Tapering: towards an end, a beginning

It was about four years ago that I began to taper, flexibly. What has been surprising in certain respects is the nature and duration of the taper, with a corresponding joy emerging from the serendipity of the new. In this post I try to reflect upon the transition from full-time academic scientist into a ‘freelance’ scientist who is developing other interests, and the extent to which echoes from the former are still being enjoyed.

For very positive personal reasons, and after a cluster of re-alignments in research activity (e.g. here) and sensing a reduced scope for further innovations in teaching (e.g. here) I decided to become my university’s ‘guinea pig’ within a new scheme for ‘flexible retirement’. It worked well in terms of re-balancing my week and seemed a sensible initial step towards an eventual retirement in the more conventional sense of the term. Thus, for approximately 18 months I drew a fraction of my university salary and a complementary fraction of my pension. The eventual decision to retire from my post completely arose fairly organically from this interim stage. However, the final step brought with it at least one surprise – on the day of the retirement celebration planned by friends within my department. Catering had been organised, invitations sent out and I had begun to steel myself for the necessarily emotional aspects of the event. However, a police-issued order for a lock-down intervened: someone had called them with a (hoax) bomb threat. So no catering, and half my university friends/colleagues were locked in their own buildings; even my wife was stuck at a road block and unable to enter the campus. A kind soul remembered that there were some crisps (potato chips for those in the USA) and peanuts left over from a student reception the previous day, and the residual tea/coffee was augmented by the generous gift of a few bottles of wine which happened to be in the Head-of-Department’s office. I made a few impromptu remarks – my remarks tend to be impromptu – about how life is made of relationships, and that it would be the people I would miss the most: which I meant, and still do. Once the cordons were lifted, we all went our respective ways. I was retired.

Here, at the end of all things (Image adapted from https://imgur.com/gallery/OOTGg, with creative appreciation also to JRR Tolkien and to Peter Jackson. Feel free to interpret the image in light of my chosen title to whatever degree you believe is appropriate. For my part, ‘beginning’ is the title’s keyword: I simply wanted to be able to show an image that had about it a sense of ‘tapering’ from one state into another.)

In the two and a half years since that ‘interesting’ day I have accumulated abundant evidence of post-retirement opportunities – those utilising my disposition as a scientist as well as those in wholly new areas. I’ve reflected on this before, e.g. here, here and here. However, what was only partly anticipated at the time was the extent to which my former professional life as an academic teacher and researcher would roll forwards for as long as it has. The motivation for uploading this post derives from the fact that I seem to be approaching the point at which I can declare that I have indeed ‘cleared my desk’ in the metaphorical as well as the literal sense. Even my agreement, more than a year after retiring, to write the inaugural post for my Department’s new blog seemed to symbolise the extended process of tidying up. (Here, in its original form.)

One specific component to the pre-retirement discussions with my Head of Department involved an agreement to return for the Spring teaching term following my Autumn retirement date in order to teach a particular 24-lecture module. This would enable the Department more gradually to bring recently appointed early-career colleagues into play. I was content to do this; it was understood to be a one-off ad hoc arrangement with a specific and well-defined objective. Teaching undergraduate Physics students thereby ended completely a mere six months after I had retired. Defining an end to my former research endeavours is nowhere near as straightforward.

Setting aside the glorious-but-hard-to-cope-with day, about seven months after the date of my formal retirement, on which many colleagues and friends came together in generous celebration of my career (here) there have been references to write for former members of my research team as they move from success to success, and continuing to act as a sounding board for those colleagues I was privileged to mentor. I’ve also had a sprinkling of other ad hoc tasks associated with my career-long support for the UK’s major research facilities. Rather more extensive has been the effort to realise my hope to see any significant residual hard-won data analysed, interpreted and submitted for publication. This is not only of intrinsic professional importance to me and my former team members but there is, in my opinion, an ethical need to make sure that the publicly-funded research we undertook is properly peer-reviewed and openly published insofar as we are able to do so. The difficulty, and at the same time, the pleasure, of trying to move forward on this is that it depends crucially on those research scientists with whom I undertook the experiments in the first place. It has been a delight to have seen four post-retirement journal papers emerge thus far, and to know that the fifth – and probably final – manuscript was accepted for publication just a few hours before this very post was uploaded. Interestingly, this final paper is both the longest in terms of pages of text and the oldest in terms of the date at which the data was gathered. It relates to a hugely ambitious experiment a colleague (Jacqui Cole) and I conducted in the USA which yielded a complex set of data on rare earth glasses in need of a novel and bespoke approach to its analysis. It has taken us more than a decade to complete the task, even with invaluable input from a couple of talented early-career researchers. Out of the results of our work I will also be able to present a paper at the annual conference of the Society of Glass Technology in September (abstract here). Will the taper in post-retirement research activity conclude at that point? I’m working on the basis that it will, but I have learnt to hold such conclusions lightly. 

Heuristic diagram of the local atomic structure in a rare earth glass.

There is a postscript: ‘freelance research’ has yielded some unexpectedly sweet fruit. I have had the opportunity, since I retired, of contributing in a small way towards the conservation of the stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral (see here) and of contributing to the study of star-forming regions in our galaxy (see here). I presented the glass conservation issues at a conference eighteen months ago, and a manuscript derived from the ‘citizen-science’ observational astronomy project has recently been submitted for publication. Science goes on, as it surely must. I am delighted to be a part of that process even now, albeit in an increasingly novel guise as time passes. I am also pleased to be able to confirm that new outlets for creativity, outside of the conventional boundaries of ‘science’, have readily emerged in order to enrich life.

Young stars don’t collect additional matter from the surrounding disk at a uniform rate. A given star may have periods when its brightness increases quite significantly because the rate at which it is accreting new matter from the surrounding disk has increased markedly. There are theoretical models for all this, but a lack of data. This is where the citizen science project came in. (Image adapted from http://sciencewise.anu.edu.au/articles/accretion)