Autobiography of Graham R. Fleming.

I grew up in Barrow-in-Furness, a ship-building town on the North West coast of England. At Barrow Grammar School, the subjects I enjoyed most were biology and chemistry. I was also torn between science and rock climbing, and Bristol University allowed me to do both without leaving the city. I enrolled as a Chemistry student but found the undergraduate teaching laboratories very tedious and uninteresting. Things really changed when I began my senior year project in a real lab under the direction of Geoff Duxbury and Richard Dixon. The project was to examine the electronic structure and excited-state geometry of thizayl fluoroide (NSF!) via Stark spectroscopy of the rovibronic spectrum using a 3.4 m Jarrel Ash spectrograph. With NSF, it proved difficult to get high enough fields without breakdown, but as I began to understand the basic questions involved, I thought a new machine recently obtained by Richard Dixon might provide answers to the orbital ordering and applicability of Walsh’s rules to NSF, which is isoelectronic to SO2. I asked Richard’s graduate student, John Hugo, if he would help me record the photoelectron spectrum of NSF. Things went well, and this led to my first paper. While I was working in Geoff and Richard’s lab, a second lucky break occurred. Frank Stone was teaching a kinetics course, and though his lecturing style was not exactly riveting, he gave references. One day, I went to the library to read the Proc. R. Soc. article by George Porter and Mike Topp on nanosecond flash photolysis. To be truthful, I was not so interested in the beautiful singlet singlet spectra (only later would I come to realize what a remarkable tour de force these experiments were), but the Q-switching and frequency doubling of the ruby laser really fascinated me. How could it be possible to take one color and turn it into another with precisely half of the wavelength? I wanted to know more and wrote to George Porter at the Royal Institution (RI) to inquire about the possibility of doing a Ph.D. in his group. I was invited to visit and was amazedwhen at the end of the day, he offered me a place in his group. The RI was as wonderful as it was weird.With its extraordinary history of discovery, the continuous stream of wonderful speakers for the Friday evening discourses, sudden requests tomeasure the voltage generated by an electric eel brought from London Zoo for a discourse, or helping Arthur Schawlow set up his discourse on lasers, it was never dull. The RI was populated by fascinating and sometimes eccentric characters following odd rules (you could not talk in the conversation room, but you could in the library). Scientific visitors to “Prof”, as George was universally called, arrived from all over the world. Tea and cake were served by a wonderful tea lady every afternoon at 4 o’clock in the Library. I had no graduate courses, though to get a degree, I had to enroll at University College London. I had an advisor there, but I never met him even when I went to teach (“demonstrate”) in the undergraduate physical chemistry lab at UCL. My real education was provided by other students, postdocs, and occasional longterm visitors at the RI. My initial project was to build a Q-switched Nd-glass laser and make the fourth harmonic to do gas-phase flash photolysis studies of aromatics, which could not be excited with a doubled ruby laser. Mike Topp and Sebastian Formoshino had used a passively Q-switched doubled ruby laser, but I rapidly found that passive Q-switching did not work for Ndglass. With much help from our electronics guy, I built a Pockels cell Q-switched Nd-glass laser but never got enough power to make the amount of fourth harmonic necessary for low-pressure gas-phase nanosecond spectroscopy. Things were not going so well, and then, I got a bad case of mononucleosis. I went home to my parents to rest and when I returned asked Prof if I might work with a postdoc from Amsterdam, Onno Gijzeman, and a student just finishing up, Godfrey Beddard, to model existing data on the pressure dependence of fluorescence quantum yields of aromatic hydrocarbons. There was quite a lot of data, not well understood, and a certain amount of confusion as to the distinction between the dependence on the energy gap between states and the excess energy dependence within a state. We set out to model the excess energy dependence, the energy gap law already having been elucidated by Engleman and Jortner and by Siebrand. I learned a great deal about how to approach problems from Onno and later