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.

Bleary-eyed breakfasts and Harry Potter: getting to know you

The process of consolidating more than three decades of research-derived documents into a digital archive is troublesome and time-consuming. Even with many hours of assistance from an ex-student it's really only the 'easy' tasks that have been completed. Thus, all the published output from me and my team is now collated as a set of electronic documents in folders somewhere out there in the cloud as well as being accessible from my university's repository (shortly to be upgraded), Web of Science/ResearcherID, etc. and mostly searchable using Google Scholar. Likewise, data files exist on various disks and/or in centralised repositories. Even my desk diaries, from before the days of reliable online calendars and their like, have been scanned (and then shredded). What remains are historical and often also personally memorable bits and pieces in all sorts of shapes, sizes and formats, and umpteen logbooks.

The approximately 2 m of shelving consumed by experiment logbooks: everything from my own PhD, postdoc contracts and first 'proper' position to the x-ray, neutron and other experiments undertaken by the various incarnations of my research team once I'd started life as a university academic.

In passing, I recently shared this image via Twitter (with the caption "Three+ decades-worth of research logbooks (vital for any future data re-analysis): how to archive for #openaccess ...") I got responses from various places including from an admirable kindred scientist, @jamie5on, who declared "What a wonderful picture! I'm much more drawn to a shelf of 'real' lab books than even the best electronic notebooks". Whilst I empathise with the sentiment - I much prefer 'real' paper novels to e-books for instance - I'm still left wondering how to archive these for the longer term given that neither my department/university nor my home will be a practicable option for the bulky originals when I finally retire. Why does this matter? It matters because all this work was publicly funded and ought to be accessible, and because I still get requests for snippets of information from fellow scientists (one within the last year which sent me all the way back to my own PhD) and because I have in the past seen too many experiments /measurements needlessly repeated using expensive national and international research facilities. The only workable way forward, I suspect, is to scan them - page by page and inclusion by inclusion - but this will take more hours than I have available, or more funds than I could release in order to pay someone else to do it.

I digress, if only a little. The combination of the glaring absence of impressive-looking postgraduate research student dissertations on my shelves - now replaced by PDF files - and some Christmas and New Year e-mail exchanges with those past members of my team with whom I'm still in contact (I'm delighted to say) conjured up a few memories. It seemed worthwhile briefly to reflect on these simply because they illustrate the human side of research life in the physical sciences: the continuing opportunity to work with talented and creative people has, in many ways, been the absolute highlight of my career.

As Dylan Thomas wrote, it's often a good plan to begin at the beginning. I was appointed to my first academic post as a junior lecturer funded under a short-lived 1980s scheme to inject 'new blood' into university departments; my very first research student, Ann, started her PhD a year later. Despite having benefited from a couple of postdoctoral contracts and then from several more formative years helping to bring to fruition what is now the world-leading ISIS neutron source at the Harwell Research & Innovation Campus and an extended secondment to the USA, I was nevertheless a complete novice when it came to the guidance and supervision of research students. To paraphrase a well-known saying: "Cometh the hour, cometh the woman". And so it was that my professional inexperience found its mitigation in the personality, character and sheer drive of a talented new Chemical Physics graduate. After more than two decades it still astonishes me that we not only successfully learnt from each other how a three-year PhD project ought best to run - to the extent that her thesis won exceptionally positive praise and her work found ready access to good peer-reviewed journals - but managed to do this against the proverbial head-wind. I knew something about amorphous materials and about the use of neutron scattering methods in their study but, for one reason or another, neutron-based experiments were not possible: we were faced with having to identify and learn a wholly new set of techniques. We turned to x-ray absorption spectroscopy, XAS, and found ourselves using a rather 'flakey' beamline at the world's very first fully dedicated x-ray synchrotron, the now-decommissioned SRS at the Daresbury Laboratory. One of the frustrations of doing neutron scattering experiments back then was the extended timescale associated with each measurement (typically 8+ hours); however, one of the immediately obvious contrasts emerged with the realisation that each XAS measurement lasted only half an hour. Benign in itself, when one combines this with the fact that the SRS ran 24/7 and expected, even in the absence of modern-day automation, full use of its facilities by its users it becomes obvious that a multi-day experiment requires shift-working. There was only Ann and me, and we were both learners. Not daring to leave this highly demanding instrument lest it do something nasty to the precious samples or refuse to yield usable data, we stayed at its side. Believe me, there are few things better than sleep-deprivation to allow one to get to know another person in depth.

