Edward Condon Remembered

Vernon Remembered

Editor's Note: The world of neuroscience lost one of its pioneers when Vernon B. Mountcastle, M.D., died January 11 in Baltimore at age 96. Often referred to as " the father of neuroscience, " Mountcastle defied early skeptics by showing how cylinders of neurons, dedicated to specific tasks, work together. This month's Cerebrum features remembrances from two colleagues influenced by Mountcastle...

Edward.

Simple Evaluation of Franck-condon Factors and Non-condon Effects in the Morse Potential

The calculation of Franck-Condon factors between different one-dimensional Morse potential eigenstates using a formula derived from the Wigner function is discussed. Our numerical calculations using a very simple program written in Mathematica is compared with other calculations. We show that our results have a similar accuracy as the calculations performed with more sophisticated methods. We d...

Coley’s Lessons Remembered

The following four observations point in the same direction, namely that there is an unleveraged potential for stimulating the innate immune system against cancer: (1) experimental treatments with bacterial extracts more than 100 years ago by Coley and contemporaries, (2) a positive correlation between spontaneous regressions and febrile infection, (3) epidemiological data suggesting an inverse...

Hardy's "Small" Discovery Remembered.

The most beautiful mathematics to Godfrey Harold Hardy was that which had no application. For Hardy, mathematics was purely for intellectual challenge. He justified the pursuit of pure mathematics with the argument that its very “uselessness” meant that it could not be used to cause harm. Hardy went so far as to describe applied mathematics as “ugly”, “trivial”, and “dull” [1]. Despite Hardy’s ...