The Friday Five on a Monday

1. Do you celebrate or observe Halloween? How?

Carving pumpkins. Roasting pumpkin seeds. Helping the kids pick out costumes and taking them trick-or-treating.

2. What is your favorite Halloween candy?

I love mini Butterfingers, but of course you don’t get those in the UK, so I’ll settle for mini packets of Haribo.

3. Do you get trick-or-treaters on Halloween?

We live in the sticks, so no. We take the children into the nearby town to go trick-or-treating with friends.

4. Do you enjoy dressing up in costumes?

I used to. I’m too tired to do so around Halloween these days as it falls in the middle of the university teaching term. But I used to go mad for it.

5. What is your favorite Halloween memory?

I don’t have a favourite memory, but I do have a favourite costume, which was the time I dressed up as the Annihilation Operator or Â, a superhero of my own invention. I had a spandex outfit, an awesome pair of Transmuter boots, a homemade logo, and a ray gun. What else do you need to go out killing particles?



(My description from 2003, OH LOR how this is 21 years ago?!) I am the Annihilation Operator! The dreaded A-hat! I have the power to destroy electrons on sight. My mortal enemy is my transpose, the Creation Operator. Without him, though, I cannot build a Hamiltonian or see my true love, the Kroneker delta, the only one who doesn't go to zero at the sight of me.