Cambridge first sabbatical

I first became interested in the subject of cycles when I went on sabbatical leave to MIT, from Cambridge England to Cambridge Mass. There I was asked by the Director of the Gas Turbine Laboratory, Professor E.S.Taylor, to take over his class on gas turbine cycles for the year. The established text for this course consisted of a beautiful set of notes on cycles by Professor (Sir) William Hawthorne, who had been a member of Whittle s team. Hawthorne s notes remain the best starting point for the subject and I have called upon them here, particularly in the early part of Chapter 3. 

From 1932 to 1936, Coulson worked toward his Ph.D. at Cambridge. At first he was supervised by the physicist Fowler. Coulson later remembered Fowler "who managed to communicate to me something of his own most evident excitement about it [quantum mechanics]" (Coulson 1955a, 2069). When Coulson was starting graduate work, he asked Fowler what topic to choose for his own research. He had expressed an interest in Mulliken s work on band spectra but was advised to keep away from them "Don t take that up," Fowler said, "unless you are prepared to spend all your life at it. It s a full time job, and if you want to be free to dabble in other topics as they arise, keep away from band spectra" (Coulson 1964, 3). Upon Fowler s sabbatical leave, he became the first student of Lennard-Jones. Relations between professor and... 

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