I have to say that both Rolfe Herber, who is now in Israel, and Goldanskii, who is unfortunately no longer with us, were enormously helpful to me as a beginner in this field, and there are many other people who were working then in America, and increasingly on the continent, Mössbauer’s group as well, I got to know very, very well, and Mössbauer himself, and there was a camaraderie and a helpfulness to new beginners which came in, and I benefited from that enormously. It was science collaboration at its best.
And the beauty of it was that no one was treading on anyone else’s field, because it was the whole of chemistry, so long as the compound had a Mössbauer nucleus in it, it could be studied. And you’d get new information.
Well, iron was the easiest, as I said. You had to do these experiments often at liquid helium temperature, so that was a new technique we had to master as well.