Congratulations on your 80th birthday!

Two recollections from 1975-1977.

You may well remember when I first arrived from the heat of an Australian summer into a snowy and windy winter's night in Edinburgh at the end of January 1975 (an otherwise mild winter I seem to recall).  It was a student flight and there were many connections including a long and very hot stay in Bangkok.  The flight from Copenhagen to Gatwick (Danish Maersk airlines!) was very late and in any case the person who had booked my flight in Australia clearly thought that the two London airports of Gatwick and Heathrow were actually just different terminal buildings at the one airport and had booked the next flight from Heathrow with only a few minutes gap.  I managed to to change the flight and I presumably was able to keep you in touch with all these delays and changes because you met me.  I was impressed with the view from your house on Blackford Hill and with your hospitality.  I was also impressed with my pay-check for the previous month lying on the desk in what was to be my office.  A wonderful introduction to two and half years in Edinburgh.  After the first days I moved into lodgings in Fountainhall Road run by an imposing landlady with what I would now call a Morningside accent.  Her main concern was that I was not one of these Australians she had come across who wanted a bath or shower more than once a week!

Do you remember the Schwartz-Hora effect? In the early 1970s, two physicists H. Schwartz and Heinrich Hora claimed to have modulated a coherent electron beam at optical frequencies using a laser and a crystal.  When they aimed the modulated electron beam at a target they detected light of the original wavelength.  They claimed that this would be the discovery of the century and that they had already sold the concept to companies manufacturing colour televisions!  It was deeply controversial.  No one could reproduce the effect and theorists calculated that the effect (if indeed it existed) would be far too small to observe.  I spent some time analysing the influence of electron quantum coherence on the effect.  I have heard nothing more about the effect since that time, but I see that a Google search for 'Schwartz Hora effect' yields links giving a more recent perspective and these are certainly worth a look.