Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Physical Chemistry

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Posted by Bryan on Nov 28, 2011 in Some reminiscences | 0 comments

“We’ve lost our Nobel Prize winner!!”

At that time, it was customary for a week’s symposium to have an outing. Although it was mid-August, Bob, an avid skier, had planned a trip to Whistler mountain where the participants would take the gondola up to the Round House and spend a couple of hours in the clean mountain air and enjoy the surrounding scene of mountains and glaciers. However the day before the outing, by chance I called Whistler and found that gondola was closed for maintenance and at that time it was the only way up.

Posted by Bryan on Oct 17, 2011 in Some reminiscences | 5 comments

Am I the one who found the famous Solvay 1927 conference photo?

In that pile of glass plates I found in the Kamerlingh Onnes laboratory in 1974, was the original glass negative of the 1927 Solvay Conference. I had never seen the picture before and it was an exciting moment as I looked at my find, and started to recognize individuals.

Posted by Bryan on May 30, 2011 in Some reminiscences | 0 comments

A Moon Struck Awakening in India.

As I looked over the Bay of Bengal, I saw what I initially thought was the sun setting. It was large and gold and full, half hidden by the sea’s horizon. I was struck for a few seconds by its beauty and felt a surge of good energy flow through me. I suddenly realized that it was not the setting sun, but the full moon rising.

Posted by Bryan on May 26, 2011 in Some reminiscences | 0 comments

Connecting with Felix Bloch and the Golden age of Physics

“We were not under a lot of pressure. We did not work weekends nor late at night and took our coffee breaks.”

None-the-less, they were successful in seeing the first absorption of energy between the two levels of the spin of ½ magnitude which are split in the presence of a magnetic field—the Zeeman Effect.

Posted by Bryan on May 23, 2011 in Some reminiscences | 0 comments

Life after NMR : My Journey to Quantum Weirdness

Well maybe I am being stubborn and accept that non-locality is a property of Nature. However it is the most worrying aspect of quantum mechanics, an otherwise fantastically successful theory of the microscopic. It has got to the point that since no answer has yet been found, the vast majority of physicists (I believe grudgingly) accept the statistical nature of the microscopic and believe indeed that God does play dice.

Posted by Bryan on May 18, 2011 in Some reminiscences | 0 comments

The Success of NMR — Good Science

Two dimensional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (2D-NMR) quickly followed from the remarkable theoretical musings of Jean Jeener: ideas that were experimentally developed by Richard Ernst and others, and taken to new levels of sensitivity and resolution with the ability to study structure, function and kinetics. This moved NMR from chemistry to biochemistry, into the life sciences and, finally, with the founding work of Raymond Andrews, Paul Lauterbur, and Sir Peter Mansfield culminated in the development of non-invasive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) (with the word “Nuclear” removed to placate the masses).