Hell or the garden of eden

That degree ceremony took place at around the same time as the interview process for head of department of the EDCL. J. O. Williams and I were awarded the D. Sc. Degree at the same ceremony and he sat right next to me. To my great surprise he was intensely nervous, while I was just mildly bored. He was visibly shaking, and I wondered why this should be so. In his less ambitious frames of mind J. O. and I got on fine, we always spoke in Welsh of course, and I cannot help wondering what would have happened if he had been appointed Head of Department. He was a far stronger candidate than Jeremy Jones, who was an obscure lecturer, and had no D. Sc. Degree. J. O. was already a Reader, two steps up in the pecking order and had out produced Jeremy Jones. J. O. was also a better lecturer than Jeremy Jones, and had none of the latter’s evil and offensive temper. Finally J. O. had a fluent grasp of the Welsh language and was an enthusiastic supporter of it, while Jeremy Jones could not care less about he language, speaking the remains of Llandeilo patois. Later records show that J. O. was a good administrator, as a full professor in Manchester and Principal of what is now known as Prifysgol Owain Glyndw^r. Jeremy Jones was a complete and abject administrative failure. In his hyper ambitious phases J. O. was less likeable, but he did have a sense of fairness. He was not very enthusiastic about the increasingly nasty campaign to force me to move to Swansea. The D. Sc. is a rarely awarded degree, so there were only two of us there - both from the EDCL, in the D. Sc. Gown of the University of Wales. J. O. had an open character and a sense of freshness and innocence about him, when I started speaking in French to a visitor one day he was greatly surprised and impressed. He did not particularly like John Thomas because the latter was manically ambitious. One can only be ambitious if one leads by personal example, not by putting one’s name to myriads of papers by other people. Clementi at IBM was also in the habit of doing that. All those papers at IBM were of course my own work, with some input from Keith Refson and others, but none at all from Clementi.

It is almost certain that Jeremy Jones had been “given the job if he applied” - the Purnell hallmark. So none of the other thirty or more candidates had any hope. This really infuriates me to this day. There may have been a hundred or so candidates for the Swansea job in which they tried to make me into a pawn on a dirty chessboard. Ninety nine out of the hundred would have had no chance, and the short listed would have been hauled down to Swansea and completely deceived. How many times does that happen in the academic system? J. O. Williams clearly expected to be given the job of Head of Department at the EDCL. I know this from personal experience because the first thing that I knew of the interview process was his rage at being cold shouldered. He was beside himself with fury and burst in through the doors of the EDCL venting his intense anger at me in the Welsh language. I have recounted a little of this already. I made my way back to room 262. I met the newly crowned king when Mansel Davies asked me to have a cup of coffee with Jones and himself. This was a rare happening, Jupiter descending. Mansel Davies always referred to him as “Bill Jeremy”. The latter had made his hallmark by some minor role in the inverse Raman effect as a post doctoral in Canada, and for some reason has been appointed without competition to Cambridge. It is not hard to guess that this was due to Mansel Davies at the peak of his influence. So I made my way to the little common room of the EDCL - then reserved for tenured staff only. Along with post docs I was confined to the coffee machine and its dubious molecular dynamics. Inside was a very nervous little man smoking incessantly. He was floored by the fact that the EDCL graduated only five chemistry students. Obviously the job arrangers had neglected to inform him of this, and he wished that he was not there. I was told to take Friedmann and Jones up to Pant y Celyn Hall for some reason. Friedmann saw a Welsh language poster and sullenly muttered “that’s all I need”. I didn’t bother to explain that Pant y Celyn was the Welsh language Hall, and that William Williams of that name was our greatest hymn writer. “This is great start” I thought to myself, and indeed it got worse very quickly.

I was summoned by his majesty to attend court that evening in the Sze Hing Chinese Restaurant opposite Aberystwyth Pier, near the alley of a thousand dustbins. Here, over wonton soup and a china spoon, I was told to go to Swansea, Jones had brought his cracked record with him. Friedmann was there, and remained silent. He had just been appointed to tenure at the EDCL without competition. So “here we go again”. Within two or three years Friedmann had gone because he could not do anything at the EDCL from lack of technical support and a large lecture load. What a mess. Friedmann was quite a pleasant man, or seemed to be, but he had just been transplanted into a culture and language of which he knew nothing. Jones told me that “Purnell will cut my head off” if I didn’t go to Swansea. I have never met an individual who thought so much of himself. There was no use protesting that public executions did not happen near Aberystwyth pier any more. I was just thinking of fish and chips, because wonton soup was not much of a meal. Very shortly thereafter I resigned the Swansea job, and took up the SERC Advanced Fellowship. I had been a lecturer at Swansea for a few months and resigned because it was my duty to do so. This was the honourable way out. None of those corrupt people had any right to interfere in my decision to build a group at the EDCL which from 1978 to 1983 out performed the other staff combined. The source documents are all in the historical source document section of www.aias.us. Shortly thereafter a large grant came through from SERC of about half a million pounds in contemporary money. With a sense of huge relief, I emerged from the Sze Hing and Jones and Friedmann made their way back to Pant y Celyn. The ugly, menacing tone of the interview was washed away with fish and chips and coca cola. Thus began five years of warfare between Jones and the rest of the staff. This destroyed the EDCL completely.

