Birmingham in the good old days

Abstract

Perhaps it is difficult for a European or American at the end of the 20th century to imagine Birmingham in the year 1953, when I arrived after 5 days on the Queen Elizabeth II, via Southampton and London. It was the chief city of the Midlands because it was in the middle — at the center of gravity of England, I was told — and it was the entrance to the “black country” because it was black. Since those glorious days the socialist city government has managed to clean things up, so that it looks quite pleasant now, but at that time it was not only black it was depressing. The Quakers who ran things saw to it that nothing moved on the streets after about 9 ’clock at night. Why did I leave MIT to pursue graduate study there? My advisors told me that if I wanted to see the world and also study physics then Birmingham was the place to go. Why was this so? Because of the presence of a man, Rudolf Peierls (later Sir Rudolf), who had established a leading center of theoretical physics at the University of Birmingham. (The English called it ‘mathematical physics’, but this is not to be confused with the word as it is currently used or, at least, as I use it.) Peierls had gone there from a threatening situation in Germany and became, initially at least, a professor of mathematics — which was somewhat ironic considering his attitude toward the subject’s significance for theoretical physics. (For instance, one of his most famous ideas was a method of proving the existence of long-range order in Ising-like spin models, but he was never quite happy with the idea that it was later made into a rigorous method with far reaching consequences.) Peierls was, as we all know, a brilliant physicist who understood and contributed heavily to many of the important fields of his day, e.g., solid state physics, nuclear physics, quantum field theory, to name a few. More or less single-handedly he established a center to which very many of the leading theorists of the day made a pilgrimage. There were many students there who later made important contributions. Some in my cohort were Jim Langer