Welcome to our second Emeriti Profile where we ask one of our emeriti faculty questions about their careers and what they have been doing since retirement.
Is there a faculty member that you recall from being a student and are you wondering what they are up to? Do you have fond memories of a certain instructor? Tell us who they are and we will try and connect with them for an update.
How many years you were a faculty member?
I feel flattered that you think the ramblings of an octogenarian professor emeritus would be of much interest to your readers but thank you for asking!
I was a postdoctoral fellow here from 1966 to 1968, returning in 1970 as an assistant professor after two years at what is now called Fermilab, the particle accelerator in Illinois: I retired in 2004.
Can you tell me about your educational background from your undergraduate degree to your PhD?
I obtained my M.A. at the university in Aberdeen where my family had settled after World War II and went on to do graduate work at the University of Oxford.
What was your PhD in and why?
The field of elementary particles was taking off and I wanted to see what happened at the highest energies, when a beam of particles from an accelerator smashed into nuclei. The Oxford group, led by my thesis advisor Mani Lokanathan, used the beams at CERN (Centre de Recherche Nucleaire), the international laboratory in Geneva. We detected the collisions by placing a stack of photographic emulsions in the particle beam; when developed, the tracks made by the particles could be studied under microscopes by technicians. The technology was at the end of its life and is now obsolete. Living in Geneva for the experimental run, my very first, very modest expense account allowed me to woo Mervyn, the beautiful young woman I met there; mistakenly impressed, she returned with me to Oxford and we married a year later.
I finished my D.Phil. in three years, not because of any brilliance on my part, but because all graduate grants provided by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research lasted only that long. I had to let the University know when I would defend my thesis, and there was a stiff fine for failure to appear. My daughter, Michelle, ignorant of this tight deadline, elected to be born on the scheduled day. However, I was magnanimously granted a month-long extension on compassionate grounds; by working non-stop, with a few hours of sleep between Michelle’s 2 am and 6 am feed, I managed to complete my thesis. I then had to have it professionally typed, and 5 copies printed: one for each of my two examiners, one for the University archives, one for the Physics Department, and a personal copy. Since copies were made by interleaving the pages with others that were coated with carbon – the original carbon copies – my copy is almost unreadable.
The examination was conducted by the head of department, the famous Professor Denis Wilkinson, and the external examiner, the equally well-known Professor Eric Burhop from University College, London. Neither had anything to prove, so I passed without revisions.
What did you do before you came to Toronto?
Upon graduating, we three sailed for South Africa, where I had obtained a lectureship at the University of Natal in Durban. I taught undergraduates and my one M.Sc. student and I did research with John Martin, also an Oxford graduate. Together we produced what was almost certainly the first cold cesium plasma in Africa. My contribution was to design a system that produced a homogeneous magnetic field to contain the plasma. The computers I used were more sophisticated than the one I had used in Oxford; the long rolls of punched paper tape had been replaced by stacks of punched cards.
While we had a wonderful time in South Africa, the horrors of apartheid and the way our African and Indian friends were treated persuaded us to leave after two years. Jim Prentice and Dick Steenberg had made the sensible decision to abandon the nucleus for its constituents, and I was offered a position as a NSERC postdoc to join their new High Energy Physics group at Toronto. The technology had advanced to the use of the bubble chamber and, helped by the more established group at the University of Wisconsin, we obtained film from experiments at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. I had the largest office of my career in the basement of the Sandford Fleming building, where the Department was housed awaiting the construction of the McLennan Laboratory.
These were the most difficult years of my career. I needed to catch up on a very fast-moving field, Toronto seemed large and cold, and Mervyn had her hands full looking after Michelle and our newly adopted son, Adrian.
The US Congress had recently approved what was to be the last large accelerator to be built in the US, and a group of Canadian physicists from the University of Toronto, Carleton University, and McGill University wanted to join the action, so they created the Institute of Particle Physics to produce a report that would encourage the government of Canada to chip in. I was asked by this group to be the Canadian representative at Fermilab, as it was soon to be called, to show the flag and produce the report. As it turned out, international accelerator culture welcomed physicists around the world, so Canadian financial input was not required, no doubt to the relief of the government.
We scientists were housed in tiny bungalows in the small village of Weston, lying in the plains of Illinois to the West of Chicago, that had been appropriated by the US government. The Americans were delightful and friendly, though all of our friends had guns; the culture in the ‘junior executive suburb’ where we lived was Wonder Bread bland, and we escaped each weekend to the delights of Chicago.
While designing particle beams for the future accelerator and writing reports of progress to my Canadian employers, a colleague and I joined groups from the Universities of Wisconsin and Chicago to do an experiment at the nearby Argonne Laboratory. A Swiss group had reported an anomaly in the profile of an obscure meson, and after two years of work, by examining a rare decay of the meson, we showed that the Swiss result was incorrect. That work produced my one and only Physical Review Letter.
Ultimately, however, the US culture was too foreign for us to contemplate settling there; the love of guns was incomprehensible, and the bottom line on most things was money. When my work was done at Fermilab, I was offered an Assistant Professorship by Jim Daniels, who had succeeded Harry Welsh as Chair of Physics. I was delighted to accept.
What are your memories of being a faculty member in the U of T Physics Department?
The bubble chamber group was still going strong, and we were collaborating with the Universities of Wisconsin and Purdue with experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in Palo Alto. The resultant film was returned to Toronto, and scanned by technicians and, later, by a semi-automatic scanner. As out-of-towners we were assigned to the midnight shift.
