Hell or the garden of eden

On 2^nd July 1979 OO90, submitted to Faraday II with Grigolini, I produced a pioneering paper using molecular dynamics in an entirely original way to show that processes in molecular dynamics were in general non Markovian and also non Gaussian. Grigolini attempted to provide an explanation, but both of us agreed that the simulation when used in this way left the theory in its wake. On 22^nd August 1979 OO80 was submitted to Chemical Physics Letters with Grigolini and Resca on a hydrodynamical theory generalized with the Mori theory. Grigolini had spent some time at Purdue University and had probably written frm Purdue asking me to “get him out of there”. Nevertheless the paper is good work in the frequency and time domains but again shows the characteristic overcomplexity of Grigolini’s approach to molecular dynamics. It seems muddy and fuzzy compared with simulation in the necessary three dimensions. On 11^th Sept. 1979 OO82 was submitted by myself as sole author to Faraday II on power reflection spectroscopy near the Brewster angle, a technique that I hoped would develop into a new spectrometer. I made some calculations using my own Mori three variable theory which showed that near the Brewster angle, the features of molecular dynamics hitherto confined to the far infra red could be shifted into the near infra red, opening up a whole new area of study. Unfortunately the conditions at the EDCL made this development impossible there, but it could be carried out easily with contemporary technology. On 24^th Sept. 1979 OO81 was submitted to Faraday II with Gareth Evans on the effect of an electric field on the far infra red power absorption of liquid aniline, with an extensive theoretical analysis by myself inter relating several different theories as part of the methodology I was developing for the Delta Project. The quality and quantity of the work matched any group in the world at the time with relatively meagre resources under appalling administration.

At about this time I won the 1979 Meldola Medal outright and the clipping of the announcement is on www.aias.us in the photographs section. So I became part of a small elite awarded both the Harrison Memorial Prize and the Meldola Medal. If I had been awarded the Marlow Medal (of which I was effectively joint winner) Iwould have been one of only two nly scientists in history to have recorded the triple : Harrison, Meldola and Marlow. Stretching a point I did in fact do the triple. I am the only member of the University of Wales with this achievement. The University did not recognize this by tenure, and has still not done so. This is therefore a severe breach of human rights, all due to the animosity of one individual over whom there was no control. No organization should be run in this way, an organization blatantly opposed to meritocracy. Not only was this allowed to happen, but no mechanism has ever been able to right the injustice, so from my case it is seen very clearly that society is not a meritocracy at all. Nonetheless I was very proud to have won the prestigious Meldola Medal. The photograph for “Chemistry in Britain” was taken by Jim Jenkins, and what a profound shock it was to receive a newspaper clipping from Gareth Evans in early 1991 reporting Jim’s suicide. At the time I was in a small office in the Irchel Campus of the University of Zurich, an office shared with Stanislaw Wozniak. There was no sign of such a tragedy in 1979. I think that Jim Jenkins was made redundant when the EDCL closed, and could not come to terms with the desolation. Jones had vanished to Swansea and by some corrupt arrangement had been allowed to keep his job. Cecil Monk described this with great contempt as “scuttling away” when I last saw him in 1993. There was no attempt by the administration to congratulate me on these prestigious medals, showing up a terminal psychological sickness or iron in the soul. Any normal University department would have trumpeted these awards to the skies, as they do today. So the generosity of spirit of Sir Goronwy Daniel left Aberystwyth with him in Sept. 1978 when he retired, to be replaced by crabby greyness devoid of any connection with the scholarly traditions of Wales.

