Unlike Neil, I was born in New Zealand, but like Neil I grew up in the Wellington basin just ten miles away from where he grew up. We attended the same University (Victoria) and I met him in 1971 when he returned as a visiting professor, teaching a class in what was then called solid state physics (even though some of his best known work was on metallic liquids). At Victoria University, I remember in particular a lecture he gave on Jupiter and its large magnetic field. Neil mentioned at that time the possible role of precession, an idea advocated by Malkus for Earth, and also mentioned the possible superconductivity of metallic hydrogen, the man constituent of Jupiter and surely the most common planetary constituent in the Universe.

Neil was partly responsible for my interest in Cornell University, the place I subsequently attended, receiving my PhD in 1976. I took a class from Neil, had Thanksgiving at his house once, and wrote a paper with him on the electrical conductivity of liquid metallic hydrogen. Although it may not be correct in detail, this paper still has relevance. Shock wave data collected by Bill Nellis two decades later seem to suggest a metallic state, though with low electrical conductivity, even lower than iron, whereas we suggested very high conductivity, more like alkali metals. It is still not known whether metallic hydrogen is a very good electrical conductor at much higher pressures (e.g. five megabars, say) though certainly the scattering of the electrons by the bare protons can be strong. In the end, my scientific trajectory was more affected by Ed Salpeter or perhaps even Carl Sagan than by Neil, but those early influences cannot be denied, and they included Jupiter, magnetism and Cornell. I am finishing my term as a professor-at-large at Cornell and visited him a few years ago when he was in retirement out near Triphammer.

I feel fortunate to have known Neil and his wife Judith, and will miss him.