Professor Sir John Enderby FRS (1931-2021): a personal reflection

Shortly before I retired fully from my three decades as an academic at The University of Kent I wrote a short series of blog posts on aspects of my career (starting here). They were drafted in a bit of a hurry in response to a request from one of my colleagues – who was, it transpired, already contemplating a ‘retirement conference’ in my honour and wanted a little biographical material; they were far from exhaustive. Within that handful of posts there is mention of the person who kick-started my career in science in the mid-1970s and who influenced it from time to time for the next thirty five years or so …

When I first came across John Enderby he was ‘Professor Enderby’ and the head of the Department of Physics at the University of Leicester, where I was an undergraduate student. It was years later that he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and was subsequently knighted. Sadly, John died at the beginning of August in 2021; he was 90 years old. Only now, a year later and after the worst of the COVID-related restrictions and fears are in the past, was it practicable to hold a meeting to celebrate his considerable contributions to science. As one of the few people still around who had worked with him during his time at Leicester (and for whom the organisers had contact details) I was asked to contribute to the short talks planned for the first day of the celebratory meeting. It was an honour to accept the invitation. This blog post is, in essence, the distillate of my talk on September 5th at ‘Understanding the Structure of Liquids: Celebrating John Enderby’s Scientific Legacy’ at The University of Bristol.

Family members, friends and former colleagues as photographed at the end of the meeting’s first day by Adrian Barnes. (Should you wish to know, when this was taken I happened to be sitting third row back, second from the right; the image shown below is of the period I was speaking about in my talk.)

An immediate difficulty faced when putting together my slides arose from the lack of contemporary images: the key events took place well before the advent of digital photography or scanners. Photographs were something of a rarity, doubly so in the case of colour. Add to that the fact that I’d been ruthless in clearing out my office as I approached retirement ... I did however find a scanned copy of the above image, taken at a Research Council Graduate School held at Leicester in 1977. John is sitting front left and a very young me stands centre-rear. There are so many distinguished scientists of the time shown in this image, and quite a few early-career people who went on to build amazing careers of their own. (When I first located this image, I confess that one of my initial reactions was to lament the lack of diversity – a situation too often ignored at the time I regret to say.)

In truth, I can’t say I remember anything specific of John until the end of my second year as a naïve BSc Physics student*. I had requested a final year research project in the area of Solid State Physics – an area that had increasingly fascinated me during that year, probably due to some inspirational lecturers – but I honestly couldn’t recount my decision-making process now (even to myself). My project partner and I found ourselves tasked with the study of manganese chloride aqueous salt solutions using Electron Spin Resonance, a technique traditionally rooted within the realm of Chemistry. Could this really be a suitable project in Physics? Our project supervisor was to be none other than Professor Enderby, which was a scary prospect. (I discovered years later that the project’s inception owed much to a conversation that John had had with his research associate George Neilson, whose background was in Chemistry.) This was my first proper exposure to what would eventually shape my own research interests across four decades: the belief that so much of interest lies at the interface between our traditional subject disciplines. For that alone I owe John a huge debt of thanks.

Central to the images above is a monochrome image of the ESR spectrometer we used for our allocated final year research project. It was taken by the departmental technician who acted as official photographer. I was given a copy, as was my project partner, which I annotated by hand and included in my project report – the front cover of which is reproduced on the left. The report itself was typed using a fairly basic typewriter; the equations were inserted by hand as were all graphs, diagrams and tables. I generated a carbon copy for myself; there were no photocopiers in the department. Very few people possessed an electronic calculator at the time, which were still fairly primitive back then – and prohibitively expensive, so calculations were undertaken using logarithms and slide rules.

Unbelievably to us at the time, my project partner and I were invited to a party at John Enderby’s house to celebrate his research group’s success in winning their first truly substantial research grant from what was then the UK Science Research Council. Being made to feel welcome – a part of the team despite our particularly junior status – had a great impact; it afforded one of the many lessons I have sought never to forget. However, there were things to learn from the day-to-day as well. For instance, John’s habit of wandering through the labs. most days, coffee cup in hand, is one deceptively simple example. He’d engage anyone and everyone in conversation about what they were doing; keeping himself abreast of developments of course but, in the process, bolstering the confidence of undergraduate and early-career researchers alike … whilst also keeping them on their toes. With my time as an undergraduate student coming to a close I began the process of sorting out what my next step might be. I had obtained a place on a PGCE course, so secondary school teaching was one attractive option. However, despite enduring feelings of inadequacy, my ambitions were focused on the desire to dive into research. Thus, despite fascinating offers in the areas of ionospheric physics and geophysics, it took me relatively little time to accept John’s offer to join his group as a PhD student.

