Subject: Fwd: Myron at Oxford
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:01:06 EDT
Dear Myron,
Please find below the latest page of Crystal Spheres.
Myron at Oxford.          Myron had previously had the opportunity to study at Cambridge, but was reluctant to go to Cambridge as an undergraduate because he wished to go to Aberystwyth. The attitudes at Cambridge were considered by Myron to be weirdly reactionary, because for a long time no protestant nonconformists were allowed to attend there. The traditional place for Welsh speakers was Oxford, where Myron duly arrived in Oct 1974 in none too great spirits, (“Were it not for science I would do this for none earthly thing”, with apologies to Henry VIII). Myron had put his roots down in Aberystwyth and felt let down by his mentors who had decided that Oxford would be a worthwhile port of call for the next stage of his career. To some, Aberystwyth was the graveyard of ambition. Students all too often loved the environment so much that they would take low paid permanent jobs after graduating rather than leave Aberystwyth to further their careers.  However, Myron had already won three fellowships in tough open international competition and any one of these would have allowed him to stay at the EDCL, the obvious course of action and the College would not even have had to pay him a salary. However Mansel had some idea that Myron should go to work elsewhere for two years even though Myron was mature enough for tenure at the EDCL. So, Myron reluctantly left Aberystwyth, but like General MacArthur vowed to return as soon as possible.      Rowlinson was unprepared for Myron’s arrival, but endeavored to improvise something. Myron found the conditions at Oxford difficult to get used to, having to transfer to a new computer system for example, and had no office, even as an SRC post doctoral, but had only part of a bench in Prof. Sir Harold Thomson’s laboratory.      Accommodation at Oxford was of poor quality and Myron initially lodged in a small room in North Oxford, then in a cellar room off South Parks Road, which was damp and wet with mildew. This was because Oxford is built on a marsh at the confluence of the Cherwell and Thames, and parts of the City, notably Jericho, left a lot to be desired. So Myron decided to compete for a Junior Research Fellowship of Wolfson College that was being advertised. Myron was relieved to win the open competition and duly moved in to the modern Wolfson College with batels (free accommodation and selected meals). This was a great improvement and Myron’s spirits rose a little.      Myron took up the Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College Oxford from 1974 to 1976 and along with his academic work continued to indulge his interest in athletics by training at Iffley Road, Oxford. One day soon before the old cinder track was to be replaced by a tartan track, Myron was training there when he happened to meet three old timers who had come to run around the track one last time for old time’s sake. Amazingly Myron found out that the old timers were none other than Bannister, Brasher and Chattaway.  They were running around one last time in honor of the old track where Bannister did 3 minutes 59.6 secs to become the first athlete to break the four minute mile barrier. Chattaway was a three miler.      At Oxford Myron pressed ahead with Faraday II publications and Molecular Physics publications, plus one review with Rowlinson.  At that time Myron also worked with Graham Davies at the Post Office Research Centre in Dollis Hill in North London.  He is now Prof. Graham Davies, Head of Engineering at Birmingham, and a fellow Swansea man.      At Oxford, from 1974 to 1976 computer simulation was being pursued within Rowlinson’s group and notably so by a Ph. D. student called Dominic Tildesley, who is now the Chief Scientist of Unilever. Myron was most impressed by Dominic’s work and realized that this revolutionary new method could be used to produce the rotational velocity correlation function in the far infra red, in addition to many other types of correlation function.      The memory function method was first applied to the far infra red in about 1975 by Sir John Rowlinson and Myron (Omnia Opera (OO) 16 on www.aias.us) and thereafter in OO19 and OO20 with Gareth Evans..  The memory function method is a development of the Langevin equation where the friction coefficient is developed into an integral, and the time independent friction coefficient of Langevin develops a memory of past events ” A la Recherché du Temps Perdues”.  After Laplace transformation a continued fraction is obtained in the Laplace variable p.  Myron realized that the far infra red power absorption coefficient could be well described by truncating this at the three variable level and Myron first presented the idea, while still officially at Oxford, to a Conference in Gregynog, in the presence of Mansel Davies, Alun Price and George Wylie.  Wylie realized its significance immediately, and this impressed Mansel a lot. The Langevin equation itself can only describe the bell shaped Debye dielectric loss curve, and flattens out into a plateau in the far infra red – the Debye plateau discovered by Mansel Davies et al., again at the EDCL.  Myron also realized that the theory could be more rigorously tested when both the dielectric loss and the far infra red power absorption coefficient were used.  This was the beginning of project Delta of the EMLG, a complex plan for multi technical research under controlled conditions, to be carried out over all Europe.  All of Delta was planned at the EDCL.  The then Labour Shadow Minister Tam Dalyell MP phoned Myron up one day to discuss Delta and Myron’s vision for a European Laboratory at Aberystwyth, in an extension of the EDCL itself.      