triggered reminiscence

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

> >  Electromagnetic "whistlers" do the same, as the spike-impulses of lightning
> strikes are
> > spread out as they are ducted across long distances through the Earth's
> > magnetosphere.
>
> William, you bring back memories from the long ago and far away.
>
> in 1958, the International Geophysical Year, I was a raw young physicist
> working
> with a party of 20 (all Australian males) on the sub-antarctic base of
> Macquarie
> Island (among many millions penguins and tens of thousands of seals).  My work
> involved running a meson cosmic-ray telescope for the University of
> Tasmania, a
> Dobson Ozone spectrophotometer for CSIRO Atmospheric Physics - this gave the
> first set of pre-ozone depletion readings from this most pertinent region
> - and
> a whistler / very-low-frequency-emission recorder run by the University of
> Queensland for Stanford University.
> 42 years ago and so much of it seems like yesterday.

Reminiscence: 43 years ago my nuclear physics class was recruited for
volunteers to go down to Macquarie Island to lie on the beach and peer
at the night sky through polaroids to detect circumferentially polarized
Cerenkov light bursts from possible incoming magnetic monopoles*. (Brian
already knows that Macquarie is about as close as one can get to the
geomagnetic south pole and keep one's socks dry.) I am convinced that the
experiment would have proved fruitless, and in the end it was not
conducted, partly because my professor could not get any volunteers to go
for "room and board" alone; our sense of adventure was dead, I suppose.

My professor? Luis Alvarez, the man who (among many other accomplishments)
"x-rayed" the great pyramid at Gizeh. Perhaps I should rethink my position
on whether the exercise would necessarily have been fruitless.

Leigh

* Electrically charged monopoles produce radially polarized Cerenkov
bursts.