John’s own 1963 PhD thesis was entitled ‘Some electrical properties of liquid metals’ – my own, submitted sixteen years later wasn’t that dissimilar, although the theoretical landscape had altered considerably in the intervening period. The computational equipment available had progressed a great deal by the time my PhD project came to an end, but the project itself was conducted on a shoestring budget.

"Liquid metals" implies high temperatures – up to about 1750°C in my case – but without much of a budget everything had to be built by hand. Simple angle-iron frames held furnace bricks stacked within an asbestos box (- yes: I had to cut and drill such sheets, the work being done outdoors and using water to suppress dust; different times). The furnaces were lowered/raised using simple screw jacks and the basic vacuum system included copper tubing soldered together by me; I also did all the glass-blowing and the machining of many other components. The colour inset is one of my wife’s still life paintings: a jar like this was used as my primary calibration cell – the whole project rested upon its use!

As it turned out, after a period of study leave in the USA, John left Leicester for a post in Bristol only a year after my PhD began so I never did benefit from his continued day-to-day supervision. One of his Leicester colleagues, Alan Howe, bravely took me on and became my key early-career mentor in John’s stead. John and I stayed in touch however and met on innumerable occasions through the years. This included the period of his tenure as Physical Secretary and Vice-President for The Royal Society, during which time I recall being treated to an excellent meal at the Army & Navy Club so that he could debrief me on my department’s performance in the recent Research Assessment Exercise. I’ve lost count of the number of supportive references etc. he wrote for me, and I have cause to be particularly grateful for his gentle nudges into what became an extensive involvement with the UK Research Councils (see here).

During the first couple of years after the move to Bristol in 1976 John would visit his old department at Leicester often. On just such a visit he wandered into my small lab. for a chat. I wasn’t there, so he had to make do with my latest written log entries. At this point I ought to point out that John was incredibly enthusiastic when ostensibly exciting results emerged, but occasionally this enthusiasm misfired. In the longer term it was never a problem: as the saying goes, first attributed to Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones.” John was a master of this approach, which I heartily applaud, but in the short term there are risks. He thought that my data on the resistivity of liquid palladium-silver alloys might represent the first evidence for ‘paramagnons’ in a liquid metal and he duly shared this idea widely. It didn’t, as I demonstrated through further measurement in the months that followed. No long-term harm was done; John was an excellent scientist: when I had generated more reliable data we simply moved on – that’s how science works.

The above are scanned copies of my PhD laboratory logbook pages, the graph on the left and the lower insert being the ones John saw during his unannounced flying visit. It would have been tempting to take this unexpected ‘spike’ in the graph at 33% Ag at face value. However, scientific scepticism – major claims need major evidence – and the desire for both explanation and reproducibility drove me to track down the origin of the feature. My ‘family tree’ of samples (central panel) showed that the ‘paramagnon-like’ feature was evidently associated with a single sample that had been contaminated by the tungsten electrodes I used. This sample, in its turn, contaminated subsequent samples made from it. Given my vanishingly small budget, I had to wait six months before I could buy fresh samples of high purity palladium and silver in order to measure this region of composition again. The graph on the right, although still fascinating in the context of the theories of the time, clearly shows that John’s paramagnons were, sadly, a will-o'-the-wisp.

There were rather few ways in which I could honour John’s scientific contributions, but in 2006 I nominated him for an honorary doctorate at my own university (Kent at Canterbury) which he was able to receive during a formal university degree ceremony. In 2014 I wrote a two-page article in the monthly magazine ‘Laboratory News’ in a short series on heroes of British science – it gave me my penultimate opportunity to pay tribute.

I hope I possess sufficient wisdom to choose to learn from others: to learn what works and what ought to be avoided. I learnt a great deal from John. Indeed, from my days as an undergraduate student, through various transitory research posts and to my thirty years as an academic with my own thoroughly interdisciplinary research team, John remained a person to learn from. I am thankful for the privilege of having known him.

* I had applied for a Joint Honours degree in Physics & Chemistry, but due to an ‘administrative oversight’ I arrived at Leicester to find myself registered for their BSc Physics programme. Lacking the self-confidence to anything other, I simply ‘went with the flow’. I have used the term serendipity often in relation to my career: this apparently random event is perhaps an early example.

