Radzikowskiego 152,
31-342 Kraków, Poland
Fax: +48-12-6628458
Phone: +48-12-6628439
Kraków, 25 February 2004
Professor Akira Inaba
The Research Center for Molecular Thermodynamics
Graduate School of Science, Osaka University
TOYONAKA, OSAKA 560-0043, JAPAN
Dear Akira,
In Kraków we have a beautiful Center of Japanese Culture “Manga&rdquo located in front of our Royal Castle Wawel on the bank of the Wisla river. Poles are very much interested in the culture and current life in Japan. So, I appreciate that I had the opportunity to visit your country the second time. To see the beautiful Todaiji and Horuyji Temples of old Nara along with the new, elegant and functional buildings like the Osaka Aquarium and Asia Trade Center was so interesting to me. The Kiyomizu-dera Temple and the Silver Pavilon with a sand pile decoration I saw in Kyoto are really unique. In Kobe it was nice to walk along the seashore rebuilt after the earthquake and to spend a lunch time in the Chinatown learning how to behave in a big crowd. Evolution of the picturesque Japanese Autumn is really a phenomenon. I saw how many local tourists gathered each Saturday in November near the waterfall in Minoh. The Osaka Science Museum was very impressive for me as the physicist. Achievements from diverse fields of science are presented there in such a clever and engaging way that they attracted even small children. - I think that it is one of the reasons why in Japan each year more than million pupils see their future in studying the sciences! There are some things in Japan we do not have in Poland as for example Women University, Shinkhansen, tea gardens, trees of unusual shapes. I will miss after-work meetings in less formal atmosphere which I think are especially important for younger members of the scientific group. Our patterns of behavior are of so different cultural and religious origins. Let me say it is splendid that our sense of humor and reactions to various problems seem to be similar so much.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to the President of the Osaka University and in particular to professor Kazuya Saito for invitation and for organization of my stay in the Research Center for Molecular Thermodynamics. I am very grateful to you for all help I experienced during my three month stay in Osaka as the visiting professor. Our group watch with great interest the activity of the Center in so many areas of condensed and soft matter. Many of us look through and read the excellent papers collected in subsequent Annual Reports. We are aware that the Center belongs to the world top class centers in thermodynamics. It is the privilege to receive your Annual Reports each year.
My contacts with the Osaka University started long ago. I remember how important the paper of professor Keiichiro Adachi on phase transitions in cyclohexanol was for my Master Thesis. In my PhD dissertation on methanol dynamics in the β-quinol clathrate I compared my data with those of professor Takasuke Matsuo. Much later, the papers of professors Seki, Suga and Sorai let me learn about glass of anisotropic phase. We were fortunate to have professor Michio Sorai as the very respected guest on our Institute and later at our biennial Janik’s Friends Meeting. Professor Kazuya Saito also visited us with his unique lecture on “Application of the AC calorimetry to the organic conductors”. It was a great honour to work together with Kazuya at the Center not so many years later. I am interested in dielectric relaxation studies of glass-formers. So it was impressive to be able to watch myself the changes of the heat capacity in real time during softening of a glass. I saw how precise an instrument the calorimeter is that I was allowed to operate. It was possible to estimate time constants characterizing kinetics of glass transition and the number of molecules in clusters at the glass temperature. Gibbs energies for crystal phases of investigated substance revealed an interesting phenomenon. The interchange of their relative stability was found although the phase transition between them was not detected. We understood then why the stable phase occurred to be the less ordered one then the metastable phase in our neutron scattering and spectroscopic measurements.
I was pleased to have an opportunity to present a seminar on the dynamics of liquid crystal molecules in porous media and to discuss that issue afterwards. During my stay in Japan I had an occasion to attend several interesting lectures on phase transitions: Dr. Stewert Clarke from Cambridge University talk was on neutron and x-ray studies of monolayer materials. Kazuya presented results on the role of intramolecular degrees of freedom. I remember also your seminar about the nature of some quasicrystals. The last two were given during the 39th Japanese Conference on Calorimetry and Thermal Analysis held at Higashi–Hiroshima University. I arrived there after my pilgrimage to the Hiroshima Memorial first.
Let me thank you and all my Japanese friends: Kazuya, Yuji, Naoki , Nagano-san and Abe-san who made me feel so wlcome in Osaka. I owe special thanks to your talented and very polite students Daisuke Kanki, Kumiko Miwa and there is one more student I do not remember his name now and PhD student Satoaki Ikeuchi. They used to take me out for very good Japanese food to the Laforete canteen. I appreciated very much the scientific atmosphere I found at the Center. It is great to have so many highly specialized calorimeters operating nearly all the time supplied by helium and nitrogen - the gas liquefied for the first time at our old Jagiellonian University.
It would be a great pleasure to see all of you again, this time in Kraków
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