Part 2 in process - Alpha Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS)

had come down to one big pointless drag, as the slang of the sixties and seventies would have
it. The final two weeks of lectures sputtered to a halt and there was silence. Most of the class
would have walked home to wherever they came from were it not for the finals themselves.
Most never saw the lecturers again.
In June 2013 the discovery was made of my final year notes from Sept. 1970
to May 1971 and they have been posted on www.aias.us. There are almost five hundred pages
which I memorized entirely. These notes were constructed after hours of effort in the library.
The lectures themselves were often entirely incomprehensible, and sometimes it was a
desperate effort to follow all the ramblings with the lecturer’s back turned to the class, talking
to the blackboard and scribbling on it. The lecturers were all tenured and there were no student
assessments so they could do anything they wanted as long as they turned up and said
something. In the following a brief description is given of each course and who gave it. These
are historical source documents that accompany this autobiography on www.aias.us and its
blog. The site and blog are archived every quarter at the British Library on
www.webarchive.org.uk in its section on Science and Technology, AIAS.
The first course in my notes is “Molecular Properties” by Mansel Davies, later
my Ph. D. supervisor, and was based almost entirely on his own books. So the class was seen
as an opportunity to sell his books. The course dealt with the elements of spectroscopy of
various kinds with the minimum of mathematical detail. Its archive is to be found in all detail
on www.aias.us by clicking on “Myron Evans” then “Genealogy / Family History”, then
“Autobiography Part Two, College Notes”. My notes are meticulously constructed with a
fountain pen in writing that is much smaller than I use now, with diagrams carefully drawn in
pencil. This course is 74 pages long and so must have covered one and a half or two terms. It
does not go into sufficient mathematical detail for any deep knowledge of the subject, so in
later years I found that my knowledge of quantum mechanics was lacking and I learned it all
myself, making many original contributions to the subject. Mansel Davies finally admitted to
me in private that he had no knowledge of quantum mechanical operators, so that explains the
vagueness. I was not aware of the vagueness at the time, my whole mind was concentrated on
making as good a set of notes as I could, memorizing them and in doing as well as I possibly
could at examinations. Mansel Davies was difficult to follow, his injured hand meant that his
handwriting was nearly unreadable, and these notes are therefore my own to all intents and
purposes. He was also dogmatic, on one occasion I devised an answer to one of his set
problems that was different from his own, and to the disgust of the class refused to accept my
version. In graduate years however he did allow me some freedom, described in later chapters.
The second course was “Nuclear and Radiochemistry” by Cecil Monk, who
was a terrible lecturer of quite good material. He advised the use of two course books that can
be seen in the archives. This course amounts to 42 pages so probably covered one term only.
Monk tried to keep up with developments and was the only staff member who ever learned to
use the computer, amazing as this may seem these days. Again there is not much mathematical
detail, not enough to go really deeply into the subject. Monk was a very good experimentalist
and in the second war worked on a classified project, having started life as a gardener. He came
from a good family that had fallen on bad times. He founded the Soddy Laboratory at the
EDCL and was treated very badly when he retired. During the blitz in London he worked at