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I arrived at Sussex in autumn 1974, having completed my DPhil
(supervised by J.C. Taylor) at Oxford. I had almost come in 1968 as an
undergraduate, but my school headmaster freaked at the idea that I might
turn down a place at Oxford. (Obviously it was the Sussex academic
reputation that attracted me, not the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll image).
Then again I nearly came as a postgraduate student in 1971 but in the
end stayed on at Oxford.
Finally arriving at Sussex, I lived in Stanmer
House, which was then in good condition and under the control of the
University. Its elegant ground floor library had been partitioned into
two large bedrooms; the other occupied by another single postdoc with
whom I shared a bathroom and kitchen. The house came to look rather
neglected in later years, but Googling 'Stanmer House", I find that it
has been restored and you can even get married there, which is
interesting. I was amused that on the website if you click on Lounge
Bar, you are presented with a view of my bedroom from the other one.
The large windows looked out over the lawn on which a local club played cricket matches most summer Saturdays. (On one occasion an impressive six crashed through one of my neighbour's windows). It was a lovely location, a short walk from campus, with longer walks possible through the village and up on to the Downs. For this accomodation I paid £20 per week, my postdoc salary was around £2000 (a year). Tourists used to come and peer in. I countered this with a sign in the window which read in very large type "PRIVATE" and in smaller type below "So fuck off you nosey bastard". This used to elicit interesting responses. On my way to work I used to pass the Gardner Arts Centre. This, sadly, was later inactive for many years; but undergoing reincarnation (apparently...) as the Attenborough Arts Centre. I probably went to every theatrical production and music concert there that year. I had one friend there from schooldays, Bridget Edgar, who was doing her PhD with Les Allen . She and her (to be) first husband Paul Marx helped with my social life (such as it was). She later became an ordained minister (rather to my surprise) and sadly died some years ago now. The particle theory group consisted mainly of David Bailin, Norman Dombey and Alex Love. The first paper I wrote at Sussex was on the search for finite supersymmetric theories, an area to which I was to return many times in later years. I then worked with David and Alex, sharing an office with Alex. Those who have met Alex later might be surprised to hear about our modus operandi; we invariably spent all day together, generally with one of us working on the blackboard and the other making notes. I never worked quite like this before or since. It went well, in spite of the fact that it was Alex's general habit to fold notes for keeping neatly in half, whereas it was my habit to do the same for notes to be discarded. I forget what we were working on to start with, but the dramatic announcement of the J /Ψ, a discovery which affected us deeply, as it did a whole generation of particle physicists. At the time student militancy at Sussex was a feature of University life; the telephone exchange was under occupation so outside communication was difficult. I recall the three of us crammed into a phone box, with David quizzing Chris Llewellyn Smith about things like the observed decay width of the new particle. We wrote a paper containing two plausible but completely incorrect explanations for this particle, according to both of which it was a vector boson. The second of these I remain rather proud of since it involved the invention of "Horizontal Symmetry" (a gauge symmetry linking the quark and lepton generations), an idea generally attributed to Wilczek and Zee, who proposed it (for a different purpose) some years later. My memory is that the original inspiration came from Alex. In the spring David left for a sabbatical in India; the three of us continued to collaborate on a calculation of QCD effects in ΔS = -ΔQ processes. This turned into an involved and technical calculation with less than earth-shattering results. It's an excellent piece of work which remains my only published paper with absolutely no citations. Meanwhile Alex and I also collaborated with Mike Moore, in an investigation of phase transitions in superfluid Helium3. . Condensed matter physics was new territory for me, but the mathematical apparatus we employed (the renormalisation group) was familiar. I enjoyed this work, and we were sufficiently excited by the outcome that we submitted a short version of it to Physical Review Letters. This was rejected, which annoyed me sufficiently that I determined never to submit another paper to this journal; as I have not. We published a complete account in Journal of Physics C. After I left Sussex I returned to full time particle physics, but Alex and David (on his return) continued to work in this area, with Alex becoming a sufficiently convincing condensed matter theorist to land a lectureship in the area in London (eventually absorbed into Royal Holloway and Bedford college). In fact their best regarded work was afterwards in this area. That spring I gave a lecture course for the first year graduate students; this I modelled on courses inflicted on me at Oxford, but modified as I went along to reflect the new paradigm created by the (correct) interpretation of the J/Ψ as a charm-anticharm bound state. I grumbled feebly about being assigned this task when a first year postdoc, but was cheerfully told that I would have to do it since otherwise somebody else would be obliged to; an unanswerable argument which I was to encounter more than once in my subsequent career at Liverpool. I left Sussex after one year and returned to Oxford to take up an IBM Junior Research Fellowship at St Edmund Hall. I was not unhappy at Sussex, far from it; the main reason I left was that my girlfriend Julia (who in 1974-5 was spending her year abroad in the course of her language degree) returned to Oxford in 1975 for the final year of her undergraduate studies. We were married in the SEH chapel in 1976. In my career I have worked with many good physicists and friends. Alex, David and Mike were the first people I really collaborated with, and in all the years since I can't say that I have enjoyed working with anyone more. We remained friends till David's recent death, though I have rarely seen Alex, who does not travel very much. |
