And over the course of the years I went to many Gordon Research Conferences, but this one in particular I want to talk about.

I’d given my lecture, and another man called Rolfe Herber, who was at Rutgers University, gave a lecture and this was then followed by someone and I just forget who it was, but he was talking about a new iron complex, and Rolfe Herber got up and said, ‘Well, Mössbauer spectroscopy would solve that problem’. There, I have to diverge, because I’ve got one version of this story, and Rolfe Herber’s got the other. Rolfe Herber says at that point, when he said Mössbauer spectroscopy will solve this, I said, ‘What on earth is Mössbauer spectroscopy?’ And he interrupted his lecture and gave a short talk about it. Actually, I got a clap when I mentioned it, if I did. Because no one else had heard of it either.

My version of the story is that Herber said Mössbauer spectroscopy would solve this problem, and Hans Jonassen, who was sitting at the back, said, ‘What is this Mössbauer spectroscopy?’ And got the answer. Whatever, that was the first mention of the word, as far as I was concerned, and I was intrigued by what Rolfe had said, so instead of going on a yacht on the lake that afternoon, I said to Rolfe, ‘Can you give me a tutorial on this? What on earth really is it?’ Pencil and paper came out, and we talked for three hours.