Tag Archives: Cambridge Society

Camsoc Ephemera visit

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9th April 2025

The Berks & Oxon Cambridge Society recently organised a visit to the University of Reading’s Department of Typography & Graphic Communication to explore its fascinating Ephemera collection. You might be wondering, what exactly is ephemera? Simply put, these are items that weren’t initially intended for long-term keeping but have been, through chance or deliberate action, collected and preserved. (The term itself comes from the Greek word ephēmeros, meaning “lasting only a day,” highlighting their transient nature. Interestingly, the word “ephemera” functions as both a singular and plural noun.) Think of everyday items like concert tickets, advertising leaflets, or even old postcards – these can all be considered ephemera.,although there is some disagreement over whether postcards are ephemera or not.

The exhibition we were shown was based around a theme of entertainment, showcasing remarkable collections from the 17th and 18th centuries, including advertising posters for various events, shows and sales. The department is located in a series of functional brick buildings dating back to the 1940s, constructed during World War II. While these buildings were initially slated for demolition and redevelopment, they are now undergoing a process of gradual refurbishment.

Our tour also included a visit to an area where a collection of historical printing presses is maintained, so showing a tangible connection to the methods used to create some of the ephemera we had seen.

The visit sparked an interesting discussion about the fate of modern ephemera in our increasingly digital and seemingly disposable world. It certainly raises questions about what future generations will collect and how the ephemeral items of our time will be preserved and understood. Of course, we were all faced with the problem of what to do with the printed car park passes & visitor labels we’d been given. Preserve or throw??

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Oh and Reading Council sent me a nice picture of my car driving along one of their streets. Shame they wanted £35 for the picture.

Oxford and Cambridge Weekend

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Saturday – Oxford Conference

For several years we have been meaning to attend a one day conference at Oxford University on various topics concerned with the History and Philosophy of Physics. These conferences run about three times a year and are organised by the Post Graduate college of St Cross. They appear to be open to anyone.

We dutifully made full use of our old people’s bus passes and parked at the Bicester Park and Ride (still free) and took the S5 into Oxford. We walked to the Martin Woods Lecture Theatre for our days’ conference on The Rise of Big Science in Physics.

Big Physics: The Manhattan Project

The first session was a history lesson given by Professor Helge Kragh from the Niels Bohr Institute. This lecture charted the history of Big Science before, after and including the Manhatten Project. We heard about the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a large telescope built by William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse which was the largest telescope in the world from 1845 to 1917.

The liquefaction of Helium was an expensive project first undertaken by Kamerlingh Onnes. In 1904 he founded a very large cryogenics laboratory and invited other researchers to the location. In 1908 he was the first to liquify helium. He also discovered superconductivity and superfluity during this research.

Big science ramped up in cost when high energy synchrotrons were built. These were necessary to understand the building blocks of life. They became more costly as they became more and more powerful.

During the war, the Manhattan Project to build the Nuclear bomb was an expensive project, which involved organisations from across America. In today’s money, this project cost $20 billion. Huge industrial plants were built to separate the uranium isotopes.

We heard how the Americans led the high energy physics until the Europeans got together after the war, coordinated and jointly funded CERN to build powerful cyclotrons. We also learnt a little about the Russians and their spying.

CERN

Dr Isabelle Wingerter from the French National Centre for Scientific Research talked about CERN, and the Large Hadron Collider built to find the Higgs Boson particle. Listening to her talk, you became amazed how these large projects are run. How technology advances during the build, and how the documentation and project management must be an absolute nightmare. Definitely going to visit CERN when we are in the area again.

ITER

Next up was Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER project. ITER is a Nuclear Fusion reactor being built in France. It will be the model for commercial reactors and should be the first reactor to generate more power than put in.

The project is funded by China, EU, Japan, Korea, Russia and the USA. Components for the reactor are built in all the counties and shipped to France to be assembled. The agreement to build the reactor was signed in 2006. All members of the project share all the intellectual property rights generated by the project. The UK participates, and the fusion reactor at Culham is used to prototype technologies to be used in ITER.

This reactor should generate 500MW for 50 MW put in. Commercial reactors will be larger. The reactor works at high temperatures and uses a magnetic field to keep the plasm in place, The device is huge, with 18 Toroidal Field Coils weighing 360 tons each. They are built to a precision of 0.2 mm. The central solenoid is 1,000 tonnes and powerful enough to lift an aircraft carrier out of the water.

