What does a physicist do? If we rattle off as an answer, ...publishes history, runs conferences on finance, helps rebuild heritage sites, makes videos, rescues old laboratories, dresses up as a Victorian, writes essays on odd socks, uses comics to teach science, and supports the employment of graduates to build and sell magnetic instruments.... then we can only be talking about one person: Denis Weaire, recently elected in London a Fellow of the Royal Society. A rare distinction for an Irish scientist but one which continues a link that goes back to the times of Robert Boyle, it is an honour which has pleased Denis’ friends.

Denis Weaire’s career has ranged across the spectrum of high academic achievement in Ireland, the UK, the United States and Continental Europe. From schoolboy days in Belfast through to studies at Cambridge University, he moved on to the Mathematics and Physics community in the United States in California, Chicago, Harvard and Yale, and ultimately held professorships in Herriot-Watt, and UCD before coming, in 1984, to TCD where he still practises his craft. With pitiful local resources available for scientific research, Weaire and his physicist colleagues in Trinity grasped the lifeline offered by European Research Programmes: their Department in Trinity has been one of the most successful University Departments in Ireland in achieving international status in its research.

A succession of management functions – from Head of Department, through Dean of Science at TCD, to President of the European Physical Society – has not diminished Weaire’s appetite for research and for innovation. If not busy promoting the now successful restoration of the Great Telescope at Birr Castle, then he is combating the indifference of scientists and literati alike to the memory of his predecessors like Prof. Francis FitzGerald by theatrical appearances in period costume on Bloomsday in Dublin. He has given his attention recently to the Oscar Wilde Centre in TCD, to planning the re-issue of a classical textbook of physics and to catering for modernists with the first European Physical Society Conference on Physics and Finance in TCD, July 1999.

A man who has clambered aboard a dumpster in a Californian University to salvage the library of a deceased academic, and who is a rescuer of scientific instruments from dissolving convents, deserves to be recognised for these contributions to cultural life. But in addition to these beachcombing forays, Weaire continues to be a researcher. Following a long period as an investigator of the structure of amorphous silicon (a candidate for the development of solar cells), his interest has turned in recent years to foams. Generations of scientists have peered past froth into their beakers (whether of beer or of chemicals), ignoring the delicate structures that are observable in this "head". Weaire and his students and collaborators have examined these structures as a problem in the economical partitioning of space. In applying modern computational techniques to these structures, they discovered a new basic structure which is more economical in packing the "bubbles" together than was known previously.

A quiet but human satisfaction with this achievement enters into Weaire’s own account. As he describes how the new Weaire-Phelan structure inches past the century-old description that another Belfast man, Lord Kelvin, had achieved, he is careful to credit appropriately his associates and those who lent him tools for the job, emphasising the co-operative structure with which science now advances. The award of a prize by the international oil company Shell to a related paper written by Weaire’s team illustrates the rapid connection between academia and the needs of industry for new knowledge, another working genre which Weaire has promoted and participated in for the past decade. A director of a campus company that imports Chinese raw materials and sells instruments across the globe, Weaire has always supported his academic colleagues in their endeavours to tempt the Celtic Tiger to master its own technological future.