Subject: Reminsicences: Some Lecturers in the First Term
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 09:57:24 EST
I recall that when I first saw the EDCL it was a formidable looking pile in Edwardian style with a large 1963 wing attached to it. It took some time for me to find the lecture theatre for my first lecture, delivered by Dr. Young on inorganic chemistry. That consisted of frantic note taking, followed by purchase of a course book and work in the EDCL library to work my notes into something civilized. I think it was followed by a lecture form Mansel Davies, the newly created professor of chemistry (with a personal chair) and then acting head of department before the arrival of the then Dr John Thomas in 1969, the incoming head of department of chemistry. Mansel Davies sailed in like a formidable hybrid, a cross between Dracula and a barn owl, wearing a waving black gown under a crop of waving white hair. He then started to extemporize in his inimitable style while we students tried to keep up with him, occasionally plastering the board with what looked like large equations. He had lost part of his right hand in a laboratory accident, so the writing was hieroglyphic. My method was to try to capture every sentence and equation in long hand. Some were mesmerized on the spot and gave up entirely. I was always willing to help a student who asked with some of my polished up notes, which I memorize verbatim, aping a Richard Burton. He could memorize whole Shakepsear plays backwards as well as forwards, every part. My memory was nowhere near as good as his phenomenal ability, but I went over things endlessly until the facts began to make coherent sense. Particularly frightening was the indeterminacy principle of quantum mechanics and the Schroedinger equation:
H psi = E psi
Mansel explained (or try to explain) why psi does not cancel out on both sides. Many years later he told me he had little idea of operators himself. That was at least honest. His great strength was intuitive chemistry, the ability to see the answer without equations. On the indeterminacy principle his was unprintable. I once quoted at him the well known : “Let Newton be and all is light” while I was at Wolfson, and he gave the chemist’s well known reply: “Let Einstein be and all is darkness again”. So string theory would have sent him into orbit around the mythical black hole. Such a hole existed around the back of the EDCL, called the solvent dump.