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Sir James Chadwick
Professor of Physics�����������������������
����������John Dainton��������������������������������������� ��Director
THE UNIVERSITY�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
THE COCKCROFT INSTITUTE of
of� LIVERPOOL ��������������������������������������������������
�����������������������������������������������������������������������ACCELERATOR SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY
��������������������������
�If we knew what it as we were doing, it would not be called research,
would it?�
������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������������������������������Albert
Einstein
Contact
�
phone: +44 151 603 820
(office: Daresbury Laboratory, room B63A and PA)
�+44 1925
894 7769 (via Liverpool University
�
email: J.B.Dainton@dl.ac.uk and/or jbd@liverpool.ac.uk
�
fax:
+44 (0)1925 603 192
�
mailing address:
�� The Cockcroft
Institute for Accelerator Science and Technology
�������������������������� Daresbury International Science Park
�������������������������� Daresbury Laboratory
�������������������������� Warrington WA4 4AD , UK
�Chair : SPS and PS Committee
Contact
�
SPS and PS Committee, CERN
office:
room 4-022, building 14 and secy
phone +41 22 767 4270
�
�The best
person to decide what research shall be done is the one doing the research. The
next best is the head of the department. After that you leave the field of best
persons and meet increasingly worse groups. The first of these is the research
director, who is probably wrong more than half the time. Then comes a committee which is wrong most of the time. Finally
there is a committee of company vice-Presidents, which is wrong all of the
time.�
Charles Mees FRS (Former Research Director, Kodak)
�Member
:
H1 experiment @ DESY, Hamburg
Contact
�
secretariat for
the H1 experiment at the high energy
electron-proton storage rings HERA, DESY Hamburg , Germany
The H1 vision
includes Nobel Prize winning science.
�(The) history of science has shown that even during that phase of her
progress in which she devotes herself to improving the accuracy of the
numerical measurements of quantities long familiar, she is preparing the
materials for the subjection of new regions, which would have remained unknown
if she had been contented with the rough methods of her earlier pioneers.�
James
Clerk Maxwell (on the occasion of the founding of the Cavendish Laboratory)
�Every important discovery is by definition unpredictable. If it were
predictable, it would not be important.�
Freeman Dyson (speech when receiving the Britannica Award for
excellence in the dissemination of learning for the benefit of mankind, part
reported in the Independent, March 12th 1990 )
�Member : High Energy Physics Group, University of Liverpool
Contact
�
secretariat for the High Energy Physics Group, Department of Physics, University of Liverpool
��� there is a danger that the key issues will be lost. Too much stress on organisational structures may obscure the basic fact that progress in science depends on the ideas, inspiration and dedication of individual scientists, not the machinations of councils, committees and departments.�
Sir Michael Atiyah (President of the Royal Society, October 1992)
Miscellaneous
��� email addresses from Los
Alamos
��� to contact my
muse
and personal publicist
��� Why people
do it � and how they can sometimes be mistaken!
�A country cannot simultaneously prepare and
prevent war�
��I�m afraid I�m wrong again. I can�t put my theory
into words. I can only formulate it mathematically and that�s suspicious.�
�It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
�All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the answer to the question, `What are light quanta?� Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.�
��Do not worry about your difficulties in
mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater.�
Einstein on Cockcroft and Walton
�They�re
cheering us both, you because nobody understands you, and me because everyone
understands me.�
Charlie Chaplin (in conversation with Albert Einstein when
they drove together through
�The opposite of a
profound truth may well be another profound truth.�
�There are things
that are so serious that you can only joke about them.�
�What we observe is
not Nature itself, but Nature exposed to our mode of questioning.�
�An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.�
�Real is what can be measured.�
�Science
is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent
things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and
uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that
judgements can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.�
�The Problem of Teaching Physics in
Transcript of keynote speech given at the First Inter-American
Conference on Physics Education,
``He
[Feynman] wanted everyone to share his strenuous approach to knowledge. He
would sit idly at a cafe table and cock his ear to listen to the sound sugar
made as it struck the surface of his iced tea, something between a hiss and a
rustle, and his temper would flare if anyone asked what the phenomenon was
called - even if someone merely asked for an explanation. He respected only the
not-knowing, first-principles approach: try sugar in water, try sugar in warm
tea, try tea already saturated with sugar, try salt ... see when the woosh becomes a fizz. Trial and error, discovery, free
inquiry."
