Subject: Fwd: Myron as a Postgraduate
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:43:46 EDT
Many thanks again to Kerry, this is a first class work of biography, already well read internationally off _www.aias.us_ (http://www.aias.us) .
Dear Myron,
Please find below the latest page of Crystal Spheres.
     Plynlimon is one of the most notable mountains in Mid Wales and rises as the road leaves Aberystwyth Eastwards to the centre of Wales. Around twelve miles inland near the mountain peak a small river passes under the road at Eisteddfod Gurig and this marks the border between the Counties of Ceridigion and Powys. Also marking the border is a small group of rocks with the words Elvis painted on them and are widely known as Elvis Rock. Nowadays it is assumed that the reference is to Elvis Presley, but initially it was part of advertising to get a local ‘Elvis’ elected to the council. The river passing under the road is infact the River Wye and its source is accessed by parking at that point and then walking through the nearby farm and following the hill to its top. At the top of Plynlimon is an ancient cairn and in the valley below is the wreckage of a World War II Lockheed Lightning which hit the mountain peak in mist while on a training mission. Plynlimon is the source of the River Severn, the River Wye and the River Rheidol which winds it way to Aberystwyth where it meets up with the River Ystwyth in the harbor before both rivers enter the sea.      For his post graduate studies Myron was given only part of a laboratory bench with no office, but these conditions were typical for research students. Myron was happy with these conditions because room 262 of the EDCL was ideal.  Slowly, packs of computer cards began to be shelved on the bench, all written in Algol (www.aias.us collected code).. Situated just behind Myron, was the Grubb-Parsons / NPL far infra red spectrometer, on a sturdy wooden laboratory bench with a hole cut in it for the condensing chamber of the pressure cell.  Its ultraviolet light would flash on and off as it was cut by the amplitude modulator.  This had a Budenberg gauge and this cell is drawn out in Myron’s Ph. D.. Thesis on the Omnia Opera section of www.aias.us.  It was designed by Arnold Baise, and built by the mechanical workshop of the EDCL: John Poley, Harold Jolley and Robert Meredith.  The electronic workshop staff kept the interferometer going and included Dyson Jones and Irfon Williams.  These same staff also maintained all the research apparatus of Sir John Thomas’s group, and great credit is due to them.  There was a photographic darkroom and facility for the electron microscope and in charge of this was James Jenkins.       Myron always strived to be original in his new papers and books with each intended to contain something new. In 1971, when Myron started his Ph. D., post graduates were not allowed to publish papers until they graduated, and then only with the Ph. D. supervisor.. In spring 1972 however Myron broke the mold when he drafted a paper for publication and gave it to Mansel Davies. Mansel agreed to look over it and approved it for submission, to Spectrochimica Acta and it was edited from Oxford by Professor Sir Harold Thomson, FRS, sometime chairman of the Football Association and Fellow of St John’s College Oxford. This was on compressed propyne. Myron had had great trouble synthesizing cyanogen, with a kilogram of potassium cyanide onto which acid was dripped in a fume cupboard. That was actually the first task assigned to Myron by Mansel on starting his Ph. D. Having narrowly avoided elimination of the whole population of Aberystwyth by using up the entire EDCL supply of very toxic potassium cyanide, Mansel eventually agreed to buy a lecture bottle – a small cylinder of the gas. It was while waiting for this that Myron used propyne. The apparatus was often out of order, despite the best efforts of the electronic and mechanical workshops, so Myron whiled away the time doing theory, firstly with Ian Larkin. From the outset Myron was always driven by a deep desire to produce new things. The cyanogen paper was eventually accepted by Faraday Transactions II, and Myron was thrilled at having it published. The only paper Myron actually published with Mansel was one on the liquid crystal MBBA, where Myron had had to expend immense efforts on the computation with a slow hand calculator using the itinerant oscillator model developed mainly by Wylie. Soon Myron was to undertake a trip to Brot’s lab in Nice, where he learned the method of single sided Laplace transformation of spectra into the time domain.      