With the advances that have come in the intervening years, running an experiment has in some ways become much easy - and the hostels are hugely better as places to grab a bit of sleep. (Which itself suggests a future blog post: tales of showers with no doors, food not worthy of the name, ...). It's also become vanishingly rare to attempt the sort of experiments Ann and I undertook without a team of three or more people. And yet still one gets a chance to 'go deeper' with members of the team in this sort of environment than is often possible in the more conventional laboratory-based research work. The essence of this derives from the fact that, even if for only a few days at a time, we are all both living and working together. We swap thoughts over meals for instance; breakfast remains the key get-together moment of the day: the 'night shift' handing over to their replacements and plans of action agreed. It's usually very sociable, although I've had to mediate now and again when tired personalities clash. The improvements in automation and therefore the longer periods of waiting also allow for the sorts of extended conversations rarely held 'back in the lab.', and can reveal hitherto unknown passions. For instance, back in the days when J.K. Rowling was still releasing new Harry Potter books I found myself travelling to join a couple of research students, Vicky and Laura, who had started a synchrotron experiment whilst I was still delivering lectures. I got a text message en route which boiled down to the ultimatum: "Buy and bring with you two copies of the new book or there'll be [unspecified] trouble". The London station book shop at which I found them was giving away free sweets and a bespoke Potteresque bag with each purchase; I think I ate the sweets.

It can be a pain in the neck to have to travel to these large facilities to undertake experiments, and it's certainly difficult to balance it with a family sometimes, but the rewards are not confined to scientific data. I have got to know so many lovely people over the years whilst chatting, sometimes unshaven and disheveled, in good times and through difficulties, that I cannot but be grateful for having been able to enjoy the experience for as long as I have.

• By the way, for a bit of fun, take a look at this short video. It illustrates how different was the age in which my first research students entered into working with synchrotron x-ray methods. The Synchrotron Song provided the finale to a Review staged each year by the scientific, technical and administrative staff at the SRS during the evening of their annual User Meeting. A year or so back I accepted the challenge from my then fellow STFC Science Board members to find evidence of this review, which had, like Monty Python's parrot, 'ceased to be' a few short years after I started attending the User Meetings. There are only odd bits and pieces surviving, and those were on near-redundant analogue recording media. Not to be defeated, although by circuitous routes, I made contact with the ex-head of the User Liaison Office - the author/performer of the closing song - and after some correspondence it was agreed that a new recording of the finale would be made. Thus, early in 2013 the very people involved at the time and now well into their deserved retirements made a new recording: a fragment from the (scientific) culture of only a few decades ago but seeming to be much further distant. It leaves a clear impression of the rate of change of the intervening years.

Celebrating Disorder

The following is a much extended version of the guest blog I recently wrote for Laboratory News UK.

This is the International Year of Crystallography. For those of us with an interest in the science of materials, it’s been hard to miss. There have been innumerable events and projects to mark a century of theoretical and experimental work aimed at understanding the arrangement of atoms in crystals (i.e. their atomic-scale structure). Some of this expanse of science has gone beyond famous and has become ‘everyday’ – like the unravelling of the structure of DNA; there’s an overview in a recent special edition of Nature and in several blogs. In the UK, which has played a leading role throughout, the Royal Institution’s web site adds an excellent suite of accessible articles – including a fascinating timeline.

However, I want to celebrate the structure of materials which are not crystals: the study of which extends back almost as far and uses many of the same empirical and computational tools.

It is of the essence of a crystal – whether that be of common table salt, NaCl, or of a fiendishly complex biological molecule – that its constituent atoms are arranged in a very specific order. If we know the positions of a suitable sub-set of them then we can predict the positions of all the others: we use the concepts of unit cells, lattices and symmetry if order to extrapolate from the microscopic to the macroscopic. For much of the past century, X-ray diffraction was the initial experimental step in this process. Whilst laboratory-based X-ray sources continue to be used to great effect, it’s arguably the case that the advent of the synchrotron source, such as the UK’s Diamond facility, allowed much of modern crystallography to expand. Exploiting the wave-like properties of the neutron, using research facilities such as ISIS and the ILL, adds a new dimension. Why? Because neutrons interact with nuclei whereas X-rays scatter from an atom’s cloud of electrons – thus, we have access to the lighter elements (i.e. those which scatter X-rays relatively little) and we can use the fact that one of a given element’s isotopes may scatter neutrons very differently to another. Add to this the fact that a neutron has mass, unlike an X-ray photon, and one might now even look at the movement of atoms in a material.

These developments have opened up the study of materials which are not crystalline, where the basic rules of chemical bonding still hold true but the long-range ordering of the crystal is absent. A glass is one example of an amorphous, or non-crystalline, material. Silicate glasses are everywhere – from plate glass windows to the surface of the moon, from the skeletons of deep sea sponges to bioactive scaffolds for the regeneration of bone – and based on a deceptively simple 3D network of silicon and oxygen atoms. Driven by the basic rules of chemical bonding, each silicon atom is bonded to four oxygens to make a tetrahedral unit; two of those oxygens are themselves part of neighbouring 

tetrahedra, but there is a small variation in the angles between each of these units. That’s all it takes to ensure that our short-ranged tetrahedral ordering cannot generate the long-range order needed to form a crystal. On the left hand side of the image, I’m holding a crystal of quartz (crystalline SiO2) and in the other hand I have a silicate glass (chemically similar, although with some metal ions present, giving the colour). Both these solids have almost identical local atomic arrangements, but only one of them is a crystal. 

This brings us to the link with the ‘International Year of Crystallography’. Despite the lack of ordering, many of the same tools deployed to understand a crystal may be used to study a glass, or any other amorphous material. Thus, diffraction methods using X-rays or neutrons provide detailed, albeit statistically averaged, insights into the arrangement of atoms in our glassy materials. Indeed, given the structural, and often chemical complexity of a glass it becomes all-but essential to use both X-rays and neutrons (including playing games with the mix of isotopes) and a whole bunch of other physical probes if one is to understand them fully. In fact, the first X-ray diffraction experiments on a glass were undertaken in the 1920s, with analysis methods becoming quite refined within a decade [1]. However, as with crystallography, it has been the advent and development of modern neutron and synchrotron X-ray facilities that has provided the tools for a sophisticated, quantitative understanding of the relationship between atomic-scale structure and observed properties.

One of these days I must write something longer on the science, art and technology of glass– not today though … . In the meantime, take a look at some of the videos on the subject available via YouTube: one recent favourite of mine, on why window glass is transparent, was put together by Prof. Mark Miodownik, who is a well known and highly accomplished science communicator in the materials arena. I have also uploaded a recording of one of my own talks to YouTube which was delivered a few years back at Canterbury’s Heritage Museum; progressively modified/updated versions of this talk have been delivered several times since then – with more bookings already agreed.


Most, if not all my published output on the structures of amorphous materials (including a lot on glasses and glassy materials) are available via ResearcherID or Google Scholar (search using "Robert Newport"); you can also find me on ResearchGate. New papers are touted via Twitter as well: @Bob_MatPhys.

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[1] It is of passing interest that, at the same time as the Bragg father and son team were conducting their first X-ray diffraction experiments – i.e. a century ago – the famous glass technologist Otto Schott was suppressing a book on glass (The Chemical Technology of Glass, Eberhard Zschimmer ,1913) written within his factory (Jenaer Glaswerke Schott und Genossen) because he was concerned that some of his commercial secrets might leak out. The book has recently been translated into English and is available from the Society of Glass Technology, from whose news feed this snippet is derived.

#SciComm: at a tangent?

I no longer feel the need to justify using Twitter, despite continuing ‘ribbing’ from some colleagues and others: I’ve benefitted from it professionally and have some fun along the way.  I can also cite many other scientists – including leaders in their field – who have already written cogently on the topic.  Prof. Athene Donald, who gave an Open Lecture at my university last year, offers a good example (spread-the-word); also worth reading are blog posts by Emily Darling (science-seeks-to-make-a-social-impact) and by a group from the University of New South Wales (science-in-140-characters).  What has surprised me a little is the way in which my use of Twitter has so clearly mirrored the relatively rapid evolution in my perspectives on Public Engagement. 

Q&A at University of Kent's Public
Engagement Strategy launch event, June 2013.

In my department we exhibit what I consider to be a leading example of outreach into regional schools; my colleague Vicky Mason – a former research student of mine I’m delighted to be able to say – and her team reaches thousands upon thousands of school students each year, and this is augmented at University level by Gaby Roch (another physicist I note).  However, Public Engagement (PE) is a far broader term: indeed, to my mind, it goes wider even than the description orovided within my university’s new, and entirely laudable, PE Strategy (which I helped to launch last year). The image shown here comes from the launch event's web pages: Sarah Dance, me and Tracy Kivell, each of us part of the panel for a discussion and subsequent Q&A session.  It was covered through Twitter, naturally.

Workshop in a drama studio as part of the
'experiment': not the natural habitat of or
usual haunt for a physicist. 

During the last couple of years I have found myself moving from a near-exclusive focus on schools work and talks to fellow scientists towards talking to adult lay audiences.  This was not by design, but via the serendipidy of ‘random’ invitations (e.g. from the local Café Scientifique, the National Womens Register, the Beaney Museum, …).  The big change came when, with colleague Jorge Quintanilla, I took part in an ‘experiment’ (their term, not mine) under the umbrella of the excellent Canterbury Festival and led by Margate’s awesome Turner Contemporary gallery.  Again, Twitter played a significant role in the broader sweep of publicity.

Panel discussion and Q&A at Turner
Contemporary, Spring 2013.

The image to the right was taken at the launch of the 5-minute animated cartoon derived from an extended discussion between scientists and artists focusing the statement by sculptor Carl André: “The periodic table of elements is for me what the colour spectrum is for a painter. . . Copper is more profoundly different from aluminium than green is from red.”  Since then I’ve been involved with another project with Turner Contemporary (and have been contacted about yet another) and a wonderful local film company, and I’m also providing science input into the libretto for a new opera by Frank Burnet, ‘Butterfly’, which is inspired by Chaos Theory.  In all cases, and others I'll not regale you with here, Twitter has been invaluable in the context of publicising events, building a network of contacts and enhancing relationships.

 

So, back to Twitter.  The account was set up in the context of a particular PE project, which never really took off, but with the fairly benign longer-term objective of providing a channel through which I might attempt to communicate my research and my professional life as a scientist.  What it’s developed into is a tool for my learning and one I can use in building bridges across science, the arts and life in general.  I think it’s important that scientists try to communicate effectively; for me, Twitter offers a fun way to do just that. 

@Bob_MatPhys

Two things only are needed for Public Engagement in science ...

The following is, in essence, the 'Guest Post' written in early June 2013 for the excellent Julie Gould's Speaking of Science web site. Indeed, this was my first 'proper' blog post and so I owe Julie thanks for, so to speak, getting the ball rolling. It's a little dated already, but arguably worth including for the sake of completeness.

To begin at the beginning [1]: my name is Bob Newport, and I’m a sixty-something Professor of Materials Physics at the University of Kent.  This post arises from one of my tweets [@Bob_MatPhys] – “It's slowly dawning on me that two things only are needed for Public Engagement in science: love of subject and love of people” – and picked up by Julie Gould; the rest, as they say, is history.  What follows is a personal ramble through my developing interest and activity in the area: I offer it only as an individual ‘case study’ and in the hope that the story will prove encouraging in some way.

I’d never really thought of myself as a ‘science communicator’ as such, but I have come to realise that I have been working towards that goal for a long time.  A significant part of what my university has paid me for throughout the years of my academic career is the teaching of students; but although it ought to be intrinsic to teaching, communication is not necessarily evident in the absence of focused effort.  Genuine communication comes out of the desire to move beyond the mere transfer of information into the realms of motivation, enthusiasm and passion, and that is what so many of us in my profession strive to achieve.  In my case, the process was accelerated when I found myself teaching within our Physics Foundation Year and needing to move my unsure and uncertain students to a place where they could begin actively to engage with their learning.  In that situation I discovered the potential of using movie clips and media articles as accessible entry points for what often became extraordinarily lively discussions; these, in their turn, helped to add context to the more formal syllabus we needed to progress through.  The approach was later picked up by a writer with Science News, a popular weekly magazine in the USA, and led to an extended telephone interview for their article.

A uranium-doped glass - fluorescing under UV illumination

Generically, it’s this same approach I adopted within my efforts to reach out to regional schools.  We have a phenomenally successful Outreach team now, led by a wonderful former research student in my group, Vicky FitzGerald, who re-trained as a school teacher (i.e. she is fluent in the languages of both ‘school’ and ‘science’ – hugely important for the role in my opinion) [2].  However, 15 years or so ago we had no such setup: it was all down to the voluntary work of a few individuals.  The principal starting point for me has been my area of research: I am immensely fortunate to have been able to work on materials that offer both intellectual challenge – my aim is to explain their behaviour and attributes via a detailed understanding of their atomic-scale structure – and a relatively easy link to contemporary ‘real-world’ issues.  These materials have included photovoltaics, ultra-hard coatings, non-linear optical glasses and most recently bioactive glasses (which, for example, can be used to promote the regeneration of bone).  Moreover, the very nature of the research has meant that my research group and choice of collaborators has of necessity been inter-disciplinary, giving me access to chemistry, materials science and biomedical science as enhancements to my beloved physics.  I also had an in-built link I could utilise to the impressive ‘big toys’ that my group used in order to gain our core data: facilities like the ISIS and ILL neutron sources and the Diamond and ESRF synchrotron X-ray sources.  Taken together, this combination of factors made it relatively easy to talk about science.  I love doing this, and have had the pleasure of interacting with school groups from Year 5 to Years 12/13, and in the context of formalised talks, class visits to the Science Museum and open classroom discussions.  Thanks from school students and teachers is always welcome – I’m only human – but it’s some of the questions that form the most memorable feedback: like the Year 8 student who wanted to know whether bioactive glass could be used in order to grow a Klingon skull.  The reason I still remember that question comes from the fact that it spoke volumes to me about the depth of this young student’s newly gained understanding of these materials.  Thankfully, I was geek enough to know what a Klingon is.

However, we all change as time passes and in my case this has been associated with a migration from Outreach into the wider realms of Public Engagement, and from a relatively young audience to one comprising adults.  Outreach has, for me, involved talking about my research to a well-defined cohort of people – but this is only a part of public engagement, albeit an important one for a university: public engagement encompasses so much more.  Leaving aside the area of ‘crowd-sourced science’, in which I have had no involvement, there are outstanding high-profile examples of scientists engaging wonderfully well with the wider public via TV/Radio (Alice Roberts, Mark Miodownik, Jim Al-Khalili, Brian Cox etc.) and in newspapers/online (e.g. Athene Donald, Jon Butterworth).  I am not amongst their number.  No, mine is a more modest, ‘amateur’ and regional effort which has grown in a rather ad hoc fashion, and which is squeezed into and around an already full ‘Day Job’.  Having said that, there are common elements between us.  We have all developed the confidence (or is it foolhardiness?) to engage with non-experts from a variety of backgrounds in such a way that, whilst our science expertise is intrinsic to the exchange, the overall ‘agenda’ is theirs.  As an example, I have in the past couple of years given three talks on glass at one or other of the Canterbury Museums.  At the Museums’ request these have each been in different formats (an extended talk followed by afternoon tea – filmed by one of our students should you be interested, one in the evening and another as a 15-minute ‘bitesize’ talk at lunchtime) but all of them used my expertise in the context of their exhibits and artefacts.  Naturally, I was able to weave a lot of science into the talk, including bioglasses and synchrotron X-rays, but I did so primarily in the context of the audience’s desire to learn more about what was in the Canterbury Museums’ collection.

One also has to be flexible in terms of venue and facilities.  I recently spoke to a group from the National Womens Register: from a dining room chair, I chatted to a group of about 20 in someone’s packed living room with only a tool box of ‘show & tell’ items by my side.  Unusual and challenging certainly – but what a great environment for uncluttered free-form discussion about contemporary science; again, to their agenda.  Can such a low-key event have an impact?  Judging from the message I got from one participant’s husband via Twitter, I must conclude that it can – at least at the level of the individual: “My wife [is] an NWR groupee. I've never known her be so interested in science”.  Not only is positive feedback like this encouraging per se but, let’s face it, in a busy week there’s only so far one can reasonably go in terms of trying to meet the challenge of criticism before deciding that ones time is better spent elsewhere.  That’s not to say that constructive criticism isn’t valuable and welcome, far from it, but merely a reflection of the fact that public engagement of this kind often remains a time-pressured ‘hobby’ in the eyes of managers trying to assign limited academic resources.

Perhaps the most involving, and boundary-extending experiment for me in recent months has been my on-going work with the Turner Contemporary gallery.  Their visionary Head of Learning, Karen Eslea, contacted me as part of her search for scientists prepared to engage in conversation with artists.  The particular focus at the time was to complement their exhibition of work by the renowned American sculptor Carl Andre, and to use the discipline of Philosophical Inquiry in order, hopefully, to derive something special from the exchange.  We jointly sought and obtained modest funding for the project from Canterbury Festival’s Prosper project, which also entailed a commitment to a series of whole-day workshops in local drama venues.  Workshops in drama studios can be rather scary for a physicist, intimidating even, and clearing entire days for what were decidedly off-piste activities was no mean feat.  However, these became prized events in my diary as I realised the value of working and conversing with such a broad range of energetic and passionate people; I learnt so much!  The pinnacle of our experiment was an extended exhibition-focused conversation between about 30 artists and scientists, led by philosophical inquiry guru Ayisha de Lanerolle.  This was recorded and ‘mapped’ by folk from an award-winning local company, Cognitive Media, who generated a four-minute animation from their 70-minute audio file.  The film became part of the exhibition (and has moved with the exhibition to its new venue) and provided a vehicle through which gallery staff have been able to gauge public perception of the sculptures.  Never before has my name appeared in the credits of a film, any film [3], let alone one associated with an excellent arts gallery; I’m taking this as a good thing.

'Turneresque' sky, taken from Turner Contemporary gallery

My perspective on this is necessarily limited, so I’ve taken the liberty of asking Karen to provide comments on this from her perspective; she has kindly written something for this post: “Working with a scientist is a huge privilege and has helped me to experiment with new ways of working. During the Philosophical Inquiry (an event which enabled deep thinking and listening between artists and scientists) I had a moment of revelation when listening to a description of nickel. I realised that my engagement with art works is based mostly on their appearance, references, ideas and context. When a scientist looks at things, whether they are artworks or materials in a laboratory, it is as if they can experience them under their surface. Their connection with things extends far beyond the visual, with their mind able to imagine temperature, structure, the behaviour of atoms in different conditions. In terms of creativity, and the ability to make vast conceptual leaps, artists indeed have much to learn from scientists.”

Where next?  Well, I’ve already tried to brief a librettist about the basics of Chaos Theory (after mugging up on it myself) in preparation for a musical item he’s working on and have volunteered to join a panel to address questions on public engagement.  In truth, my heart currently resides with the desire to take the positive outcomes of the ‘Turner Contemporary Project’ further by rolling out the generic approach to a more widely drawn range of participants.  It’s encouraging that we already have offers of help, for example from Kent’s new science and technology park at the ex-Pfizer site at Sandwich.  It would also be great to see Canterbury Festival weave science more overtly into its already excellent portfolio, and with enough time I’d love to do some more writing and perhaps to interact with writers.  Time will tell; I am content to look out for opening doors and see what emerges. 

To return to the tweet which sparked off this post for Speaking of Science, the lesson I have learned over and over again is that for the public, people, to be engaged with and by science they need to see scientists who care about what they do and who care equally as much that others understand where this is coming from. The first of these attributes is easy to supply; what’s needed thereafter is a commitment primarily to listen, and then to be open to learn and to change.

---

[1] Dylan Thomas’ opening phrase for Under Milk Wood.  Listening to the classic BBC performance, with Richard Burton as the narrator, is one of my all-time favourite calm-down aids on the train home after a troublesome meeting somewhere.

[2] There is also support at the Faculty level via another talented ex-school teacher physicist, Dr Gaby Roch; schools outreach is taken really seriously I’m glad to say. 

[3] Actually, that’s not entirely true: I did a voice-over for an animation designed, scripted and put together by children at a local primary school (where my son was teaching): they wanted an ‘old’ voice!

INTP; really?