In addition to these awards and publications a major item of new equipment granted to myself was due to arrive: an Apollo Instruments far infra red laser ordered from California. With the wisdom of hind sight and experience I should have used the grant money to fund more post doctoral staff or extend the terms of the post doctoral staff to five years. In the event Jones had the opportunity of totally disrupting the Government’s intentions by deliberately refusing to house the laser, and deliberately wasting the Government grant. This is illegal and could be actionable today in court. The Government should have taken action back in the late seventies and early eighties. ACAS rules these days would interpreted such an act as career blocking, discrimination and harassment. On 3^rd Oct 1979 OO83 was submitted to Advances in Molecular Relaxation and Interaction Processes and developed the technique of low angle Brewster reflection spectroscopy for ionic crystals, melts, conducting media, biomolecular systems, semiconductors, gas / solid and liquid / solid interfaces. Unfortunately this was a scruffily produced journal and OO83 is not easy to read on www.aias.us. Nonetheless it is one of my favourite papers of that time. On 16^th Nov. 1979 the most incisive paper in molecular dynamics produced up to that point in history, OO78, was submitted to Chemical Physics Letters with Mauro Ferrario and Paolo Grigolini. I was able to show by simulation with the Singer algorithm TRI2 that the statistics of molecules are in general non Gaussian. This was the first time that this had been demonstrated since the nineteenth century. There were so many fundamental discoveries made in that year of 1979 that they must stuck on to paper here like so many postage stamps. It seemed to me that each new discovery was accompanied by a note from Jeremy Jones placed on my desk at midnight complaining about postage, or if he could not think of anything else, about my very existence on this earth. What a travesty of all that is just in society!

On 26^th Nov. 1979 OO85 was submitted to Molecular Physics with Colin Reid on the liquid crystal known as K21 and on 4^th Dec. 1979 OO86 was submitted with Colin Reid to Molecular Physics and is another very fine paper utilizing a range of data to test theories to destruction. There is still no theory that is able to describe data used in this incisive way. On Dec. 18^th 1979 OO84 was submitted to Zeit. Phys. B in sole authorship comparing the results of an incisive new simulation method with Mori three variable theory. The simulation exposed the limitations of the theory. Finally on 21^st Dec. 1979 OO87 was submitted with Colin Reid to Spectrochimica Acta on solvent shifts in the far infra red, based on extensive experimental wotk by Colin Reid on the new far infra red interferometer granted to Rowlinson and myself at Oxford and transferred to Aberystwyth, a place to which I was far too generous. In that year of 1979 about seventeen first class papers had been produced and the three legged Delta had been defined: experiment, theory and simulation. These all brought in a pile of reprint requests by post card so Jones had a whale of a time complaining about postage. He did not read any of the papers about which he complained. The system, instead of supporting scholarship, set out to destroy it because one individual was afraid of his career being hurt and all others were afraid of stopping him. That is such an absurd way to “educate” and it had to be shut down of course. By now, thirty three years later, it has become a great pleasure to see all that original thought archived on both sides of the Atlantic and available for all to read open source.

Colin Reid completed and submitted his Ph. D. Thesis in the same year of 1979, and my method of publishing refereed papers in advance pulled him through. He was intensely nervous before the final examination, despite writing up an excellent piece of work of about two hundred and fifty or more pages. He got into an argument with Graham Williams and threatened to pull out, so it took all of my persuasive powers to keep him going. His “official” supervisor Alun Price was way out of his depth, and Colin acknowledged my contribution generously. Graham Williams never read or understood any of my work, whereas Colin Reid had a thorough knowledge of both its experimental and theoretical aspects. He pulled through his final examination and was awarded his Ph. D. In late 1979 I offered him a post doctoral Fellowship which he accepted. So for a very brief time in late 1979 I had built up a group with three post doctoral assistants while being in the wildly anomalous situation of being a post doctoral myself, with a D. Sc. Degree. My work was acknowledged throughout Europe and I had begun work on the Delta Project, published in OO99 in 1981. We still occupied Room 262. Gareth Evans was in the last year of his post doctoral assistantship granted to him by Mansel Davies, and this was also switched to Alun Price. The latter of course did nothing at all to supervise. Around about this time Gareth Evans became worried about his future prospects because we could all see that the EDCL was headed for disaster, and we could all read those revolting notes placed on my desk. Jones would have them typed out by his secretaries, placed in a sealed envelope, which would then appear on my desk very suddenly. We all thought that he was disturbed psychologically. The typed letters would be copied to the Registrar and Principal. Instead of sorting him out, the senior administration did nothing from very afar. This seems to read from this distance in historical perspective that they had decided to close the EDCL. Either that or the were not administrators at all, just there for the salary and pension.