The work is progressing on time, work started on site in April 2014. The next two years are crucial with most of the large components being delivered and installed. Then comes the long few years in commissioning the equipment. The first plasm should be generated in December 2025.

Lunch

We left for lunch and had soup at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The queue was busy when we arrived. A few from the conference were there also. A thought, each session of the conference was around 30 minutes, with questions afterwards. Some of the questions were rather bizarre. One attendee was asking about documentation, and how to get these large projects documented. He found nobody wanted to update the Wikis. Isabelle said there was nothing better than human interaction and meetings. But what happens years down the line when everyone has left.

Interesting to hear how the published papers now had hundreds to thousands of names as authors. These were the researchers, but not the technicians who built. operated and serviced the machines.

ASTRON

Professor Carole Jackson from Astron, The Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy talked about the mega projects in Astronomy. Here we learnt about the creation of NASA and how they were the birthplace of big astronomical projects. We again heard about the hyper authors, with over a thousand authors named on a paper.

As well as building large radio telescopes, there is collaborative research where telescopes are linked together across the world to make one large machine. Pure Science research requires global participation.

Look Ahead at the Next Decade

Dr Michael Banks a journalist from Physics World, Institute of Physic Publishing, took a look into the next decade.

In 2021 we should have the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. This will work in the Infrared and is a joint project from NASA, EAS and CSA. $8.8 billion

2025 The European Extremely large telescope with a 39.9-meter diameter dish. This will be used to searching for exo planets. $1 billion.

The Square Kilometre Array, thousands of radio antenna, building in South Africa and Australia. (low radio interference) $1 billion

2027 Long baseline Neutrino Facility. A proton accelerator and neutrino detector. Built-in Fermilab and Sanford. To detect the symmetry violations in antimatter. 180 organisations including CERN. Cost $1.5 billion

2027 Hyper Kaniokande, 260,000 tons of pure water in a mine in Japan to detect the symmetry violation of neutrinos. Why is there more matter than antimatter? $0.8 billion.

2035? International Linear Accelerator. 20 km accelerator (250GeV) with two detectors. To study the Higgs Boson in greater detail. To be built in Japan, $7.5 billion

2040? Compact Linear Accelerator 11 km tunnel (380GeV) CERN, further study of the Higgs Boson. $6.0 billion

2040? Future Circular Collider. 100 km tunnel, first stage 250GeV, then 100TeV with protons. Higgs Boson and look for further particles. $9-25 billion

Tea

Tea was taken in the Physics Department. Chatted with a couple of attendees. One was a questioner, who had a bone to pick on documentation. Hopefully, he won’t be at the evening meal.

Closing

Professor Frank Close closed the proceedings with a summary of the days’ events.

Conference Dinner

Dinner was held at St Cross College. We arrived in plenty of time and sat in the Common Room waiting for pre-dinner drinks. Close examination of the pictures on the wall, which had all been bought in a few years from a bequest. The College was founded in 1965, admitting its first five graduate students a year later. The College moved to its present location on St Giles in 1981.

After preprandial drinks, we went into dinner. Rosemary and I seemed to be seated in quite a good position on the table. Near to the organisers and some of the speakers. Our dinner, which included wine was.

Twice-baked cheddar souffle
Confit of duck with spiced plums, celeriac mash and flageolet bean ragout.
Vanilla baked cheesecake with roasted spiced plums
Coffee, mints & petit fours

It was an enjoyable evening with lots of conversation. We left and caught the S5 bus home. Busses seem to run late into the evening and well past midnight in Oxfordshire.

Sunday – Cambridge Society

Next day was the Berkshire branch of the Cambridge Society AGM. It had been scheduled to be the last AGM. This was to be the winding up AGM as there was no one wanting to stand as committee members. Thankfully two new members were found and we are going forward.

The meeting was held at Hurley Village Hall. We held the AGM, over quite quickly. We then ate lunch, each of has brought along a dish. Then there was a talk on a cruise from the UK, to France around Spain and back again. This did not persuade Rosemary to undertake any more cruises. We might visit Bordeaux though.

I came away not a member of the committee. We were asked to look at whether it was possible to organise a tour of the Space Centre at Wescott.

