First Visit to the United States
Subject: First Visit to the United States
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 07:17:22 EDT
This was in the summer of 1976 when I was about to take up my Ramsay Memorial Fellowship at the EDCL back in room 262 fitted up with a new Grubb Parson / NPL interferometer which Rowlinson kindly allowed me to set up at the EDCL. Mansel Davies asked me to open a Gordon Conference on his behalf at Holderness School, New Hampshire. This was quite a task for a 26 year old post doc, becasue the conference was attended by Nobel Laureates Lars Onsager and J. H. van Vleck, and also John Deutch, professor at Harvard and later Presidential Advisor. I arrived at Logan Airport Boston and proceeded by bus up to the School, situated near Mount Washington and Lake Winnipesaukee. My first impression of the US was of a heavily wooded flat countryside in Massachussetts, gradually giving way to the mountains of New Hamsphire. On the morning of the conference I took a run around the American football pitch and met J. H. Van Vleck (”Van”), who was shaving at the time. he said “It’s awfully early isn’t it?”. He was a kindly mid Westerner about eighty years old at the time, formerly a professor at Harvard and in good shape intellectually. He was awarded a share in a Nobel Prize about a year later, and unfortunately the shock killed him but he must have died happy. I got through the opening lecture without realizing that all these distinguished and formidable Americans were sitting in the front row, listening intently. All seemed to go well, and feeling immensely relieved, I met Bob Cole after the lecture. He was a professor in Brown University Rhode Island at the time. Some of us later took a walk up to Mount Washington, and being very fit at the time I left the others trailing far behind and reached the summit overlooking the lake. The School was very well equipped with an ice rink and baseball and football facilities. I substituted for Mansel Davies at the conference dinner opposite the Nobel Laureate Lars Onsager, a Norwegian with intensely blue, piercing eyes. At the time, Onsager was getting on in age and was not very well and clearly unhappy. He did not like the heat and humidity of Florida, where he retired, but they would not let him back to Yale as an emeritus. Van Vleck was a really fine lecturer, but Onsager lectured by just loking at the board, whispering to it about six inches away, adn back turned turned to the audience almost the whole time. This was well known and so everyone patiently and respectfully listened to the great Norwegian chemical physicist. Van Vleck was kind enough to mention to me that he thought my work to be of high quality and important, so as a young post doc I felt great about that. I did not often get forthright honest praise like that back home in the EDCL, to which I have a deeply ambivalent attitude to this day. At the EDCL I woudl be told quite often to publish less, and so on, which irritated the skin out of me, such talk from unproductive people smacked of something very unpleasant. I felt like snapping back: “Why don’t you publsih more?” but kept my silence, otherwise I would have been reported for insolence or similar. After the 1976 Gordon Conference I flew back to London with the NPL group and arrived in a haze of jet lag after an overnight transatlantic journey and drove home to Swansea. In 1976 they were celebrating the 200′th anniversary of 1776 so there were coffee cups with the revolutionary midnight ride on them and so on.