I had always had difficulty balancing the demands of research and teaching and after many years I began to lose interest in continuing my research. The bubble chamber technique was becoming outdated, my last graduate student had graduated, and my Research Associates had left to continue their careers, so I determined to concentrate on my teaching, my true love. This was long before tenure track teaching positions were even imagined. I arranged for our bubble chamber measuring machines to be gifted to the University of Jammu in North India, and I spent some enjoyable time in India, helping the physics department set them up.
I became even more interested in psychology and pedagogy and, over a three-year period, I obtained a diploma in a form of psychotherapy called Gestalt Therapy. What had started as a hobby became a very minor secondary career, and I spent many Reading Weeks teaching in Europe and the Far East. I also spent a sabbatical teaching undergraduate physics at the Albi campus of the University of Toulouse.
I spent about fifteen years in departmental administration, serving as the Associate Chair (with Chairs Robin Armstrong and Dick Azuma), Associate Chair for Graduate Studies (with Chair Michael Walker) and was Acting Chair for a term until Derek York was able to take over as Chair. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in administration, where I had the power to solve many of the bureaucratic problems brought to me by worried students.
What kind of physics did you teach? And why?
Throughout my career I taught at all levels. Two of my favourite subjects were quantum physics and electromagnetism. Perhaps my favourite courses were those to first year students, whose pre- and misconceptions I enjoyed confronting. I especially enjoyed teaching Physics for the Life Sciences in Convocation Hall. I loved the performance aspect, and the fascinating demonstrations provided by the department’s outstanding technical team. This excellent course had been created by Kenneth McNeill, and I was fortunate enough to teach with team David Harrison, John Pitre, Jason Harlow, Kim Strong, William Trischuk, Salam Tawfiq, and a huge team of Teaching Assistants. Sadly and coincidentally, the year that Kenneth McNeill died, this course was replaced by a standard physics course, taught to all new comers, thus confirming its main purpose – to keep idiots out of medical school. I taught the section on Nuclear and Radiation Physics, about which I initially knew little; Pierre Savaria came to my rescue when required. I introduced and taught several courses for non-science students that were a delight to teach.
I served many years teaching the First and Second Year Laboratory courses. The instructions for students had been written by Malcolm Graham whose terse style bordered on incomprehensibility, so I rewrote the manuals with more detailed instructions and a more verbose style; the students did not seem to enjoy the laboratory any more or perform any better. David Harrison subsequently re-designed the first year laboratory to better accommodate the increasingly poorly prepared students.
I developed training courses for our many Teaching Assistants, and gave several workshops for different audiences across campus, laterally under the auspices of the Teaching Assistants Training Program. At Woodsworth College, I took over the course Teaching in Higher Education developed by John Kirkness from the French Department to meet the needs of senior Ph.D. candidates who wanted to become academics; evidence of a commitment to good teaching was finally becoming necessary to obtain an academic position. I also introduced the graduate course, Communication for Physicists, to help physics graduate students develop their writing and presentation skills.
How has the Physics Department changed since you were a faculty member?
When I joined the Department, all decisions were made by Full Professors, who held regular faculty meetings, to which Assistant and Associate Professors were not invited; the idea that students should be allowed to attend was too extreme even to be contemplated. In later years, once all faculty were allowed to attend, the Chair, notably Robin Armstrong, would bring the large store of liquor kept in his office, to the lounge for an informal post-meeting drink with no need for University-provided baristas.
After each lecture, a technician would clean the blackboard in preparation for the next. If slides were required, a technician would operate the projector; however, for most lectures, the slides could be written out on sheets of transparent plastic and fed as required into an overhead projector.
All computing was done on the IBM 7094 that occupied the 12th floor of the McLennan laboratory. The programs were fed to the machine on cards, and the data was stored on massive magnetic tapes loaded into rows of tape decks the size of refrigerators. Time had to be booked on the computer, and, as large users, we often processed overnight. Users’ research grants were charged by the second. George Luste, another particle physicist, became more interested in computing and purchased the first departmental computer. In addition to making a fortune investing in IBM stock, George ran the computer with an iron hand, and his work made a huge contribution to the department.
Many rooms in the McLennan tower were used as experimental laboratories for faculty, as the now inoperative DC outlets attest. These were gradually turned over to lecture or seminar rooms as their inhabitants retired or moved to the basement.
All papers were written out by hand and handed to typists. Corrections were literally cut – using scissors – and paste – using Sellotape – until the number of errors generated by the typist equaled the number of errors in the manuscript. The IBM Selectric electric typewriter with its innovative ball was a huge step forward, and the days of professional typists began to be numbered. Nowadays with word processors, text or diagram changes are so easy that few theses escape without several, required by examiners who want to show they have read the student’s work.
What have you been doing during your retirement?
I was among the last Ontario professors who had to retire at age 65; now there is no age limit. For a good decade I continued to teach the Woodsworth course and the Communication course, and extended my teaching in Gestalt Therapy in Japan and China. For several years, I volunteered at Princess Margaret Hospital, and have become somewhat active in canvassing for the Green Party. We continue to spend time with our growing family, our summers at our small farmhouse in the Tarn, our weekends at our log cabin in the Kawarthas, and our winters in Rome. I took up golf again but can report no improvement. I have been educating myself in politics and economics, corresponding with friends close and far, and I continue learning Italian at the School of Continuing Studies. As a member of Senior College, I attend functions and talks, and several courses at the Academy for Lifelong Learning.
Anything else you would like us to know or share?
Too long already, hope you got this far.