A walk around Green Park, Reading

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A tour to Reading with the Cambridge Society on a rather wet and unpromising day. We met near to Green Park, parking in the CostCo a short walk from the wind turbine. We then spent the next hour standing in the rain, listening to a talk about Wind Turbines. Interesting to hear the turbine paid for itself in 7 years and has a life span of at least 25 years. The most carbon polluting part of the turbine was the concrete foundation, which could be reused by a replacement turbine. When the wind speed gets up to 70mph, the blades are feathered and its stops generating. If left operating at higher wind speeds, the blades would bend back and start to impact the column as they rotated..

We then went for a walk around Green Park, and the local new housing. Green Park has some footpaths totally shielded away from the office buildings. So you are walking down a muddy tree and bush lined path, and through the leaves, you could see the high tech buildings. A lovely pond centres the park. All the buildings housed Tech companies, Cisco, Symantec, Huawei, Veritas to name a few.

After the walk, we headed by car for lunch at Cunning Man. Not far away, but seemingly miles by road. Very busy pub serving lunches. Not sure now what I ate, but it was fine.

Culham Centre for Nuclear Fusion

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Another trip organised by the Berkshire branch of the Cambridge Society was a visit to the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. This was not exclusive to the Cambridge Society, we populated two groups of around 10 people for the tour. There were several other groups visiting.

We arrived in bright sunshine, checked in at the gatehouse and drove to the visitor car-park. We started off with a short talk and then we were on the way to see MAST. This was a British device looking at new ways to contain the hot plasma. It was undergoing an upgrade, adding new containment electromagnets, and a redesigned device to remove the gas and debris from the fusion reaction. It was not operational and was being dismantled to fix a leak which was letting in air. Hopefully, it would be up and running in a couple of years.

After MAST we saw JET, which is still at the forefront of Nuclear Fusion research. It still holds the record for generating the most power. It also had recently been upgraded and was building up to break new power records. It is funded by a collaboration of European countries and was testing out manufacturing ideas to go into the ITER reactor in France. For instance, the robotics required to perform maintenance tasks, such as replacing the Beryllium lining tiles. When a test is run on JET, it can consume 2% of the UK national electricity supply.

I find it amazing how old these devices are, and they are continually being upgraded as the science improves. ITER  will be the first Nuclear Fusion reactor which will run and test out a commercial reactor engineering build. After it has been built and tested, the first fusion reactors may enter service. This is still 30 years away so it is likely I won’t be around.

After the tour, we left in the torrential rain for the pub, The Swan in Sutton Courtney. Nice meal, and the company of some Cambridge alumni for interesting conversation.

 

Visit to Eaton Socon, Grimes Graves & Norwich

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We visited Ann, Liz & Bob in Norwich and stayed a couple of nights.  On the drive over we stopped at Eaton Socon and had a coffee in a pub called The Rivermill.  This was a converted mill building on The Great Ouze. They were quite happy to serve coffee, In fact they seemed to have a morning coffee and-cake special running.  Rosemary was quite taken with some flats overlooking the river. Nothing was as we remembered it. We then drove past are old house, 183 Great North Road, which was still standing as was the Leylandii Hedge that I planted in the front in the late ’70s.

We stopped in the park by the river in St Neots and ate our picnic lunch before heading on to Norwich.  As we had plenty of time we stopped off at Grimes Graves.  These are prehistoric flint mines in the Brecklands.  I last visited then in the ’60s and Rosemary had never seen them.  You can still go down one of the mines.  There are a couple of others which have been excavated.  The landscape outside is Breckland grass, but here there are lots of round dips caused by the pits.  There are many pits which all apparently inter-join below ground. 

On to Norwich where we all went to the theatre to watch The Play that Goes Wrong.  A comedy about a play that goes wrong from beginning to end.  This had been recommended to us. Amazing timing by the actors as scenery fell down around them. An audience member got to the stage of laughing where they just squeaked intermittently. 

The next day, we raced off to my favourite online camera shop. I’d never seen the bricks & mortar shop. Later, we accompanied Bob on a walk to the local Waitrose via the club where he plays golf. Lovely scenery and very edible wild cherries. Expanding our local geography even further, In the afternoon, we took a walk in Eaton Park, where Liz jogs.  A huge park in Norwich which was created after the First World war.  It has a large boating pond, and tracks for miniature railways. Despite going to school in Norwich, I had never been to either place.

On the Saturday we returned via Cambridge for the Caius benefactors May week garden party where we met up with Richard and Andrea. (And yes, it was June, but that’s Cambridge for you.)

