This involved thousands of hours of work but gradually led to a series of papers (see the Omnia Opera ) which analyzed the far infra red very thoroughly with the then known models.  So Myron’s Ph. D. Thesis is composed largely of this novel analytical work, which at the time made a significant international impact.  Certainly, both Mansel Davies and John Thomas were very proud of this work, and mentioned it extensively.       Myron wanted to stay at Aberystwyth, as a Welsh speaker, but for some reason was advised to take a post doctoral first and went on to win three post doctoral fellowships in open international competition..  A SRC post doctoral for Oxford, a NRCC post doctoral to work in Canada with the Nobel Laureate Herzberg and an ICI European Fellowship to work with Brot again.  These were all tough, highly competitive fellowships and Myron should have been thrilled with his progress. However, at this point in the summer of 1974 he began to feel less happy, because he felt he had earned a lectureship at Aberystwyth and did not want to experience the disruption of moving elsewhere.  Myron had now spent time abroad in France and that rewarding experience had also made him realize that travel was fine but Aberystwyth was home. So reluctantly Myron had to follow the career path being mapped out for him and he relocated to Oxford to work with Professor Sir John Rowlinson, FRS, who had been the external examiner for Myron’s Ph. D.  Neither Rowlinson nor Myron quite knew why the relocation was necessary, so both had to improvise.  Rowlinson at that point had not ventured into far infra red, so some strange political things were happening which baffled Myron and were taking him away from his beloved Wales and Aberystwyth.  Myron was openly being advertised as a whiz kid but was not given the essential opportunity for tenure. Myron completed his Ph. D. in 1974 in just over two years and prepared to move to the PCL at Oxford as an SRC post doc.      Mansel was a formative influence on Myron and had encouraged him to publish in journals while still a student. However, Myron’s first paper infact was almost his last! Itwas on compressed gaseous cyanogen and required Myron to carry out a dangerous experiment on this most toxic and flammable gas.  It was kept liquefied
at liquid nitrogen temperatures prior to compression to up to about one hundred atmospheres and beyond. One evening, working late as usual, the safety office Dr Sam Graham heard the cyanogen bang in the pot, and as it started to bubble away Myron thought Dr Graham was going to keel over and sink at any time. Myron held his breath in more than one way. Dr Graham departed just in time as Myron quickly bolted up the gas in its pressure chamber and opened all the windows. This is paper one on the Omnia Opera, on the far infra red spectrum of compressed gaseous and liquid cyanogen and its quadrupole moment.  Mansel typically chose it solely on the grounds of its quadrupole.  The fact that he might lose both a student and a safety officer had eluded him!  Kerry
Kerry took part in the filming of “The Universe of Myron Evans” and he is putting together a really pleasant and evocative filmscript for the second film I will keep on adding reminiscences to the blog. The study in France was really important for the development of the correlation function method. AIAS is now making such a big impact that it would be a good idea to team up with Aberystwyth again in some way. The Welsh language has great support all over the world, and we badly need a Welsh medium College in which all staff are fluent in the language. There is such strong support for the language in the US that such a College may well be founded there.