So I encouraged Gareth Evans to apply for a University of Wales Fellowship in open competition in the autumn of 1979, and strangely enough, Jeremy Jones signed the application. I suppose that he did not even know at that point that Gareth Evans was working for me, otherwise he would have refused to sign. The Fellowship application was of course based on our award winning work. Gareth Evans also applied for other jobs, such as that of a Warden and I positively refereed all the applications. He went as far as an interview in industry, but was told that if he did not get a heart attack by age forty he would be sacked. This drivel put him off industry. So the group stayed together and all seemed set fair for Room 262. At that point the S. E. R. C. should have stepped in and demanded tenure for me as an Advanced Fellow from Aberystwyth, but it did nothing. The group felt relatively safe and insulated in Room 262, in which I had been working since 1971. Cooperation had also been forged with the National Physical Laboratory, Trinity College Dublin (part of the Oxford / Cambridge system) and the University of Pisa, and I had begun to forge excellent relations with the Singer group at Royal Holloway College of the University of London. Despite this, the unstable sword of Damocles was always hanging above us. In a historical perspective it is clear that the corrupt nature of the University of Wales would not tolerate truly competitive talent. It was a small clique made up of individuals who appointed each other and used the system as a springboard for career. They regarded all talk of the People of Wales with disturbed contempt.

Suddenly the sword fell, in early 1980 we were told to get out of Room 262, which was to be handed over to Graham Williams. The group was outraged because Graham Williams already had plenty of room for himself as full professor. This was therefore a deliberate disruption of the Government’s intent. For a long time Gareth Evans and I tried to argue that we were expecting the arrival of an Apollo Instruments laser, and that the EDCL was contractually bound to house the equipment. We were told to move into a tiny room directly opposite to Jeremy Jones’ office and completely unsuitable for modern equipment such as the California made laser. Jones disrupted things further by having the room “redecorated”. So the plan was to disrupt and destroy our group by having its equipment piled up in the corridor, awaiting redecoration. We were forced out of Room 262 but there was no other laboratory available. All of this is illegal, it is harassment and career blocking. All of the strange little notes were and are illegal. At the same time a third desk was jammed into the tiny office occupied by Gareth Evans and myself opposite room 262. To reach my desk, Gareth Evans had to walk out of the room so that I could get in, and then reoccupy his desk. There was no direct lighting. These days that would be a violation of conditions of work. Finally we were forced to move the delicate interferometer into the corridor of the old EDCL, awaiting redecoration. It remained there for months in full view of all staff and students, none of whom dared protest in any way. This was Government equipment which by today’s money might be worth about one hundred thousand pounds. The Apollo laser might be worth a further three hundred thousand pounds. Graham Williams did not use Room 262, it was kept empty for two or three years.

This harassment helps to explain the long gap between OO87, submitted on 21^st Dec. 1979, and OO88, submitted on 16^th April 1980 in sole authorship submitted to Spectrochimica Acta on moment analysis of the depolarized Rayleigh spectrum. On 16^th April 1980 a paper with Colin Reid on the Zero to THz Spectra of rotator phases was submitted to Molecular Physics, making clear that this range of spectra challenged theory as never before, or indeed since. There was another relatively long gap to 3^rd June 1980, when OO95 was submitted with Grigolini to Physica A. These were all theoretical papers, we could no longer use the far infra red spectrometer. The Apollo Instruments laser arrived in crates from California in the first part of 1980, and the crates were again piled up in the corridor. The “decoration” was taking an awful long time, especially as it was just a coat of paint. From this perspective I should have demanded an S. E. R. C. inspection. These days I would have had immediate recourse to ACAS, the Government’s advisory and conciliatory service. On 21^st July 1980 I submitted three more papers. The first was OO92, with Mauro Ferrario and William Coffey, submitted to Advances in Molecular Relaxation and Interaction Processes in which computer simulation was used to evaluate theoretical models. The second was OO93, submitted to the same journal, with Gareth Evans and William Coffey on computer simulation used to evaluate short time translational motion, and OO94 to Zeit. Phys. B with Paolo Grigolini, on computer simulation used to demonstrate that molecular dynamics are neither Gaussian nor Markovian. Computer simulation was running far ahead of the theory.

