Physicist's 50-Year Journey at Bristol University: Research to Admin Roles, Study notes of Physics

Download Physicist's 50-Year Journey at Bristol University: Research to Admin Roles and more Study notes Physics in PDF only on Docsity! 1 Published in ‘100. A collection of words and images to mark the Centenary of the University of Bristol’, (Ed: Barry Taylor, University of Bristol 2008) Professor Sir Michael Berry describes his intellectual habitat as ‘the borderlands between physical theories’. The author of more than 400 publications, he has received ten honorary degrees and dozens of major prizes and awards, from the Royal Medal of the Royal Society to the Wolf Prize in Physics. The 25th anniversary of the publication of one of his most famous papers (Quantal Phase Factors Accompanying Adiabatic Changes), which has had a huge impact in the world of quantum mechanics, falls in 2009. My (nearly) half-century in Bristol by Michael Berry The H H Wills Physics Laboratory is the highest point in the centre of Bristol, so it can be seen from many places across the city and is easy to find (‘Keep going up’). When I arrived in 1965, damp behind the ears with a new PhD from St Andrews, I was impressed not only by the location of the building but also by its imposing 1927 design as a mock castle. Then, the physics department was clamorous with builders constructing the ‘new wing’. Four decades later, as my retirement looms, the builders are back, renovating the whole laboratory. With a young family, it seemed sensible to consider buying a house. One that we viewed was, in the estate agent’s clichés, ‘In need of some redecoration’ (we glimpsed a dead cat on the rotting staircase leading to the basement), and ‘in the up-and-coming area of Kingsdown’. He was right on both counts, but we decided we could never afford the princely asking price of £1,200. With a post-doctoral fellowship, and a physics project different from what my colleagues in the department were studying, it was easy to settle into research with few distractions. But I soon discovered that physics has a surreal side. A mathematical enquiry from a research student in the veterinary department was channelled to me. He had spent three years measuring electric signals on the surface of a horse that he had covered with detectors, with the aim of deducing the electrical properties of the heart, which acts as a weak battery 2 whose functioning gives a good indication of health. The mathematics he did not understand deduced what was happening inside the horse from measurements on its outside. His first question was ‘Do these formulae apply to a real horse, or only an ideal cylindrical horse?’ Thus I found myself applying calculus to horses. A year later, I received the student’s published paper, in which he expressed gratitude: for help from me, and funding from the Horserace Betting Levy Board. An early responsibility was as co-ordinator of staff meetings, that is, custodian of departmental democracy. We introduced practices that were unfamiliar in the university then but are commonplace now, such as having an agenda circulated beforehand, and inviting student representatives with equal rights to speak and vote – though votes were (and still are) rare in a department with decisions made largely by consensus. We agreed to the unheard-of practice of allowing students to bring notes into examinations, so questions could probe understanding as well as memory. In an extreme application of this principle, still remembered by some of the students, I held an ‘infinite examination’, in which there was no time limit. This was a failure: the best results were obtained by those students who had finished within the usual three hours; and I had forgotten to bring anything to eat and so was starving, unlike the weaker students who had taken my advice and brought sandwiches to sustain them during their largely futile scribblings, which for the stragglers lasted eight hours. In those days, academic appointments were made differently. After I had been in Bristol for nearly two years, John Ziman, who had arrived in 1964 as the new professor of theoretical physics, called me into his office and pointed out a fact that I was dimly aware of but whose significance had not sunk in, namely that my research funding would soon come to an end and I would be out of a job. ‘You seem to be able to teach, so would you like a lectureship?’ I mumbled that it seemed a good idea. ‘OK, but you will have to go through the formality of an interview by an appointments committee’. And so, with no advertisement, no references taken up, and no citations scrutinised, I found myself with a permanent appointment in the same university that in 1959 had rejected my application to enter as an undergraduate.