Who is this physicist?

September 7, 2024

Intro

I am in the midst of a project to scan all of my father's (Michael's) 35mm slides (current estimate: some 4500 of them).

Bristol Conference

There was a group of slides from a summer 1987 trip to his graduate school alma mater, the University of Bristol (UK), for the occasion of attending a conference titled "40 Years of Particle Physics."

Name mystery

On the cardboard slide mounts he had written some identifying information. As you can see below, slide frame number 30 is labelled "Carvesi, Amaldi, Fowler" and "Bristol 7/87".

Fowler was clearly Peter Fowler, Michael's colleague and friend from Bristol. (Also, a co-author on the G-Stack Collaboration paper [ cover| info and importance].)

I did not know Amaldi's name, but quickly figured out he was Edoardo Amaldi.

But I simply could not find the other individual. I tried all sorts of spellings, guessing from the slide mount label: Carvesi, Carveni, Canveni, Canvesi.

Conference Proceedings

Finally I decided to look up proceedings from the conference. I found a copy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Proceedings-Conference-Anniversary-Discoveries-V-particles/dp/0852743548

Even more tantalizingly, I discovered (unsurprisingly) that Michael had owned this book, and it was one I had catalogued when we were preparing to donate his entire library to the Washington University Physics Library in 2022. It's a unicorn—the only copy of this book among the 7.9 million books catalogued on Library Thing— no one else has it! His copy in the Library Thing catalog I created then is found here.

So, my ace-in-the-hole remained that I could contact the Wash. U. librarian who expressed interest in his library and helped make the donation happen. I imagined she would be willing to pull the book off the shelf and look up something for me. However, I decided to see if there was another way to find this.

Another Google result had a lot more information about the proceedings: the web site of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). There, I found the main listing for the conference proceedings (published the following year, in 1988). And there on page two of the listings of the individual presenters was that of "Marcello Conversi"! (This included the complete title and abstract of his talk, "From the discovery of the mesotron to that of its leptonic nature."

Conclusion

Marcello Conversi, Edoardo Amaldi, and Peter Fowler (click to enlarge)

So, now I have a definitive answer for who these three people are! (It's not that it's such an amazing photo, but it is still a useful historical record.)

It's also interesting that all three of them have Wikipedia pages: