A colossal hello: reflections through time

Bletchley's evocative 'digitised' statue of the tragically iconic
Alan Turing, shown holding an Enigma encoder on his lap.

Last week was full: two days as a member of the Science Advisory Committee for the Diamond Light Source - 'swimming' in excellent science at a world-class research facility which is at the threshold of an exciting new phase in its work - and then a bit of R'nR via Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing. In truth, it was Bletchley Park I had planned to visit, but the Computing Museum is on the same sight - and crucially, it houses working reconstructions of two of the first digital computers ever designed and constructed, both of which were central to the code-breaking work of the Bletchley Park/Station-X operation. It's out of the juxtaposition of these two parts of my week that the reflections in this post emerge.

The Bletchley Park Trust has done a good job in renovating important parts of the original World War 2 site and in explaining the background to the work undertaken there. It is still a 'work in progress' - and I suspect it'll remain so for many years to come since there's a lot that's in need of re-building and then 'populating' with exhibits. What is there, however, is more than enough to illustrate the staggeringly high levels of intellectual ingenuity, doggedness and resourcefulness associated with this critical period in Britain's recent history. The Bombe and then Colossus computers, for instance, represented the first of their kind: the very beginning of digital electronic computing. To have taken this step at any time would have been a remarkable feat - to have done so as rapidly and successfully as they did under the pressures and privations of war-time is mind-blowing. The prototype Colossus, built from components used in the telephone industry of the day, contained 1500 valves - the forerunner to the transistor, thousands of which are built into even the simplest of  modern-day computer chips - and the final version, now reconstructed, required 2500 valves and consumed large quantities of electricity.

My simple video of this beast in operation illustrates the rhythm of its operations, but the noise of having several of these running simultaneously must have been unpleasant (although the heat output was presumably welcome in Winter-time). The 'program' is written/input using the small bank of switches on the grey panel (centre front, about 20s in - the thumbnail image above) and the 'data' is in the form of a loop of punched paper tape* (shown at the far end, whizzing around over motor-driven wheels, at about 25-35s). The banks of valves - one of which is still running from the 1940s - and the clank of relays are self-evident.

Enough of this nerdy eulogy. What struck me as I reflected on this week-of-two-halves was the degree to which the life of someone working at the forefront of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) today resonates with that of 70 or so years ago, and yet is so very different. For example, my own research career has been characterized by a desire to work across the traditional boundaries between subject disciplines; although a physicist by training, my research team has comprised almost equal numbers of chemists and physicists. This conveyed enormous strength in that we could make the very best novel materials for experiments and then handle sophisticated mathematical models with which to analyse the data. Later on I also began working with industrial and bio-medical materials scientists. In more recent years, the call of 'science communication' and 'public engagement' has become a key passion in my working life and this has given me some golden opportunities to work with talented and creative people in the arts and humanities; I've written about some of this in earlier posts (here, and here). Two words encapsulate the generic approach: multi-disciplinary, i.e. synthesizing the distinct contributions from more than one area to provide a 'solution', and inter-disciplinary - wherein one uses from the outset the insights from more than one discipline (i.e. this is a 'new' avenue altogether: rather like the generation of chemical physics as a new subject by inter-twining physics and chemistry). Unquestionably, one gives up some depth of physics per se in order to bring in the other scientific disciplines, but the reward is being able to illuminate scientific puzzles that would not have yielded to any one discipline/method on its own. It struck me that the work at Bletchley, as portrayed at the Park site and in the various TV documentaries I have seen over the years, was multi-disciplinary more than it was inter-disciplinary, although a good deal of the latter was evident also. However, the resonance fades fairly rapidly at that point. For easily understood security reasons, the various experts at Bletchley - mathematicians, technicians, linguists, chess masters and so on - mostly worked in compartmentalized 'huts', often literally - such that no-one ever had sight of the wider picture as it were. This contrasts with the approach possible nowadays in which open research partnership is seen as the more valuable avenue.

There are other differences it seems to me: the rise of the spirit of individuality for instance, which can, if left unchecked, wreck the sort of research partnership I've just described, is arguably far stronger now than seems to have been the case in the 1930-40s. Would it be practicable to constrain the leading minds of today to work in the sort of way deemed necessary back then? Perhaps the times would dictate: I hope never to have to find out.

There is one other set of reflections that emerged from my mind's rubbing together of Bletchley and Diamond, and what they respectively signify in terms of approaches to research and the life scientific. In a famous lecture delivered by C.P. Snow - himself both a chemist and a writer -  a little over a decade after the creation of Colossus and which is still raised in debate today (see tweets/blog posts by Becky Higgitt for example for some sane analysis) we are presented with the Two Cultures model. Scientists, it is said, cannot converse meaningfully about their scientific endeavours with those from the arts and humanities; one can today hear terms like 'computer /scientific /mathematical literacy' - and by implication, illiteracy' - banded about relatively frequently. There is certainly an issue here, although it's often discussed in too simplistic a fashion, but there is also a fast-growing number of scientists (and those from across the STEM and related disciplines) who are committed to building bridges between these 'two cultures'. Were those working at Bletchley Park in the 1930s (when it began life as Station-X) and 1940s afflicted less in this way than it's claimed we are today? Certainly, the mix of experts working to a common overall cause was such that it's tempting to think there was the possibility of some remarkable meeting of minds - and the astonishing output from the place might lend support to that conclusion - but the intense security consciousness of their working environment might also degrade that opportunity. Evidently, one of the mistakes I made on this particular trip was to fail to buy an authoritative account: there were plenty of tempting books on sale there, but I already have such a deep pile of books awaiting my attention ...

As a visitor to the rebuild of Colossus I was handed a short
section of tape: I show a scan of it here, with my 'translation'.

* Punched paper tape? Although I'm not quite old enough to have been alive when these very first electronic digital computers emerged I have witnessed a lot of the key stages in their development thus far. I first started using punched cards, and then the paper tape analogue, when I was a student; all the way through to my first salaried research contract the other side of my PhD I was still using them - only later did magnetic tape arrive in force, to be followed by a multitude of magnetic-based storage thereafter all the way to hard drives, flash memory and so on. The 'code' was developed a century ago when the first teleprinters emerged (think text messaging crossed with Morse code) and in an efficient series of holes punched in a paper ribbon about 17 mm (3/4") wide it was possible to convey all the alphanumeric characters. The tape developed over time (e.g. to end up 25 mm, 1", wide) but the fundamentals remained the same.

Media me (or, "It's life Jim, but not as we know it.")

I had some good news a few days back, which has the potential to turn into something really exciting - and immensely scary at the same time: I have been, I am told, short-listed for a British Science Association Media Fellowship. As I understand the process, my application has successfully past some sort of BSA filter and my details have now been forwarded to several national media organisations for their consideration. Will I make the team or, as in most of my school sports lessons, return to the sidelines? Time will tell. However, what did begin to bubble back to the surface on hearing this news was an idea for a post I had ages ago but haven't had the time to pull together until today. I have been 'in the media' before, just not in any way that would stand review by those with more serious intent in the area. In fact, I've been captured in some form of media or another, if that's a sensible term for it, as result of what I can only describe as a random walk

(a characteristic of much of my professional life - although I prefer the term used by one colleague who described me as a nomad) or perhaps a more accurate term would be a series of 'accidents'. I realise that this makes it all sound like an ill-advised midnight stroll through Tolkein's Dead Marshes, which is over-doing things a bit, but ...