A plate from the past: SGT and me

 

I follow many scientists and science-centred organisations on Twitter. In fact, they dominate the list of accounts I follow – which is hardly surprising given my interests. One of these is the Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining and the other, which is closer to home in terms of my own scientific career in materials research, is the Society of Glass Technology They recently surprised me …

The COVID-delayed sixteenth conference on the Physics of Non-Crystalline Materials was held at the university I worked at before retiring more than seven years ago (see here for details of the current incarnation of my old department). I put something up on Twitter about how strange it felt to have a meeting running for week at my old stomping ground given that, a decade ago, I would have expected to participate. The SGT account holder, who I’ve known for a long time, replied saying that I ought to pop in to say hello as they had something to give me from several years back. How could I resist …

It turned out that they had commissioned a commemorative plate to mark the fact that I delivered the 2015 Mellor Memorial Lecture – the SGT and IoM3 share the hosting of this memorial lecture, and it was the turn of the SGT that year as part of its annual meeting, ‘Glass Reflections’ (here, this is an old link – pre-https days – so your browser may warn you that it’s not secure). I was honoured to be asked. Although I tried hard to prepare properly, I confess that I wasn’t pleased with my performance at the time; I’m almost never pleased with my performance. I was a little taken aback to have all this effort made to honour the event – and completely delighted.

David Moore presenting me with the plate (image taken by Christine Brown). The plate's inscription reads: Presented to Prof Bob Newport by the Ceramics Society - IoM3; 55th Mellor Memorial Lecture 'Glass: out of History and Art and into Tissue Regeneration'; 8th September 2015. The backdrop is a 2018 painting by Heather Gulliver showing an African Coral Tree; it hangs in the PNCS16 conference venue at the University of Kent.

Here’s a little background for you, taken in part from the IoM3’s web site: Joseph Mellor FRS (1869-1938) was a pioneering ceramist and heavily involved in the work of the Ceramic Society (which became the IoM3). He wrote several books including ‘Modern Inorganic Chemistry’. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1927 – no mean feat.

In 2016, in their centenary year, the SGT elected me a Fellow of the Society – an honour I continue to treasure, but have only a certificate in commemoration (see here, second half). That will do nicely.

♪ The Sun has got its spots on … ♫

It has been a whole year since I last posted. I’m sure that this is in part one of many diverse legacies of SARS-COV2, but it’s also related to the fact that my primary focus for the blog was always to reflect on living life as a scientist.* I have in the meantime continued to write about topics in science elsewhere: using my u3a local branch’s social media group example. However, the point is that I intended only to write on this blog as and when my week involved me in rolling up my metaphorical scientists’ sleeves and getting directly involved. You can perhaps see where this is headed …

Last week I visited Year 5 of The Churchill School; one of the two classes is taught by my talented daughter-in-law, and it was she who invited me. I’ve been to the school many times before, but less often as a visiting scientist (e.g. here). I freely confess that school classrooms unnerve me. I (mostly) loved school when I was part of the whole thing as a child and I have the deepest of respect for excellent teachers like my daughter-in-law. However, nowadays, the thought of standing in front of a class of children – let alone two 30+ classes combined – with the aim of leading them into some new knowledge and understanding renders me a little weak at the knees. It was truly lovely, then, to get a warm welcome by the four staff members involved – but it was the eagerness of the 9/10 year-olds that completely blew me away.

I turned up while they were still in a school assembly so that I could get everything set up in peace. I had brought with me my newly acquired second-hand 72 mm refractor, the lightest of my two equatorial mounts and a tray of bits and pieces which included a homemade solar filter. The neutral filter material, which removes 99.999% of the incident light, is of the highest standard, but I can’t say the same thing about the cardboard and duct tape assembly that holds it in place in front of the telescope’s objective lens. In order for the equatorial mount’s tiny battery-driven motors to keep the telescope pointing towards the Sun over time, it has to be tilted to the correct latitude, levelled and compass-aligned. The telescope itself also needs to be balanced (both front to back and side to side). Once the Sun had been located and its image focused I have to say that I was more than relieved to see several sunspot clusters clearly visible; passing clouds were, as ever, less predictable. (By the way, the images taken at the school were carefully checked by them before they were released for my use; faces have been covered/blurred as necessary.)

