Beamlines

“England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies.” So wrote George Santayana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana in 1922.

Here we have two words, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew, which scholars of those languages will have no difficulty in recognizing as descending from the same ancient Semitic source. In Arabic the word means “error” in the sense of “error message” from a computer. The Arabic version is pronounced “khata” (with an emphatic “t”), and the Hebrew is quite similar.I’m sticking with the Arabic for now, because this is the jumping-off point for an interesting bit of medieval mathematical history.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the third most common synthetic polymer and accounts for about 18% of world polymer production. It is an aromatic/aliphatic polyester which possesses very practical thermal properties that are not found in the all aliphatic commodity thermoplastics polyethylene or polypropylene: a glass transition temperature (Tg) near 67°C and a melting temperature (Tm) of 265°C.   But like those two, it is derived from fossil fuels: the key aromatic component of PET, terephthalic acid, is derived from petroleum, while ethylene glycol is derived from petroleum or natural gas.

I remember, as a child, being very upset by a ventriloquist’s dummy at a show, and crying out and making a ‘scene’.  Even well into my teens and beyond, I felt disturbed by “magic”, even in mathematics or science.  One particular incident I remember was being shown in class the ‘proof’, by an elementary form a calculus of variations, that the shortest path[1] between two coordinates is a straight line.  This left me with an uncomfortable feeling.

Retirement in less than three week’s time!  What shall I sing?  How about this?And now the end is nearAnd so I face the final curtainWell, that’s my second most hated song, suited either to a dictator facing trial at the International Criminal Court or a drunkard expiring in a ditch.  Even the melody was stolen from a much superior (in my opinion) French song “Comme d'habitude”[1,2].Not that I could justifiably sing it, anyway:Regrets I’ve had a fewBut then again too few to mentionOn the contrary, my career in science is littered with them.  One of the most poignant is the memory of the many students we have had whose work has not reached publication to the extent that it should have.

One month to go before the Physics Department closes!  And I have the job of classifying and disposing of unwanted and waste chemicals.  This year, when “everything must go”, this is proving a mammoth task.How did I get this job?  Being the only practicing chemist in the department, in effect I am Snape, the Potions Master.  This in not only because of my academic training, but my work has taught me what chemical can go with which without creating an explosion (for example, NOT acetone and chloroform!)

When I was in my late teens, my father (a chemical engineer) took an interest in quantum mechanics.  Two words from his conversation at that time stuck in my mind, namely Hamiltonian and eigenfunction.  The former was almost certainly due to the Scottish part of my ancestry, but with the latter it was the word itself.
Indeed, it at first sight seems quite an intimidating word, along with its relatives eigenvalues and eigenvector.  Fear not – I will show you that it despite its fearsome bark, it has a very soft bite.

It may surprise those who know of my Ulster Protestant background that I am something of a fan of Flannery O’Connor.  As yet, I have not delved into her novels, but I have read all her stories, and also Mystery and Manners : Occasional Prose, from which I take the following

A multiplet is a simple thing to describe: it is a collection of several identical or nearly identical things. Here, however, a difficulty arises because a "multiplet" is a manifestation of symmetry groups, and symmetry groups are tough objects to discuss. So if in a scientific paper you write "the new hadron might belong to a SU(3) multiplet", you have the additional trouble that you need to avoid discussing group theory to an unwilling listener. What is SU(3) ? Do we actually care?Thus wrote Tommaso Dorigo in The Language Barrier on 26th May this year.

Skegness is SO bracing

Recently Elizabeth Cunningham Perkins brought us a Weedy Rumination on the Creeping Bellflower, Campanula rapunculoides. I will now tell you about a wildflower growing in my own garden, which is full of memories.

In February 1999, the giant German pharmaceutical company Bayer celebrated the centenary of the launch of ASPIRIN, the world’s most successful legal drug. One thing they did NOT celebrate is the launch of HEROIN one year earlier. Both drugs are synthesized by adding acetyl groups to already existing natural compounds. Aspirin is produced by adding one group to salicylic acid, found in willow bark which had long been used as a traditional remedy for pains and fever, while heroin is produced by adding two acetyl groups to morphine, the active constituent of opium.  Here are the two formulae with the acetyl groups marked with pink rectanguloids.