Fawley Hill Museum

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The Berkshire Cambridge Society visited Fawley Hill Museum on an open day on the 4th June 2017 on one of the four annual slots available for community groups to visit and ride on Sir William McAlpine’s private railway on his estate at Fawley, Oxfordshire.  A life-long railway buff, Sir William has over the years amassed an extraordinary collection of redundant railway artefacts and memorabilia and now has his own station, engines (steam and diesel), rolling stock and 1.25 miles of track. There are about 12 trips a day and each trip takes about 15 minutes. Visitors are free to travel as often as they wish. There is also a magnificent carousel, which was working, a museum, a model railway and an animal sanctuary. 

We rode the Hudswell Clarke 0-6-0ST No.31 and the Class 03 0-6-0 diesel locomotive, no D2120, on its first official passenger outing. All great stuff.

 

 

Cambridge Society Visit to Salisbury 12-14 May

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We headed down to Salisbury on the Thursday, stopping off at Figsbury Ring.  A hill fort being grazed by cattle.  From here you could see the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, and the planes landing at Sarum airfield. Lovely sunny day and a nice spot, though fenced in on one side by military fencing and a rather poor access road. We then drove on to the Salisbury Camping and Caravaning campsite and parked  Van the Van for the night. Big, open site, next to a huge playing field.  Good walks down by the river and into town.

On the Friday we started late and walked to the Old Sarum Iron Age Hill Fort for our guided tour.  Lovely views of the surrounding countryside including the airfield, Figsbury Ring, Salisbury Cathedral and of course our campsite as one member of the society commented.

Walked into town for dinner at Sarum College where most of the other Cambridge Society members were staying.  Good meal in the student canteen.  We taxied back to the campsite to bed.

Saturday we again walked into town to the cathedral for a guided tour.  We were divided into a couple of groups.  Our guide gave a rather dumbed down talk.  Fine for me, but not for those who wanted more information.  Next we had a guided tour of the roof and tower of the cathedral.  This was really very interesting and was excellent.  Tower tours seemed to be run very regularly. I think there were three in progress at a time. We walked from one end of the cathedral to the other under the roof, then up steps through the tower to the base of the spire.  Outside we could look over Salisbury from a narrow ledge.  The tour went on longer than planned, so no lunch and straight out for a walk to see Clarendon Palace Ruins.

Evening was another lovely dinner in Sarum College. and then a taxi ride back to the campsite.

Sunday another pleasant walk into town to pay for our meals and then a guided walk around Salisbury. This included the old court house where Kate, a Society member, had once sat as a judge.  We cadged a lift to Old Sarum Airfield where we ate lunch.  Apparently there was a rather large unanticipated crowd there today with a sponsored parachuting event.  No matter.  The main event for us was the museum where we could look at and sit in old military aircraft which had to have  some connection with Boscombe Down.

Walked back to the campsite for dinner.

On the Monday we drove home, stopping off National Trust Mottisfont Abbey.  The Abbey itself was not open, but the gardens were.  Lovely river with large fish swimming, and some working displays of lock gates for children to play with.  No children around so Rosemary and I had great fun pumping water and operating sluice gates. R wanted a set in our garden.

 

 

Berkshire Cambridge Society lunch

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The Berkshire Cambridge Society (BCS) 2016 Lunch was held at the Henley Business School.  Members from both the Oxfordshire and Berkshire societies attended the lunchtime meal.  The dinner was a buffet dinner, like the previous year, with very clever carved vegetable decorations.  The highly interesting guest speaker was John Baxter, former Group Head of Engineering BP and now Chairman of the Advanced Nuclear Research Centre and Visiting Professor in Nuclear Engineering at Strathclyde University.

 

The 150th boat race

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Rosemary and I visited the London Wetland Centre run by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.  This is a 40-hectare area converted to wetlands on the South Side of the Thames by Hammersmith Bridge.  It is remarkable because of its location in the middle of London.  The trip had been organised by the Berkshire branch of the Cambridge Society to coincide with the 150th boat race.

We had a guide tour round the centre and saw many birds.  I think Rosemary was pleased to see a couple of Avocets.  There was supposed to be a Bittern in the read beds, not spotted.

Afterwards we watched Cambridge win the boat race from the South Bank at St Pauls School.  A nice supper had been laid on after the race.