In 1976 at Mansel’s request, Myron opened a Gordon conference at Holderness School, New Hampshire. Here Myron met a number of well known scientists including Harvard’s J. H. Van Vleck and Brown University’s Robert H. Cole who both made encouraging remarks. Myron also met Yale’s Gibbs Theoretical Chemistry Professor, Lars Onsager and the Presidential Advisor John Deutch (Harvard University) at the conference dinner. Lars Onsager (1903-1976) was the Norwegian-American winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the Onsager reciprocal relations, which are a set of equations concerning diffusion and temperature which are used in thermodynamics. In 1925 Onsager improved the Debye-Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions by incorporating Brownian motion and became Debye’s assistant at ETH Zurich until 1928 and went on at Yale to make improvements to the dipole theory of dielectrics. John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (1899-1980) was born in Connecticut and won the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics for his contribution to the understanding of electrons in non-crystalline magnetic solids. Vleck told Myron that he thought his work was important, a complement that the 26 year old Welshman never forgot.      Myron was Mansel’s third last student, followed by Gareth J. Evans (who became his close friend) and Colin Reid. Gareth had followed in Myron’s shoes after Myron had completed his Ph.D by becoming Mansel’s Ph D student studying far infra red spectroscopy and dielectrics. However, Myron was a hard act to follow and the far infra red equipment which had been state of the art was now aging and showing signs of exhaustion and overuse following Myron’s unrelenting research work. Myron’
s collaborative work with teams in France had opened up new avenues of study that Mansel had not even dreamed of. Mansel was also approaching retirement and was spending more time in his home in Criccieth. Thus, Mansel could see that if Gareth was going to thrive in his research work, Myron would have to pass on his experience.. So it was that while at Oxford, Mansel asked Myron to effectively supervise both Gareth and Colin back at Aberystwyth and this request, opened the way for Myron to return frequently to his alma mater which he had deeply missed while at Oxford.      However, things soon began to get out of hand because it meant a lot of travel for Myron, but with no accommodation arranged at Aberystwyth, and no expenses. So Myron took every opportunity to return to Aberystwyth and got round the problem by using a sleeping bag to sleep on the floor of the laboratory in room 262.  When Myron arrived back for the first time Gareth was about to give up his Ph. D. after being asked for three months to repair a paper tape punch. Gareth was thrilled to meet Myron and saw greatness in him, but said recently that he had not realized that Myron would eventually set out to unify the whole of physics.      It was soon being noticed back in Oxford that Myron was not around as often as would have naturally been expected. Myron was being asked questions by President Sir Henry Fisher at Wolfson why he was not spending all his time there. This was a very awkward situation. The march of papers down Myron’s Omnia Opera gives an impression of stability at this time, but this was far from being the case. At the EDCL Mansel found out that Myron had been sleeping there and kicked up trouble about the fact that the insurance of the EDCL did not allow itinerant scientists to shelter overnight in laboratory, room 262 and went on to write Myron a stinker of a letter, overlooking the fact that he had asked Myron to supervise Gareth, a thing that he should have done. Eventually this chaotic situation righted itself when Myron found some typically terrible accommodation back in Aberystwyth for a while (this time with a room with no window, just a hole in the wall) before eventually renting Martin Beevers’ house in Tal y Bont while he was on sabbatical and at last Myron was happy again.       The stagnation of Gareth’s work was remedied by a Government award to Rowlinson and Myron of a new interferometer system and by the strong development of theory, as can be seen form papers 7 to about 20 on the Omnia Opera of www.aias.us. At this time, Rowlinson kindly allowed Myron to go back to the EDCL together with the new Grubb Parsons / NPL system to replace the failing equipment at Aberystwyth. Rowlinson had recognized that Myron was unhappy at Oxford because he had put down his roots in Aberystwyth and wanted to work there for the rest of his life! The major advance of the memory function method appeared in paper 20 of the Omnia Opera.  Gareth Evans was able to produce ever better quality data on which Myron was able to bring both theory and computer simulation to bear.  Thus, Gareth’s spirits improved and he graduated Ph .D. in 1977.  The computer simulation was a long, slow arduous slog, because it had to be carried out on the UMRCC CDC 7600 computer, with zero priority, and very slow turnaround times. Nevertheless Gareth and Colin had proved themselves and were to become important members of Myron’s new research group that was forming at the EDCL.  Kerry
Many thanks again to Kerry – who is now a member of the Court (supreme governing body) of the University of Aberystwyth. This is a balanced and accurate summary of those years. Sir Henry Fisher was a retired High Court Judge, a kindly man who understood the situation after it was explained to him. The first president of Wolfson was Sir Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher, so the curved wall of the 1965 College is called the Berlin Wall. I have the same perspective of Aberystwyth as the Founders of the University of Wales did in 1887, at the National Eisteddfod. To bring education to protestant nonconfomists locked out of OxBridge. Lloyd-George supported the establishment of the UW, and also the National Library of Wales, and was a welsh speaking Baptist in origin (i.e. protestant nonconformist, like most of Wales). So as Edinburgh is a focus for education in Scotland, and Trinity College Dublin for Ireland, Aberystwyth should be a focus for Wales. There are over a hundred Universities in Britain in the English language, none in the Welsh language, none in the Breton language in France, none in the Cornish language, and one in the Gaelic language, founded by the Galeic language poet Sorley MacLean of Skye. Ironically, DNA shows that the people of Britain have been essentially homogeneous for ten thousand years, so the British Celtic was their OWN language, all over Britain. It is shameful if the People of Britain lose their own languages. They have already lost all Norse, Angle and Saxon languages. If I said “Offa was a wis rug” in Saxon, no one would understand me.
Civil List Scientist
