I was a bit of a precocious science nerd child and spent a lot of my time as a kid reading science, doing chemistry and bugging my parents for equipment. I must say that in my early teens I wasn’t very familiar with spacetime and relativity and hadn’t even heard of quantum mechanics.

Anyway, when I was twelve my teacher told me that the Einstein mass energy formula was violated by some particle called a ‘calutron’. Needless to say, I tried to find some reference to something that sounded vaguely like calutron (could it be kalutron, which I believe is a device not a particle) and never did. Was my teacher merely misinformed or was he just trying to shoo me out the door?

Fast forward a few years, now I’m in high school and reading as much physics as I can lay my hands on. After a class one day I asked my chemistry teacher a question about neutron decay. To my amazement, he said something like “Boy, no one knows anything about the nucleus.” I stood their in disbelief, this was in the late 70’s and the Yukawa theory of the strong nuclear force had been proposed in the 1930’s. Moral, some chemistry teachers don’t know jack about the nucleus.

The following year, another chemistry teacher nearly throttled me over the relative abundance of isotopes. He did not understand that relative abundances are measured quantities and not constants of nature. If the ratios of isotopes were constant (as he maintained) then carbon dating wouldn’t be possible, nor would a whole host of other technologies based on isotope ratios. This guy was marking university chemistry papers and he was pissed off that a 16 year old nerd was questioning his facts. For the record, I was right. He did however hate my guts and make my classes with him a living hell for the next year. Moral: it does not pay to be a smart-arse.

About the same time I asked my maths teacher about Riemannian geometry. His response was, “Why the hell do you want to know about Riemannian geometry?” This guy actually sat down and explained it to me - what little I could comprehend. He knew his stuff, in all sorts of areas and seemed to really enjoy teaching. If only all my teachers were like him.

Well I finally got off my butt and left the computer for a bit on Friday. I went out to Uni to discuss the papers I’ve been working on with my PhD supervisor. He thinks that the papers are ready for publication. So after a little bit of light editing they should be on their way to the physics archive and eventually (hopefully) to a print journal. I’ve had these papers on my desk in various forms for a long time and I’ll be glad to be finished with them.

Doing the research is alot of fun, but writing it up is really quite boring. We also discussed the research itself a bit and he gave me a few ideas to pursue. I have developed quite a few of my own ideas and have been scribbling away in my note books. The work is very technical and is hard to describe, even to other mathematicians. When I first started working on quantum groups the whole area seemd so opaque. Early on, my supervisor gave me a pile of notes he’d written on the subject, most of which was actually new research. To keep the size of the notes down (120 pages) he left out a lot of the working, so I spent the next 12 months filling in the details and learning the subject. When I was done he handed me a third set of notes (65 pages) describing more recent research he had done. I started working on these, checking the results and extending them.These results are now the basis of the two papers. There are many more calculations that can’t be put into the papers, but these will go into my thesis (it is currently at about 100 pages and growing in size at an alarming rate). The thesis itself is still in very rough form and will need a lot of editing, I haven’t put in all the recent results yet.

I’ve been invited to a small meeting of quantum theorists this week.They will be discussing variuos aspects of quantum computing and information. One of the fellows talking has been developing ideas in quantum computing that are closely related to research I did back in 2000, so I’ll be keen to talk to him. I never bothered to publish the research because I wasn’t happy with it and thought that the applications were too limited. Perhaps I didn’t waste that year working on what I thought was a dead end.

A beautiful light rain has started to fall. It’s a nice change from the merciless heat we’ve been having. A nice day to tuck into some books.