Sometimes I surprise myself, which is, on the whole, a somewhat better state of affairs than being continually disappointed in oneself. The latter sits alongside manifestations of 'Imposter Syndrome' and a whole slew of other self-image issues which seems to me to be almost endemic within the 'bubble' of people I know (or try to know through their work or their writing or ...).  Apart from psychopaths and sociopaths, and of course all the mature and well-adjusted people out there, I imagine that a great many of us are troubled with the condition, such as it is. I also suppose that those who are willing to spend a bit of time and effort reflecting on their life will be able to put it into some sort of perspective, but that has to be tempered with the fact that we're often, to one degree or another, opaque to our own gaze. That's where family, friends, colleagues, counsellors and confidantes come in: as a potential source of a more objective insight. Not that I'd advise taking everything they say as meaningful or accurate - indeed, it'll sometimes be quite misleading - but experience, which is not necessarily synonymous with age, tends to allow one to sift out those who truly see and understand from those who don't.

One of the things my students learn about me very early on in their careers is that I am relatively easily diverted: all it takes is an interesting question for five or ten minutes of a lecture to disappear in a tangential discussion around some topic or other. Is this a problem? I don't think so, and judging by student feedback they don't either. We cover the required syllabus, but along the way we'll have indulged in a bit of fun within our chosen subject, and I'll hopefully have ignited not only a passion for its pursuit but also a confidence in their ability to contribute to the endeavour. Of course, what I've just done is illustrate the fact: I opened this post intending to write a brief note on my take on Imposter Syndrome in the context of my evolving week ...

There seemed to be a flurry of people writing on the topic during the past few months, but this may be another example of the distorting effect of Twitter. (I've become a bit of a Twitter addict since I set my account up a year or so ago - originally at the request of freelance journalist Carole Jahme in order to support her project defined by @shakesphere1 as "Pop-up street theatre for the #CulturalOlympiad and beyond. A synthesis of science from Shakespeare's realm and @STFC_Matters frontier science." Needless to say, I was there to cover the contemporary science, hence the reference to the Science & Technology Facilities Council. Herewith the second diversion; spot the pattern?) Notable contributors to the exploration of Imposter Syndrome have included Athene Donald, in two posts, and Hugh Kearnes. Beyond the fact that the concept resonated with me, and from a great many conversations I can be pretty sure that it's an umbrella heading that also has meaning to a significant proportion of the people I know, it caused me to ponder on its meaning and on its consequences. During this time I happened to stumble across a web site - by which I mean I read a tweet which included the URL - which claimed to analyze any given blog and return a Meyers-Briggs personality profile. Despite the fact that I regard this sort of profiling as being only marginally less useless than graphology or phrenology, it was too tempting to resist. 

Into the 'analysis' code went my blogs, and out came a profile declaring me to be of type INTP, which was associated with a graphic purporting to reveal the way my mind works. It'll take only a small amount of time on the internet to find well-argued cases against the claims made for 

Meyers-Briggs profiles, and to elaborate on its limitations here would be to get into a larger-than-average diversion. However, the picture summary and the text that went with it did serve a purpose of sorts. Rather like the input from friends etc. mentioned above, it promoted some reflection on how I might come over to those who read my various written bits-and-pieces. I've always loved reading, and came also to love writing from quite a young age. Indeed, one of the positive reasons for taking 'Flexible Retirement' was so that I'd have more time to write, especially in the context of being a scientist. Thus, almost irrespective of the ultimate value of the profile in terms of an assay of personality, it might, or so I thought, prove useful as a tool in the re-examination of my writing style in light of what it is I'm trying to convey to people. It's one thing to be described as logical and "attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges" and to be compared with Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Yoda, which the web site's analysis offered, but quite another to be told that I may come over as "arrogant, impatient and insensitive". These are serious accusations, if taken that way. In truth, I may have forgotten the whole thing after that initial scan-read were it not for the fact that my wife read the profile, over my shoulder as it were, and then laughed - I mean really laughed, a lot. Oh dear. In fairness, the bit that caught her fancy was the phrase "Their ability to grasp complexity may also lead them to provide overly detailed explanations of simple ideas, and listeners may judge that the INTP makes things more difficult than they need to be", which pandered to a long-running source of amusement (for us both). However, despite the caveats, her reaction raised the analysis' profile sufficiently to pose some pertinent questions that I'll do well to hold on to as I try to explore what I can do in terms of written work: both in the area of public engagement with science and otherwise. It may be, for instance, that three decades of writing research papers and the like as a professional physicist has narrowed my vision and that, as a consequence, I need to exercise a few creative muscles that have atrophied. Time will tell.

What of the 'surprise' with which I opened this blog? Well, it's simply that having consciously planned to use my new part-time status in order to step up my levels of writing via local news media, maybe a bit of creative short-story fiction but initially through the blog purposefully set up for the purpose, I've found myself actually doing less than in many periods when I was working full-time. This has been for the best of reasons - some far more exciting, challenging and immediate opportunities presented themselves - but it's surprised me nonetheless. Add to that the effect of 'Imposter Syndrome' and some less-than-flattering descriptions of my writing and it's apparent that the real surprise is that I've actually returned to write another post after a two-month gap! Who knows, maybe now is the time to step up the pace; certainly there's a long list of topics scribbled onto scraps of paper awaiting my attention ...