I was given a generous introduction inside the school before we all trooped out to the school’s expansive playing field and the children sat in a semi-circle on the summer-dry grass. I kept my own introduction to the telescope very simple; no-one needed to know about focal lengths and lenses in order to observe the Sun. What did need to be shared at the outset though was the standard but ever-vital warning not to look directly at the Sun for fear of damaging the eyes. In this instance it was important to go much further, making the point that looking at the Sun through binoculars or a telescope is likely to cause blindness without the appropriate safety measures in place. You also have now been warned 😉

I had given them a rough idea where the sunspot clusters were by describing the Sun’s disk as a clock face: two and eight o’clock got them to the most obvious, although it was a busy day on the Sun and there was a lot to choose from. This is an image captured by a talented amateur astronomer, Roger Hyman ( find him here or here) on that same day; the image is used with his permission. The orientation isn’t exactly as we saw it – the angle of the camera he was using and other factors will affect that, but it’s close enough. All clusters of sunspots are given a unique identifying number and on Friday 15th July 2022 they were, beginning at the 2:30 position and moving clockwise: 3057, 3056, 3055 and 3053 (see here).

In between the slowly drifting clouds, everyone got a chance to look through the telescope – even the adults. All but a handful said they’d seen the sunspots: some after a bit of coaching in terms of how to use an eyepiece. It took a while, and given the need for a lot of patience they did astonishingly well.

Every time a cloud came over we used it as an opportunity for questions, which came thick and fast. Indeed, the flow of questions continued when everyone had had the opportunity to take a peek and we had moved back inside the building. These were exceptionally wide-ranging, and varied from the scientifically and philosophically challenging to the more speculative ‘what if’ (the Sun disappeared, you went into a black hole, …) and ‘would you’ (like to go into space, live on Mars, …) type of question. All of them deserved to be taken seriously and given the best response I could muster. I can only say that I was genuinely impressed; it was uplifting to see so much evidence of the potential on display within that classroom. A few of them were obviously highly clued up, and several made a point of telling me that they wanted to be a scientist. Perhaps what I should have said in response, but for some reason didn’t, is that in a sense they already were – just as much as I was at their age.

I was at the school for almost 2½ hours in total, although it felt far briefer than that.

I promised this blog post in order to provide a reminder of what we did, and to offer a little information in a more coherent way than I fear I managed on the day. Perhaps one might start by saying that sunspots are associated with a localised increase in the Sun’s magnetic field. They appear darker than their surroundings simply because they are a little cooler, with their central region (the umbra) at about 3000-4000ºC compared to the average of 6000ºC. Their sizes vary a great deal, with the largest being several times the diameter of the Earth. (If you are able to see the above image of the Sun on a reasonably large screen then you might notice the small blue dot I inserted to the left hand side: that is approximately the size of the Earth on the same scale.) Sunspots can last for days, but eventually disappear. The number of sunspots visible at any one time varies over the eleven years of the solar activity cycle; we’ll be at the next maximum in this cycle in 2024. You can find lots more information here, here and here; a recent BBC ‘Sky at Night’ programme covered some of this ground also.

Perhaps a fitting way to close this post would be to offer a couple of suggestions for useful astronomy apps and to share a small number of my own images. The first app I downloaded when picking up after retiring the hobby of my youth (from Android Play Store) was ‘Sky Map’, which I still use as a simple interactive guide to the sky; for a little more sophistication one might go for ‘Stellarium’. The choice is yours. In addition, and especially if you want to pursue this further, I’d recommend joining your nearest amateur astronomy group. Unfortunately, the one I’m in – Ashford Amateur Astronomy Society – is an hour’s drive from my home; maybe there’s one closer to where you live.

The above were taken at different dates, through different telescopes and with different cameras. The result is that we have a fairly recent image of the whole disc of the Sun together with a more highly magnified image of one part of the solar disc, and a close-up of two particular sunspot clusters taken in 2021 which bring out a bit more detail in terms of their structure. You’ll notice that each sunspot comprises a dark central region (the umbra) and a somewhat bright outer region (the penumbra); as you might anticipate, the penumbra has a temperature which is intermediate between the umbra’s and the Sun’s average surface temperature.

Happy observing.


* I retired from my paid employment as an academic and multidisciplinary materials research team leader about seven years ago, but I’m still a scientist – just as I was as far back into childhood as I can remember; I’ve covered this ground in earlier posts (e.g. here).