Welcome to issue No 17 of the Newsletter.
This is the first issue for me as your new editor and I should like to express my personal thanks and appreciation for the excellent work done by my predecessor Lucy Gibson and to wish her well. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the newsletters and will try to keep up the good work!
It has been a long time since the last issue (No 16) due to unforeseen circumstances. Dr Chris Ray, who had taken over the editorship from Lucy, has since been appointed High Master of Manchester Grammar School and felt his new commitments prevented him from doing justice to the job of editor. We would like to congratulate Chris in obtaining such a prestigious appointment and wish him well in his new post.
So in this issue we are catching up, so to speak, on the events of last year as well as including news and reports from this year. We have both Chairman's reports from 2003 and 2004, but articles from the meeting held at this year's AGM, under the heading 'Life Before Einstein', will be in the next newsletter.
Sadly, one piece of news, which we have to report, is the death earlier this year of Bernard Spurgin. He was a member of the History of Physics Group from its earliest days. An obituary by his friend and colleague, Stuart Leadstone appears on page 8. (Only in the printed newsletter not on the web.)
Last November the History of Physics Group and the Medical Physics Group invited Dr Sidney Osborn, one of the founder members of the Hospital Physicists Association to speak on his personal recollections of the early days of medical physics. See page 20 for a fascinating account of these times taken from his notes for that meeting.
Next year will be quite an occasion being of course the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis; on page 40 Stuart Leadstone reminds us of those seminal papers. Also, Ireland celebrates the bicentenary of the birth of William Rowan Hamilton by designating 2005 as 'Hamilton Year'.
Malcolm J Cooper