Final Friday, First Friday

Some words are richer than others. 'Transition' is definitely well endowed. To a physicist it's used to describe a change from an initial to a final state via some well-defined physical process: perhaps an electron moving back towards its lowest energy state in the atom  - the Ground State. In the process it loses the excess energy that kicked it upwards in the first place by emitting light, a photon. Such a transition occurs in a tiny fraction of a second, almost instantaneously. The word has a wider range of connotations in our personal lives however. In an earlier post I mentioned my plans to reshape and re-focus my week, taking advantage of an excellent aspect of the occupational pension scheme I'm in to retire 'flexibly': to reduce to three the number of days I spend devoting myself to the University of Kent and its School of Physical Sciences and to draw two day's worth of my pension in order to create space for, amongst many other things, writing blog posts. And so it was that Friday 25th October became my 'final Friday' in my salaried job of so very many years; 1st November was, therefore, the first Friday opened up for new things.

Changes of this kind are of course nothing like the near-instant move of the electron from one defined state to another, accompanied by an equally precisely defined packet of energy. No, this transition has, in a sense, been coming about for months and is still a very long way from being completed - not least because it involves a change in mindset. Whilst my 'initial state' as a full time academic was more or less well understood - mostly teaching and research, alongside the administrative and managerial tasks that keep the place going - the analogue of our electron's 'final state' remains largely unknown. It's not even the case that I am now diving into wholly new things, such as helping to promote Public Engagement in science, that were formally precluded: it's more that the scope for shifting the balance of what I do has, I hope, been enhanced. Quite how much of this change in focus will be due to good planning on my part and how much the result of serendipity, which has, at the surface at least, played a major role hitherto, remains to be seen. 

There is plenty of 'evidence' for the direction in which I'm currently travelling however, and for the next few months I'm content to adopt the approach of saying 'yes' to whatever comes along, as long as it sounds interesting; eventually I'll assess what has worked and what I ought to steer clear of in future. A scan through my diary for the few weeks leading up to Final Friday and then for the analogous period after First Friday provided a hint of my current trajectory. In fact, it did more than that: I managed to astonish myself at what is already 'on the cards' ... 

I'm working through a book on Chaos Theory at the moment for instance. It's an interesting topic in its own right, if complex, but I now have an ulterior motive: I volunteered to act as 'science consultant' for the librettist of a new opera inspired by Chaos, and now need to brush up on my facts and understanding before trying to communicate its essence to others. An inspiring ex-colleague of mine from many years back, Frank Burnett, is to blame for this in that mine was the physicist's name he recalled when seeking out someone to bounce ideas off before and during his work on the libretto. Not only have I already had great fun talking through the basics of the project with him - he lives in a converted windmill by the way, not the usual venue by any means - but we're now jointly committed to speak about the project at a local Café Scientifique as well as to a group of Science Communications masters students. I suspect (and secretly hope) that both audiences will, in their own ways, pose challenging questions in equal measure to their enthusiasm and support of the idea.

I've already written in general terms about my work with the excellent Turner Contemporary gallery and the animation that emerged from our first endeavours, which were focused on looking at materials from the viewpoints of both the scupltor and the scientist. I'm pleased to say that we're continuing to interact via projects which, although necessarily art-based and therefore some distance away from my 'comfort zone', might nevertheless benefit from a scientist's perspective (and goodness knows, I benefit from their perspectives). I'm now involved with another project, Life in Technicolour which, as the title suggests, has a focus on colour; it's being run in association with Artist Rooms on Tour and People United. The project has already given me a great afternoon of learning and talking about the stained glass of Canterbury cathedral: learning both from the head of the glass workshop there, Léonie Seliger, and from the young people at the heart of the project; talking about the why and the how of coloured glass. As a follow-up I'm being interviewed at more length in a few days from now. I also have a date booked to explore the potential for more projects with the People United team - watch this space, or my Twitter feed (@Bob_MatPhys), for the outcomes. Coincidentally, this is the second time I've been celebrating the Cathedral's stained glass in recent days. A book launch last week represented the culmination of a project prompted by an after-dinner conversation with friend and local part-time author, Martyn Barr, on how to convey some science and wider insights into stained glass to a younger audience. The resulting book, Paintings in Light, which represents Martyn's fourth 'young person's guide to ...', is the result; Léonie and I acted as consultants throughout.

Science is a self-evident theme in all this, but there is another. Of equal, if not higher importance is reinforcing relationships and building up new ones in the borderlands between science and the rest of life. I love talking about the science of materials to people who have similar interests, but I have begun to treasure even more highly those conversations with people who wouldn't refer to themselves as scientists at all - not even remotely so. Perhaps that's why I seem to have drifted towards areas of public engagement wherein I am the curious outsider; it's demanding, but the potential rewards are arguably more significant for me, certainly no less, than they are for those with whom I'm conversing. We'll see.