At the time, Room 262 was a busy laboratory doing work of international renown. I occupied it with Gareth Evans and Colin Reid, and Gareth Evans and I were given two desks in a microscopic office with no windows opposite the laboratory. On 10^th November 1978 OO66 was submitted to Faraday II with Gareth Evans, A. H. Price and Eugene Schwartz. Alun Price was one of those who had refused to join in the go to Swansea scene. On 17^th Nov 1978 OO66 was submitted to Molecular Physics with Gareth Evans, Yarwood, P. L. James and R. Arndt on the molecular dynamics of acetonitrile, developing the multi technical approach further. I had just discovered the gamma process of the far infra red, that was reported in OO67 submitted on 11^th October 1978 and secured Colin Reid’s M. Sc. Degree. He was able to go on to a Ph. D., supervised by myself. I was not given any credit for this supervision because I had no tenure. OO67 reveals the intricate nature of molecular dynamics of a small molecule, dichloromethane, dissolved in a glass. The spectra were obtained in the far infra red and at low frequency, so the evolution of the dynamics could be observed from picoseconds to years as part of the same, immensely protracted, evolutionary process. In rough analogy, this is like observing the geological evolution of the earth in real time. So here was an individual with a distinction higher than full professor, and a Harrison Memorial Prizewinner, being denied credit for supervising an excellent Thesis. I paid a visit to Trinity College Dublin at about that time, and the result of that was OO63, submitted on 1^st December 1978 to Chemical Physics Letters with William Coffey and J. D. Pryce of Bristol University’s School of Mathematics. On my return from Trinity College I met an Italian physicist called Paolo Grigolini of the University of Pisa who had visited the EDCL in order to start a cooperation on mutual interests. That resulted in his student Mauro Ferrario becoming my post doctoral assistant under the newly acquired SERC grant. The first class technical ability of the Pisa group strengthened my own group as can be seen from the Omnia Opera. The first paper with Ferrario and Grigolini was submitted on 25^th May 1979 as OO76 on the interaction of rotation and translation in molecular dynamics. Both Grigolini and Ferrario became full professors, and Ferrario became a Director of CECAM.

As soon as he heard of my resignation Jeremy Jones wrote an illegal letter from Cambridge trying to force me once more to go to Swansea. His judgment had already collapsed, because he was prepared to give up a half million grant and the most talented British group in molecular dynamics for the sake of neurosis. Purnell would not destroy his department, Jeremy Jones would destroy it himself. That strange, menacing letter is to be found in the historical source documents of www.aias.us, written with a fountain pen on Cambridge notepaper. I was to receive many strange little notes from 1978 to1983. All of these notes would be illegal today, because they were all aimed at getting me out of the EDCL as soon as possible, a clear case of prejudice and career blocking. Nothing else mattered to the little man from Cambridge. To the rest of British chemical physics this was an obvious disaster. Here was an unknown bureaucrat with the arrogance to set aside the opinion of an entire profession. The incoming Principal in the Autumn of 1978 was a nonentity who could not even speak the Welsh language, so with his appointment Aberystwyth ceased to have anything to do with Welsh speaking Wales and meekly accepted colonization. I ignored the pathetic letter from Jeremy Jones, so afraid of his own shadow and completely unsuited for any position of responsibility. He was a peculiarly offensive man with the attitude of an occupying Gauleiter of Cambridge, sent down to sort out the peasants. Some thought he was appointed to close the department, nearly all found it impossible to accept the appointment. There were no ACAS mechanisms in those days, there was a Trade Union but it was almost wholly ineffective. The EDCL was at the mercy of tyranny.