Jones’delaying tactics were beginning to work against him, long overdue criticism of him from increasingly browbeaten staff and technical staff forced him to open the door of the tiny little room in which both the laser and interferometer were somehow to be assembled. There was room only for the laser, which worked with high voltages. The interferometer remained piled up in the corridor, so experimental work on it was stopped as planned. Mauro Ferrario announced that he might be leaving for Brussels on an Italian CNR Fellowship because there was no longer any space available for him to work at the EDCL. No one likes to work in a department in which the atmosphere of animosity could be cut with a knife. The group struggled to forge its own kind of civilization against this cynical harassment and somehow we managed to get the apparatus stuffed into the room. This was very dangerous because the room was completely unsuitable and deliberately chosen to be so. The Apollo Instruments support technician flown over from California could not quite believe what was being done to the new laser. He did his best to get it going on an ordinary laboratory bench. The interferometer must have been crammed on to another bench in the same small room. We were harassed by George Morrison and A. J. S. Williams, who had been set up as some kind of safety officers. Morrison was probably senile and A. J. S. Williams knew nothing about lasers. They did not even notice the high voltages and could have been conveniently electrocuted. Morrison spread cigar ash all over the new gold mirror.

This laboratory was at the opposite end of the EDCL from the microoffice occupied by Gareth Evans and myself and one more post doctoral. This scene would be condemned outright these days as multiple breaches of safety at work, harassment, and career blocking, but in those days all turned a blind eyes as they looked after themselves. In the same way, when Caligula declared himself a god, all agreed that it was obvious. The human spirit defeats dictatorship by ignoring it until it implodes and destroys itself. So OO93 was submitted from a dustbin on 29^th. July 1980 with Gareth Evans and William Coffey to Advances in Molecular Relaxation and Interaction Processes. This document is clearly legible on www.aias.us and records the work being done with Coffey at the time. The paper was essentially all my own work, the itinerant oscillator was already obsolete. Coffey had a free ride all his life because he was given tenure at Trinity College Dublin at a time when it was ingrown and a club of self appointed individuals. Gareth Evans and I donated some old apparatus to Trinity College but it made no good use of it. With tenure there was no need for competition, and life was a leisurely routine of lavish Commons, coffee, and newspapers. After a few years one would get promotion, and settle in to the existence of a nonentity, without risking any new ideas or radical thought. I cannot blame people for liking such an existence, but it leads nowhere in the end. After safely transferring the apparatus Gareth Evans was surprised at the laconic pace of the College, Coffey would drift in at about noon, and on one occasion appeared to be demonstrating Brownian motion in a zig zag path to his office. He was stoned in the middle of the day as Gareth put it. The hyper cynical Vij would say that you can do anything you like after tenure, and that was not far from the truth. In the end though it is a waste of life, you do not build civilization that way, without imagination, and using the work of others. They had the Book of Kells in their midst and that would not have been written by a stoned scribe at high noon. The brilliant and intricate detail needs the steady hand of civilization.

