Table of contents

Information about appointments and awards, meetings, and member services from the Institute of Physics.

The events of the last year or two have brought home to us the precarious state of universities in many western countries. If in this country we feel a little more secure than some, it is a matter for gratification but not complacency — there are by now enough examples to show that the real crisis, when it comes, cannot be resolved by improvisation.

Someone, I remember not who, once suggested that the most interesting developments in science take place when an overlap between subject boundaries occurs. This has been true in many developments in the mechanics of fluids.

The structural use of fibre reinforced composite materials in the aerospace industry is not new. Glass fibre reinforced plastics in particular have been steadily developed over the years and are currently to be found in such applications as rocket motor casings, drop tanks, fairings, radomes and other secondary structures of various kinds.

Recent progress in the development of new fibre composites has led to the production of engineering materials possessing strength to weight and stiffness to weight ratios many times those of present day structural metals. This is an enormous step forward and these new composites show great promise now as structural materials for aerospace and possibly for more general applications in the longer term.

Britain's first 1 MV electron microscope is being delivered this month to the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. Made by AEI Scientific Apparatus at Harlow, it is the first of five on order in the UK.

The Science Research Council, in its annual report for 1968–69, reports an increase of £3·5 m. in expenditure, bringing the gross expenditure to just over £42 m. Nevertheless, it expresses concern at the financial limitations imposed by the current economic situation and the effect these have on present and future programmes.

Of the many activities reported by the UK Atomic Energy Authority in its 15th annual report the continuing increase in non-nuclear research is particularly notable (see table 2). While in all other cases expenditure is considerably below the 1966–67 high, expenditure on non-nuclear research has trebled since then.

To a large extent the existence of sandwich courses in the universities of the United Kingdom owes its origin to the development of the former colleges of advanced technology as university institutions. Immediately prior to this change of status most of these colleges offered a wide range of sandwich courses, normally of four years' duration, and leading to the award of the Diploma in Technology.

Productivity bargaining in the research laboratory may be some way from being general practice, but at Moscow's Karpov Institute of Physical and Chemical Research an attempt is being made to determine scientists' salaries by their performance. As explained in the September issue of Science Policy News the experiment, the first of its kind in the Soviet Union, was initiated because it was felt that the existing pay structure did not always stimulate efficiency among scientists: it was remunerative for a young scientist to get a higher degree, but once this had brought him promotion and a better salary, the system provided no incentive to better or more effective research.

The lobby of Europeans putting the case for streamlining industry in Europe has been joined by Mr Charles Villiers, managing director of the Industrial Reorganization Corporation (IRC), in a forceful speech delivered at the German Industries' Exhibition in Berlin on 18 September. Pleading for vigorous technology based industries extending across national boundaries Mr Villiers reminded his audience that European industry could hope to retain a substantial slice of a growing European market only if it pooled its resources, research and development, and production and marketing techniques.

Professor C. F. Powell, Hon FInst P, FRS, died on holiday in Italy on 9 August 1969, aged 65, very shortly after his retirement from the Directorship of the H. H. Wills Physical Laboratory at the University of Bristol. A research student of C. T. R. Wilson at Cambridge, he had been at Bristol since 1928, initially as Research Assistant to Prof. A. M. Tyndall, becoming Melville Wills Professor of Physics in 1948 and Henry Overton Wills Professor and Head of the Physics Department in 1964.

A European Society of Nuclear Agriculture, financed in equal parts by the German Ministry of Scientific Research and the Dutch Government, was formed during a meeting in Wageningen, Netherlands, on 16–19 September. The initiative for its formation arose from the close cooperation which has evolved between the Institute for the Application of Nuclear Energy in Agriculture, Wageningen, the Institute for Radiobiology of Hannover Technical University and the Institute of Radiobotany, Munich.

The study of ionospheric and auroral phenomena by the European Space Research Organization continues with the successful launching on 1 October of ESRO-1B, the second satellite in the ESRO-1 project, from the Western Test Range in California. The satellite carries eight experiments, including two from the Radio and Space Research Station, Slough, and two from the Mullard Space Research Laboratory, University College, London; their main purpose is to investigate the fine structure of aurorae and to correlate studies on auroral particles, auroral luminosity, ionospheric composition and heating effects.

One of the more inaccessible languages, Japanese, is to be made more accessible to scientists through the development and evaluation of an intensive course for which Prof. G. Bownas of the University of Sheffield has been awarded a grant by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information. Recent surveys have shown that the proportion of Japanese scientific literature of interest to research workers is on the increase but that unfortunately the proportion of it published in English is decreasing.

Education in Britain is expensive, requiring contributions not only from the educational establishments and the state, through grants, but to varying degrees also from parents. Parents therefore would do well to inform themselves about the extent of the contribution they are expected to provide, and for this purpose the Department of Education and Science publishes two booklets giving full details of grants and parental support.

The words "...but not descriptions of experimental techniques..." used in recent announcements concerned with Letters to the Editor in the Journal of Physics were not intended to preclude experimental details essential for the explanation of results, but to discourage mere exposition of new techniques. Letters in French and German will be accepted provided they are accompanied by an abstract in English.

The annual autumn meeting of the German Physical Society is probably the largest regular gathering of physicists in Europe. This year, the 34th meeting was held in Salzburg on 29 September–4 October, in conjunction with the Austrian Physical Society and the German Geophysical Society, and attracted an attendance of over 2500.

The first specialist conference of the Plasma Physics Group was on plasma turbulence, at Manchester on 22–23 September. The conference was attended by some 40 people including participants from the USA, Holland and Italy.

A most successful conference on nuclear and elementary particle physics was held at the University of Sussex on 24–26 September 1969. The purpose of the conference was to bring together two branches of physics which, over the last few years, have tended to develop independently of each other.

The eighth triennial congress and general assembly of the International Union of Crystallography was held at the new Campus of New York State University at Stony Brook, Long Island, during August. About 1400 delegates from most countries of the world were present and of these, about 100 came from the United Kingdom. Undoubtedly the highlight of the scientific meetings was the additional session put on at very short notice to enable Prof. Dorothy Hodgkin's group to announce the successful solution of the structure of insulin.

It is interesting to analyse the figures presented by Mr Donald Hutchings in his article on the employment of PhD physicists (Physics Bulletin September 1969 p370) in terms of the size of research school. Of the 1048 physics PhDs awarded in the years 1965–68 rather more than half were from seven universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, Manchester, Durham, Sussex and Glasgow.

Dr A. F. Trotman-Dickenson's article (Physics Bulletin September 1969 p387) on the support of university research by industry raises some interesting points but overlooks others which are very apparent from the industrial point of view. Firstly, if we count agriculture, fisheries and the wealth producing parts of nationalized concerns as 'industry', all the money for research and training comes from industry.

What is the basis for the choice of the new titles of the journals of the Institute and Society? Indeed, why has it become necessary to change the titles at all ?

I, too, have been following the correspondence on the role of physics in colleges of further education with considerable interest. My dictionary defines "physics" as "the science of the properties and interrelations of matter and energy", a definition with which I am sure no reader of Physics Bulletin will find himself in violent disagreement.

One is accustomed to the common accusation that scientists use incomprehensible language, but it comes as something of a shock to be the victim instead of the villain. In reply to a recent tentative enquiry about a particular post with a moderately well known firm, I received a job specification which said, among other things, that "...the incumbent's major concern is the alignment of resources to the priority research tasks involving the continual reappraisal of optimum methodology within the budget".

May I make a plea for the kilogramme molecular weight? The mole as at present defined depends on the number of atoms in 0·012 kg of carbon-12.