My first serious encounter was during my PhD years, which really was a long time ago - decades in fact, when I agreed to be interviewed by someone from a local radio station about my job. (There's the first curio: my PhD as a job!) I was naive, the questions were far from being open and the editing was worse. This was an intensely unhappy experience that I have sought to expunge from my memory ever since, to no avail. However, we should learn from our mistakes as we move on; in my case this amounted to hiding in cupboards, metaphorically speaking, whenever anything remotely similar ever arose again in any sort of conversation. Thankfully, even for a slow learner like me, it's possible to get beyond such events. Having said that, I've never tried my hand at a radio interview since then - still less an interview for TV, although I did enjoy the media training course offered as part of staff development training. This will come as no surprise to those of you used to reading my long sentences, but the one bit of negative feedback I was given after my trial-run live interview in front of a camera related to my use of ... yes, long sentences. Apparently, one of these lasted 35 seconds. I was told that, in the hands of some editors, I could be made to say something quite different to what I actually said. Hmm, I think I've already met one of them. Time to speak in soundbites?

Moving swiftly on, we get to a request from my highly talented primary school teacher son. He was, at the time, running an after-school club focused on creating animated films (oh, how things have changed) and told me the kids wanted and 'old-sounding voice' to narrate the script they'd written. Such flattery, how could I refuse! Armed with their script and the MP3 recorder I use to record lectures for my students, and with the animation running on a laptop in front of me, I duly declaimed. It was a lot of fun; do I sound 'old' to you? My career as a voice-over artist didn't end there. In earlier posts I wrote about my delight at working with folk at the Turner Contemporary gallery; out of this relationship has come, amongst other less easily identified things, a couple of short films in which my voice-of-a-scientist crops up. The first of these, an animation, represents a project, sponsored under the Prosper banner of Canterbury Festival, which brought together scientists and artists to talk about their respective, complementary, reactions to an exhibition of sculptures by American minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. More recently, I wore my scientist's hat in conversation with a group of young people from the area who were being supported in the making of a film under the heading Life in Technicolour. Both of

these were more fun to do than I could sensibly describe - mostly coming from the opportunity to work with talented, creative and enthusiastic people.

We are told in Shakespeare's Twelve Night that some achieve greatness whilst others have it thrust upon them: my next immortalisation in media was of the latter kind. A student I taught, Andrew Payne, who was later to graduate with a great degree and then move to Oxford for a PhD, decided to cut snippets from my lecture audio recordings - a module on Matter as I recall - an dub them onto a piece of music. I only found out about it

after it had travelled, viral fashion, around the student body; I took it as a compliment, and still do. In order that you can enjoy this as well I've added one of my photographs so I can upload it to YouTube as a video: it benefits from volume and decent bass*. At this point I ought to confess that I have thrust media exposure of sorts onto others as well. As a result of one of those lunchtime conversations that sometimes emerge in the middle of an important but tiring meeting, I accepted the challenge of tracking down a recording of a song. It was written and used as the finale to a stage review presented each year by the staff at the Daresbury Laboratory's Synchrotron Radiation Source for their research community visitors at an annual conference. One thing led to another, and e-mail exchanges with one long-retired colleague who knew another who ..., until it was finally agreed that the song would be re-recorded by its author and oft-performer, Ken Lea. The Synchrotron Song, an echo of a seemingly long-lost past, is now preserved for the wonder/amusement of the current generation of synchrotron light source researchers.

These are all very minor examples of ways in which I have touched upon the fringes of media-life, which is a strange but curiously enjoyable form of existence. I could perhaps add to that innumerable numbers of audio recordings of my lectures and talks, an attempt at filming a talk in a local museum and so on, but that arguably adds nothing much to what I've already said. Instead, I'll end by pointing you towards the work of people I met during the Canterbury Festival/Prosper experiments mentioned earlier and who I have been able to stay in touch with ever since (with the help of Twitter). As a director and script writer I've come to admire the work of Sam Supple who, with skilled producer Debra McGee, founded and runs a locally-based film company, Viola Films. The thoughtful piece that first caught my eye was a short film, made using local talent, which is highly topical in this World War 1 centenary year: Time Bleeds. But I'd also point you towards another of their short films: this one an imagined look into the earlier life of Charles Dicken's character Abel Magwitch. Now, there's a life in media for you!


* The music is Tractor Beam by Eat Static, which is used with their kind permission; the image is of Bulkhead by Rick Kirby and this stands outside the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, UK.