The therapy and nostalgia of 'slimming down'

In a recent, and characteristically well-written post, Athene Donald (@athenedonald) mused on her current need to sort out her office in Cambridge in order to move to another office. She highlighted the tendency so many of have of hanging on to stuff, despite years during which it's merely gathered dust, 'just in case'. I've had some experience of having to move office, laboratory, building, town and even country so I found it easy to empathise with her. It's not that dissimilar to the process of moving house. Indeed, over this past Summer, which already seems way back in the mists of time, I decided to try to reduce my 'footprint' in my present office. I filled about three rolls of green sacks with paper to recycle, and umpteen black sacks for the trash. Part of this process involved scanning important documents to PDF - a task I was immensely grateful to be able to pay a recent ex-student (currently setting up her own company) to do this for me. The process was quite therapeutic.

In the process of sorting out what to recycle/dispose of/scan/keep I came across no end of memory prompts. This is, as soon became apparent, a really hazardous place to be: it would be so easy to allow the fond memories of fun experiments, of talented people, of key events in my career, of friends and of acquaintances to slow, or even stop altogether, the clear-out process. The objective fact that these submerged treasures has lain undisturbed for years, even decades, usually ruled to day - but it was a close run thing on more than one occasion. Then there were the compromises: throwing something out after tweeting it or first showing it to those who'd share the same memories. Here, for example, is an image from about 15 years ago which captures colleagues (mostly male you'll notice: thankfully that is beginning to improve) at a small meeting on liquids and amorphous solids like glass. Some have risen to elevated levels in one part of the world or another, some have retired and some are no longer with us at all: but scanning their faces caused all sorts of mostly pleasant memories to return in a nostalgic flood. Evidently, others appreciated seeing this bit of my dusty archives as well if retweeting can be used as a proxy measure.

Or what about this one ... an attempt by some of my colleagues (all now long-since retired) to replicate, in period costume, a famous experiment conducted by Blaise Pascal in 1646 which enabled him, in essence, to measure the weight of the atmosphere. The essence of the experimental equipment was a barometer, similar to the devices still being used until quite recently to measure atmospheric pressure. In the original experiment, Pascal filled it not with mercury but with red wine; in the reconstruction one was limited to water and red food colouring: times change. The location was a little different as well. The centre of Rouen became the front of the Library building at the University of Kent. Happy days ...

This was good Public Engagement in science, before the term had any great currency, and I doff my 17th century cap to them, metaphorically speaking of course. Which thought prompts me to share a few comments on Public Engagement as I now experience it ... but that must await another spare 15 minutes. In the meantime, I will pat myself on the back for having gained a bit of space in my office which I can proceed to fill up with all sorts of new stuff.

@Bob_MatPhys

The times, they are a-changin'

This is always a crazy time of the year for academics like me, with bus loads of new students arriving and multiples of that number returning to university a few days later. It is, for me, at one and the same time both the best and the worst of times (apologies to Charles Dickens). It's good by virtue of the sheer energy, enthusiasm and implied curiosity embodied in all these (mostly) young people which, if we let it, almost seems to soak into those of us who are a little more wrinkly. And allow it to buoy us up we must, because the down-side comes from the sheer volume and extent of what needs to be done in order to ensure the the show stays on the road.

Indeed, as I start to type this, late in the evening, I'm sitting in a hostel room after a day of train journeys and junk food having finished reading through and making notes on the 100 or so pages of paperwork associated with a two-day meeting which starts tomorrow and which I must chair. Why spend a day in this way and in this 'monastic cell'? The simple fact is that, had I stayed 'available' back in my office I could never have carved out the time to do the work. Perversely, the busier the times the more important it is to wrench time aside for the bigger and more pressing challenges. In part, it's this intrinsically frenetic underlying pace that's led to a decision to effect change in my own life: I've decided to reduce my time at the University to three days per week. I'm fortunate to be in a pension scheme which operates a Flexible Retirement policy, and given that my 60th birthday is now history it's practicable to draw 60% of my salary alongside 40% of my pension. Why did I take this decision? Well, this was one of those multi-faceted ideas that took a long time to settle and is certainly not without ongoing uncertainties - far from it - but one of the potential advantages is that I'll get more time to do some of those things I've come to enjoy greatly but currently have to short-change something else in order to squeeze them in. Included in that list is writing, which I love: this blog comes out of that, as do a couple of short stories currently with an editor friend of mine. Maybe there's another blog post to come in order that I might get my thoughts ordered on all this; we'll see.

However, I'm getting ahead of myself as this change is still three weeks away. It was originally planned for August 1st, but has been delayed to November 1st so that, putting it crudely, the University can make a bit more cash out of my research team's work through the past few years. October 31st is the census date for the UK's Research Evaluation Framework, the infamous REF (and successor to the equally wonderful Research Assessment Exercise) and it's financially beneficial to the University if I'm still full-time on that date: they want to maximise my 'volume factor'. Thus, I find myself straining forward in order to start writing on science for Kent's regional press, speaking on science to adult lay audiences and engaging in a wide - and rather scary - range of projects in which I play the role of 'resident scientist' ... but still having no time to follow through. All of which brings me back to earth in the realisation that I need to focus for the next two days on chairing this international review panel at the Diamond Light Source ...


P.s. the title, for those who didn't get it, pays homage to Bob Dylan.

@Bob_MatPhys