On 20^th August 1980 OO97 was submitted to Spectrochimica Acta and reported a completely new type of spectrometer which was built by the group from a combination of the Apollo laser and far infra red spectrometer. It was a Model 560 Apollo laser with Brewster window plane grating generating 85 lines at up to 50 watts continuous wave output. This pioneering paper was the result of work in appalling conditions, and was in co authorship with Gareth Evans, Colin Reid and Mauro Ferrario. Gareth Evans designed a cell with a parabaloid gold plated wall and interferograms were recorded by Colin Reid and Gareth Evans of far infra red induced fluorescence. This paper shows what the group could have achieved in a normal environment. After that experiment the laser had to be shipped back to California because of the damage done to it by Morison’s cigar ash and the unsuitable conditions of the “laboratory” opposite Jones’ room at the EDCL. The technical staff and the responsible academic staff looked on in dismay as the laser was recrated and shipped back out of the main EDCL doors, three hundred thousand pounds of brand new Government apparatus. Conditions were becoming intolerable in other ways because the group was joined by Prof. Ahmed Hasanein on leave from the University of Alexandria on a Royal Society scholarship. No foreign visitor could believe the conditions, they expected the sophisticated, civilized and enlightened environment of my papers, of my intellectual achievements. They found dictatorship by a small lunatic on the edge of the grey sea, not sunny at all.

The office next to our dustbin had been empty for some months, so I moved into it quite innocently. This allowed more space for the rest of the group, now consisting of three post doctorals and a visiting professor. This office had a window, and eventually it filled with computer output and empty coffee jars. I have been in there for maybe a couple of weeks before Jones appeared at the door and started a stream of vulgar, gutter abuse, watched in disgust be Cecil Monk from his own microspace in EDCL. If Monk had come forward as a witness Jones would have lost his job, or more accurately should have lost his job. These days ACAS would have protested strongly to the College administration. Thirty three years later I take this opportunity to lodge a strong protest, not only against Jones but against the whole rotten set up that passed as a university department. In due course he retreated and left me in charge of the office. By now he was hanging on to the EDCL by a thread, he had insulted too many senior and productive staff. The laboratory next to the office was also empty, so taking advantage of this foothold, the group somehow managed to make him see reason and allocate this laboratory to us. It used to be Cadman’s laboratory, and the latter most sullenly allowed us to take it over. Cadman’s apparatus was moved out and there was space for the laser and interferometer.

The Omnia Opera betrays none of this vulgar warfare and continues on a high intellectual plane with OO98, submitted with Mauro Ferrario on 4^th August 1980 on the cumulant expansion of the orientational autocorrelation function providing a general theoretical method of relating the orientational and angular momentum autocorrelation functions in the asymmetric top. This paper shows the mathematical influence of Prof. James McConnell of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Even this level of theoretical finesse could get nowhere near to a truly complete description of the computer simulation. As usual I wrote most of the paper, and it is mostly my work. During these months I had also been working on the Delta Project, which was published in OO99 as a long review in Advances in Molecular Relaxation and Interaction processes with J. Yarwood, whose scientific contribution was minimal, but who was interested in helping to organize the European Molecular Liquids Group. OO99 was published in 1981 but there is no date of receipt. The Delta Project grew out of my award winning work of the seventies and is a plan for the systematic evaluation of the state of knowledge in the dynamics of simple liquids using all the resource available: experimentation, theory and computation, especially molecular dynamics simulation and Monte Carlo simulation. OO99 reviews all the relevant material in great detail, and coordinates the experimental conditions. The Delta Project was my conception entirely, and written entirely by me. I wrote to about seventy five leading groups in Europe and got a very positive response. My work was always admired by the National Physical Laboratory so George Chantry eventually agreed to chair the meeting that brought the EMLG into being. Jeremy Jones had a great time complaining not only about postage but about xerox costs while the rest of Europe ignored him completely. It was apparent to me that the state of knowledge in liquid state molecular dynamics was poor, some theories gave the impression of being able to explain some small parts of the data set. Despite the great improvement in instrumentation and computing power between 1980 and 20 3 , little or no progress has been made on the fundamental level. That would need a new Delta Project and imaginative and energetic administration, and would be far more interesting than anything taking place at CERN.