From James
Gleick
``Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics", page 284,
Abacus 1994
�Any measure
used for control is unreliable.�� (Goodhart�s Law)
The economist Charles Goodhart observed that any statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
�Scientific
thinking and invention flourish best where people are allowed to communicate as
much as possible unhampered.�
In case you, as well as PPARC, were wondering:
�Strategy. 1688. [a.F.
strat�gie,
ad. Gr. στρατηγία
office or command of a general, generalship, f. στρατηγός.]
�1. A government of province under a strategus. 2.
The art of a commander-in-chief. The art of projecting and directing the larger
military movements and operations of a campaign 1810. b. An instance of species
of this 1833. 3. Gr. Hist.
The office of a strategus (rare) 1869. a. S. differs materially from tactic; the latter belonging only to the mechanical movement of
bodies, set in motion by the former 1810.�
The
Shorter
Also Wikipedia
�The foolish reject what they see, not what they think. The wise reject what they think, not what they see."
��Education is learning to appraise data critically, to
try to think up an intellectual framework, to be able to test it, to be able to
marshal facts, to be able to write about them, to be able to communicate with
people who may - and almost certainly will - have less knowledge of those facts
than you have, because they will be asking you questions about them with a view
to taking some action.�
�Always
looking to the future, we pick up bad habits of anticipation.�
Philip Larkin
�Life is tough in H1, but it's worth it�
John Dainton (sometime H1 Spokesman)
�
Foresight: Individuals are better
than Committees
�If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me ....�
W
Shakespeare, Macbeth Act I, Scene III
Michael
Faraday
The
Royal Institution employed Michael Faraday to improve the quality of optical
glass. He asked to leave to study some questions that interested him concerning
electricity and magnetism.
James
Lovelock
When
James Lovelock sought funds to study the distribution of CFCs in the
atmosphere, he was turned down for making �one of the most frivolous
applications� which the committee had heard. Years later his work proved a key
to understanding the causes of the ozone hole.
George
Gray
For fifteen years George Gray studied molecules
which formed liquid crystals, receiving so little support that he almost
abandoned the research. But when the suggestion came to use liquid crystals for
electro-optical displays, he had the answers which made it possible.
Alec
Gambling
In the mid 1960s Alec Gambling was told by
industrialist friends to �do something useful�, and not to waste his time on
the first studies of the transmission of signals along optical fibres.
Max
Perutz and John Kendrew
Crystallography experts told Max Perutz and John Kendrew that they
were crazy to attempt to solve the structure of protein molecules using X-rays.
For more than ten years �they had no results at all� (Kendrew).
It took over twenty years to achieve success.
Harold
Kroto
Chemistry's hottest topic is the study of �fullerines�, football-like molecules formed from sixty or
more carbon atoms. With many potential applications, they were only discovered
because Harold Kroto persisted, with little support,
in his curiosity about inter-stellar dust.
�We dance around in a ring
and suppose,
But the secret sits in the middle and knows.�
Robert Frost,
�The Secret Sits�
�
Formula Funding?
Engineers and scientists will
never make as much money as business executives. Now a rigorous mathematical proof
explains why this is true:
Postulate 1:
Knowledge is Power
Postulate 2: Time is Money
As every physicist knows����������� Work/Time = Power
Since ������������������������� ����������� Knowledge = Power
and ���������������������������� ����������� Time
= Money
we have����������������������� ����������� Work/Money = Knowledge
Solving for Money we get ��������� Work/Knowledge = Money
Thus
as Knowledge �
0, Money �� regardless of work done.
Conclusion: The less you know, the more money you make.
��
All of the above assembled with help from many
friends
January
2006