Myron’s inductive thinking really began to develop with the first successful production of a time domain correlation function from a far infra red power absorption spectrum at the EDCL in summer 1973. This meant that the power absorption spectrum could be compared easily with correlation functions from theory of all kinds. These were rotational velocity autocorrelation functions  where mu dot is the time derivative of the molecular electric dipole moment. This required very long hours of work, because it was all done by hand plotting and drawing using the Elliot 4130 computer situated a mile or so away on the main Penglais Campus, having a total of only 48 kilobytes of memory for the whole College. The far infra red power absorption spectrum itself was obtained by a fast Fourier transform from a distance domain interferogram. This technique was developed at the British National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Middlesex, notably by Alistair Gebbie, George Chantry and John Chamberlain.  At the EDCL in the early seventies, the seventeenth century elegance of Fourier and Laplace was the basis for everything using the twentieth century abacus – the computer. The process therefore started with an interferogram and finished with a correlation function.  Later the rotational velocity correlation function was combined with the dipole correlation function , the single sided Laplace transform of the dielectric loss. The latter spectra were obtained by other parts of Mansel Davies’s unique twelve decade laboratory, stretching from sub Hertzian to far infra red (terahertz).  Before Myron went to France he was restricted by inexperience and by the fact that he could only use the power absorption spectrum, not the correlation function. After coming back from France Myron was able to test Gordon’s M and J diffusion models - at a time when Gordon was working at Harvard.  These are the early Omnia Opera papers on www.aias.us - all published in the leading chemistry journal of Britain at that time for chemical physics, Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry Faraday Transactions II.      Myron was always inspired by original thought, in the arts as well as the sciences, and as a postgraduate used to read a lot of poetry and novels bought at Galloway’s bookshop on Pier Street, and shelved in his small room at Cwrt Mawr. The twentieth century poetry from Yeats onwards inspired Myron the most. Books by Dylan Thomas were bought in the same Uplands Bookshop as he himself frequented as the young man dressed in the bottle green tie and fag end, the Evening Post reporter in the capsized town of Swansea. Myron wanted to transfer the astonishing originally of a James Joyce or Dylan Thomas to science – but as student did not quite know how.      Among the books Myron bought and read were ones by Sartre, Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Machado, Akhmato
va, Jimenez, Racine, collected twentieth century verse, Joyce, Thomas, Kenneth Clark, and later Patrick Kavanagh and many American authors such as Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”, “Tortilla Flats” and ”Cannery Row”, Jack London and so on.  In the Welsh language all the major and lesser Welsh poets, the Oxford Book of Welsh verse, and “Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym” by Prof. Sir Thomas Parry for example.  Earlier Myron had read Mallory, Sheridan, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Eliot, Wilde, Golding, and Shakespeare at school, and earlier still Dickens and Tolstoy and many others from age about seven onwards.  Only gradually though did Myron begin to understand the power, originality, precision, word-colour and depth of Dylan Thomas. Conan-Doyle was a particular favorite of Myron and he read the famous Sherlock Holmes stories many times in their entirety in addition to Turgenev and all the major Russian authors in translation.        Myron was always inspired by this originality and wished to transfer it to science somehow, but this was often a search in the dark. The powerful driving force of inductive thought was ever present, so for example one can see the correlation function method of the early seventies being applied for the first time to collision induced spectra of the far infra red, liquids as well as compressed gases. Later at Oxford Myron was to learn of the Mori statistical mechanics, and the elegant Mori continued fraction in the Laplace domain. However it was at the EDCL that the correlation function method was first applied, and all the seventies papers are variations on this rich theme. Using the frequency domain collision induced spectra alone it was possible to measure molecular properties such as the multipole moments, for cyanogen Myron measured the quadrupole moment, and for oxygen both the quadrupole and hexadecapole moments. So with the very limited resources available at the EDCL, Myron tried to squeeze out all the new ideas possible, always hoping for the emergence of a major new paradigm. With the benefit of hindsight that era is seen to have produced very good work, but it was restricted due to lack of experience. The major new paradigms came much later, and these ideas reverberate around the world today, like it or like it not. The motivation however is the same now as it was then, but now aided by a lot of hard gained experience.      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 (Director of the CNRS Labo de Physique de la Matiere Condensee at Nice) 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.  Kerry
