Rafi Blumenfeld at a glance

Contents

Who is Rafi Blumenfeld?
I went into the adventure of theoretical physics with eyes not too open, believing that life could inflict on me nothing beyond my resilience. In spite of the chaotic (some would say desparate) state of affair in scientific research I still believe that this endeavour is one of the greatest adventures around. When cornered by a local media person once with the demand to characterize myself in one sentence I quoted a famous NBA player, Doctor J, "I am a student of life". Life retorted by repeatedly teasing and testing. Academic institutes followed life and after random-walking through Cambridge (UK), Princeton (NJ, US), and Los Alamos (NM, US) I landed back in Route-1-stricken Princeton. Getting disillusioned with the effect of the funding system on physics research in all too many US academic institutes, I crossed the fence to the high-tech industry and about two years later I moved back to Cambridge UK to a seemingly permanent position as the Project Leader for a software company, Molecular Simulations Inc (which changed names several times since then and is now called Accelrys, I believe). This job, however, proved to consist of far less research and far more development than anticipated and this prompted another move. This time just across town, back to the good old Cavendish Laboratory, who took me in as a lost child. There I have been a Visiting Scientist ever since.

It was difficult not to note that a path that started as a self-avoiding walk (Tel Aviv - Cambridge - Princeton - Los Alamos) became a random walk, once one loop was completed (Princeton-Los Alamos-Princeton) and then turned into a highly correlated trace-back of steps through continent space (Tel Aviv - Cambridge - Princeton - Los Alamos - Princeton - Cambridge). Should any theoretician be tempted to engage in extrapolation of this idea to predict the next move, s/he would do well to remember that life is a chaotic dynamical system undermining such simple analysis; the new millenium found me with one foot in Warwick doing some new exciting stuff while the other remained planted in the Cavendish doing the old exciting stuff. This period in Warwick affected my direction in soft condensed matter, as you may find out if you ever manage to go past this long-winded blurb to my research interests. The Warwick loop in the random walk concluded in 2002 and I came back full time to the Cavendish until recently. From January 2005 I am based both in the Earth Sciences and Engineering Dept, Imperial College London and the Physics Dept, Cavendish Lanoratory, Cambridge

Many of my colleagues regard me as the ultimate physics addict, mainly because I am happily researching and consulting regardless of whether I am paid to do so or not. In fact, there were long stretches when I did quite fundamental research without any salary coming in, to my wife's dismay. I regard the activity of scientific research as lighting lights in a vast space of the darkness of the unknown. Mostly these lights are small, but every so often a bigger flare occurs, which makes me feel like singing and dancing in the rain. If I could sing that is. My nibbling at the vast space of the unknown has been on several fronts, all of which relating in one way or another to soft condensed matter physics, nonlinear phenomena, materials science, and recently even biological issues ("You too" I hear you groan; yes, there is so much mystery on that some of what I had done appears to be relevant, and if I manage to demonmstrate that it indeed is then I might be putting up a nice big fire in the dark). Feel free to browse through the research problems that have captured my interest in the last few years, but take notice that some of those have been dormant for lack of time (and students). If any item on this list gets you really excited, excruciatingly disappointed or leaves you in the dark you are hereby encouraged to contact me and let me have a piece of your mind or get together to discuss it.

To get a clue on how I have arrived at this (my father says miserable, my mom and my wife bite their tongues on the issue) stage in my life you can go through my Curriculum Vitae and perhaps try to avoid some of my Don-Quijote-type mistakes. I have had the great fortune to interact with some of the best physicists around, managing to produce in the process one or two (well, closer to eighty) publications. If cornered I may admit that probably not all of those would meet the Nobel Prize Committee criteria, but I believe that some were bloody good. What's more important, I have always tried to be original. You can go through some recent selected publications or even the entire publication list (In fact, why not download it all as a tested substitute to sleeping pills). It gives a good idea about my research path, where I came from and, with some clever extrapolation code, where I am going.

My ideas about student-advisor relations and my attitude to teaching grew up on the fertile/turbulent soil of my own experience. It may be interesting to psychologists or sociologists of science (and perhaps a window to my soul), and could be looked up here, but I have taken it off for an update recently. I have been tutoring in recent years many Cambridge University undergraduates, A-level, and GCSE students. I have found that there are several ways to win a students' hearts and capture their imgagination. I would like to believe that I have helped most of my tutees to see some light.

Reluctant to take at face value everything that I tell you? Feel free to contact my references, who are some of the people that I have interacted with in my meandering career.

My spare-time personality is off in a Hyde-tangent to my Jekyll-research life. In 1985 I appeared in Israel's national indoor Volleyball Cup final with Elitzur Tel Aviv, a top-division club, where I played the middle blocker position. 1991 saw a casual beach volleyball partner of mine, Till Pfleiderer, and I defeating the reigning British champions in the annual Beach Volleyball UK Grand-Prix tournament. Between 1976 and 1981 I was on the regular team of an Israeli chess club in the Israeli league and my highest ranking was about 1900. Becoming a physics student cut that activity short. I used to be a Sci-Fi freak in search of diminishingly new ideas in this genre. I wish I could construct a list of cool ideas in Sci-Fi literature and movies that both surprised me and made some sense from the scientific point of view but I found it too time consuming and dangerously infringing on my, some say more fictional, scientific activity.
You will find some of my off-the-main-résumé achievements (some in volleyball, some not) in my `other résumé'. This link also contains an amusing list of anecdotal incidents, including an encounter with Danny Kaye at the age of three, meeting Yakir Aharonov (from the Aharonov-Bohm effect) in a chess club without recognising him and making a real fool of myself, ruining Benoit Mandelbrot's lawn on one very rainy night, being lectured about Schrödinger's adventures in Dublin by Sir Nevill F. Mott, and being educated by Sir Sam F. Edwards how not to be a theoretical physics prima-dona. After all this casual name dropping, surely, you must look it up. It also contains my personal obituary to Sir Nevill F. Mott's, an incredibly beautiful soul and a great physicist, who passed away in August 1996.

You can comment on and react to any of the stuff that you see here by email, rbb11@phy.cam.ac.uk or in any other way.