It was already obvious that Jones’ sole intention, regardless of any merit or productivity, was to get me out of the EDCL, because otherwise he would be decapitated by Purnell, by axe on a block near the pier, or if Purnell was in a good mood, by sword. It is impossible to believe that a National University could ever be run in this way, and today it would be a multiple breach of human rights, virtually every human right ever dreamed of. So I decided to show what the group of Room 262 could do in the face of disgusting animosity. All around us the island of civilization known as the EDCL was sinking. The planks were creaking and the timbers shivering. Civilization needs confidence, stability and hope for the future, and we had a lunatic in charge, Gaius Caligula had declared war on the sea and had read out his edict on the promenade. The Roman Empire slowly began to collapse from madness and decadence. The first sign of carnage was the sudden appearance of a deeply embittered Cecil Monk right next door to Room 262. He had just retired and had given lifelong service to the EDCL and had founded the spacious Soddy Laboratory for radiochemistry, but had been savagely booted out by the ambitious J. O. Williams and stuffed into a small preparation room. He had been allowed to continue to work at the EDCL, but was denied access to the interminable boredom of staff meetings. He continued to write scientific papers from that small room, which filled with smoke from his pipe. I think that J. O. was in turn booted out of part of the Soddy by Jeremy Jones, who put Friedman to work on some apparatus that was never made to function. John Thomas had vanished to Cambridge and had gutted the EDCL of apparatus. None of the Welsh speaking technicians of his group moved with him, quite naturally. They had worked hard for him in the expectation that he would build up the EDCL with my help as another Welsh speaker and the youngest Scientiae Doctor in history under modern rules. They were naively unaware of what am ition can do to a man . Jim Jenkins was to pay the price by suicide, and Mansell Davies died some years after an eye injury. Islwyn “Griff” Griffiths died of cancer, but not before declaring his infinite disgust and anger as he saw me about to leave for Bangor. Irfon Williams was transferred to physics and became deeply depressed. I believe he left academia completely. The non Welsh speaking technicians fared very little better, and lived out their lives in a deep pit of bitterness in scenic Aberystwyth by the sunny sea. They actually had to live there without jobs, and it wasn’t very scenic in the dole queue. This is what always happens to Welsh speaking or non Welsh speaking Wales, whose history is one of continuous betrayal by manic ambition.

For OO76 Mauro Ferrario and I had coded up the running time averaging algorithm for a range of correlation functions of many dynamical variables, auto and cross correlation functions that wove a rich tapestry of information which at that time (1979) was entirely new and original. These correlation functions could probe areas of dynamics that conventional theory could not, and much as they tried, neither Grigolini nor Coffey could ever come to grips with the far infra red or with computer simulation and drifted off into increasingly abstract work of the type that solved problems that could be solved, exercises in mathematics. Neither could improve on my early work using the Mori three variable theory in the far infra red, started at Oxford and taken up at Aberystwyth. The severe problems with Jones had already begun to affect both Mauro Ferrario and Colin Reid, and Mauro Ferrario could stick it out until the autumn of 1981 when he won a CNR European Fellowship and later moved to the Free University of Brussels. By the time Mauro Ferrario left however, the correlation function technique had been developed to the point where it became the mainstay of about three hundred papers and reviews of mine in total, in all the best journals worldwide.

On May 30^th 1979 I submitted two more papers, OO71 as a single author, and OO70 with Colin Reid. OO71 was on Brownian motion modulated by the atom atom potential, which was used in computer simulation. OO70 used data over ten decades of frequency to describe the molecular dynamics of dichloromethane dissolved in a glass, and developed my slightly earlier discovery of the gamma process. This paper used a development of the Smoluchowski diffusion equation based on methods that I had developed myself at Trinity College Dublin and later at Aberystwyth Colin Reid worked very hard all of a sudden to produce the data. At first I thought he would never produce anything, being absent from work for weeks on end. It may have been the stabilizing influence of his fiancé Jennifer Davies of Aberaeron. They were later married in Brecon Castle just before I was forced to leave for IBM as full professor in Sept. 1986. On May 31^st 1979 OO77 with Grigolini was submitted to Molecular Physics on an extension of my earlier Mori theory to try to describe rototranslation, but as can be seen from OO77 on www.aias.us the theory is hideously complicated and cannot come to grips with the simulation. So a combination of the far infra red and simulation is enough to defeat theory already. I began at that point to forge the European Delta Project, because I could see the need to coordinate research all over Europe. This was done with the usual complaints about postage, which Jones used as an excuse to complain to the Registrar as an example of my lack of discipline. So he was a disaster waiting to happen, without vision and imagination, and deeply offensive to science.