For many of us, David Sherrington has been a guiding light during the course of his long and distinguished career, a career filled with service to science, enduring relationships within the scientific community, and intimate involvement, via his own scholarship, with deep ideas that continue to surprise and thrill. On the occasion of his stepping down from one particular aspect – 37 years of devoted service as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Advances in Physics – it is a pleasure for me to represent the community via some words of admiration, gratitude and respect to David for all he has contributed.
Before touching on some other of David’s wide-ranging contributions, let me pause to reflect on why I think guiding a high-calibre journal such as Advances in Physics matters and is so worthy of our gratitude and respect. Many of us – and I certainly count myself as one – love science as culture, as provider to the prepared mind’s eye of breathtaking vistas over the natural world at play. But, in addition, we see science as a guiding light for Earth’s inhabitants, a pivotal resource for protecting one another from pandemics, hunger, climate change and more. There is no operating manual for all this, but the scientific literature is the next best thing: an astonishing assemblage of humankind’s best understanding of how the world works, there for the ages to be called upon and, over time, improved upon, a living record of what we know and what we can do. And all of it grasped from within this thin, fragile biosphere, the great majority over just the past fifty years. To be such a resource, to serve humankind in this way, requires the scientific literature to maintain the highest standards of quality and integrity – and this demands thoughtful guidance and straightforward devotion from the very top: deeply committed journal editors like David. Hence, our gratitude and respect.
Let me now turn to David’s service to science and scientists. Wherever he has been located – Imperial College London, the University of Oxford and elsewhere – David has personified every academic leader’s dream colleague: in addition to undertaking compelling research of his own and thoughtfully training the next generation of undergraduate and postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows, he has been a generous contributor within both his discipline and his institutions. This entails sacrificing the scientist’s most precious resource – time – to support, guide, review, referee, recommend, edit, … so that institutions and disciplines remain vibrant and replete with integrity. More reasons for gratitude and respect.
Lastly, let me turn to David’s own scientific adventures, which have been both broad and full of impact. Some of the breadth is well displayed through the title of his Bakerian Lecture – Magnets, microchips, memories and markets: [the] statistical physics of complex systems, which David delivered as the recipient of the 2001 Bakerian Medal of the Royal Society. As for impact, I’m not sure I can do better than quote some thoughts of my own from a few years ago:
As scientists we are … motivated by a desire … [for] some evidence that [our work] has been engaging and stimulating to others in the field. But David’s work [with Scott Kirkpatrick on spin glasses] far transcends this model, being pivotal not only … in the originally intended domain of rather obscure magnetic alloys, but also far, far beyond: from neuroscience and biological information processing, to the social sciences including economics, and on to probability theory, computer science [and] the next generation of optimization algorithms … .
Indeed, one can regard spin glasses as captured by the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model as a conceptual version of the silicon revolution: a curiosity-driven scientific endeavour that continues to catalyse utterly unanticipated progress over far-flung domains. [From: David Sherrington as a mentor of young scientists, by Paul M. Goldbart 2008 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 41 1–3; doi:1088/1751-8113/41/32/320302. © IOP Publishing. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.]