Robert's Adventures in Artland?

[With apologies, and due homage, to Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"]

I have touched on my links with the arts and humanities before, all of which has been in the context of my amateur’s passion for public engagement in science. Indeed, if you’re interested, please see here, and also here. I have tended to look upon these as examples of extremely welcome accidents which have yielded fruits beyond anything I could have anticipated. However, a tweet from Alex Fleming – a fellow science enthusiast from my part of the world – caused me to reflect on my assumptions in this regard. In truth, his choice of words helped to crystallise what I realised had been fermenting in the back of my mind for a quite a while and I am grateful to him for catalysing the process of getting these thoughts to the surface. (I hope you noted the gratuitous use of scientific terms in that sentence: let me know if you’d like a primer on any of them.) This is what he said …

Alex Fleming @eastkentscience   Jun 24

@PrattJulespratt Antony Gormley and adventures by @Bob_MatPhys & few others the only egs of crossover of art & science in Kent. Any others?

Now, this was itself part of a series of tweets – yes, I am indeed something of an addict – emerging from an excellent PostgraduateResearch Festival at my University. These one-day events are held annually, although this was the first one I’d been able to participate in. I had proposed a session in which a small panel drawn from across our Faculties would introduce their ‘take’ on Public Engagement and then respond to questions from the audience. It was a fairly simple idea in itself, but the fact that I was brave, or foolhardy, enough to submit it to the organisers bares testament to the events of the past couple of years and to the wonderfully talented and creative people I've met as a result. Joining me in this panel were colleagues Nancy Gaffield (English, a poet of deserved renown), Sian Stevenson (Drama, specialising in performance) and Becky Higgitt (History, having joined us recently from the Greenwich Maritime Museum); Lynne Bennett, who oversees the University’s Public Engagement with Research programme, kindly agreed to introduce us and to chair the Q&A session. The point I really want to get across here is how it was that I came to know these lovely people. 

I met Sian under the umbrella of the Prosper stream within Canterbury Festival (see here, and here): I was a naïve scientist working with the Turner Contemporary gallery, she an accomplished member of a team experimenting with community engagement via dance. Although I had first met Nancy in the context of student support, my eyes were opened to her creative talents when I read her first published collection, Tokaido Road (now the inspiration for an opera, premiered at this year’s Cheltenham Festival – but coming to Canterbury in 2015 I am delighted to say). Despite the fact that she worked at the same University, Becky first came to my attention via Twitter and her blog posts for The Guardian (- our University is a big place, and there are rather few ways in which staff can bump into each other in the relaxed way that facilitates serendipitous interactions); having made that initial contact however, there was no turning back. Lynne was the generous talent behind the Launch Event for our new University Strategy for Public Engagement with Research – generous in part because she invited me to play a front-of-house role despite my relative inexperience. So, there we were: the panel and our chair, billed as presenting a plenary session at an event none of us had any real experience of.

Even, or perhaps especially with hindsight it is apposite that the heading I chose for my handful of image-heavy slides at this Research Festival was ‘Random Walk’. (The image to the left formed the basis of my opening slide.) This has a particular meaning for a physicist, but was also, I thought, a meaningful generic way to describe my route to the present in this context. If there was one idea I wanted to leave behind with our audience it was that they embrace the  risk in saying “yes” to at least some of the ‘wild card’ offers and opportunities that will assuredly come their way. In a way it reflects a phrase coined by Theodore Roosevelt that has been on my office wall for many, many years, albeit in paraphrased form: “Far better is it to dare mighty things, even though chequered by failure, than to dwell in that perpetual twilight that knows not victory or defeat”. Is this another way of embracing the concept of a 'Random Walk'?

Any genuinely high-level success in science research positively requires the mind-set that underpins this phrase, alongside painstaking attention to detail and an eye for the unexpected buried within it, and a whole raft of other attributes. However, it’s only in the past few years that I've seen its relevance worked out in other ways – and that only as a result of external, unlooked for, changes to my professional environment. As funding for research got scarcer I sought new challenges, almost unconsciously; the realities of university life are such that this was only made practicable after taking partial retirement. Having been an active proponent of outreach into regional schools for many years, constrained in the past by the lack of available time, I now found I had the opportunity for more science communication work at about the same time as invitations emerged to take this into the world of adult lay audiences. In truth, I suspect the opportunities had been there all along, but the frenetic rush of everything else (including chasing the funds needed to keep a research team ‘on the road’, managing our projects and overseeing the dissemination of our outcomes) would have blinded me to their presence and potential. And so it was that an informal talk on glass – my pet subject – at a local Café Scientifique led to another couple of talks at the Canterbury museums (the Heritage Museum and

then the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge), which led to … you get the picture. There is still rather little ‘art’ in the mix at this stage, other than images in my slides of some rather fine examples of glass art, including the stained glass of Canterbury Cathedral of course.  (In passing, my links with the glass workshop at the Cathedral also led, via conversations with a long-standing friend, author and written communications guru Martyn Barr, to a highly readable book on the Cathedral’s stained glass: yet another positive step on my ‘random walk’.)  All of this was fun in and of itself, but that very fact will, I think, have ‘softened me up’ such that I embraced the chance to help in the experiment envisioned with the Turner Contemporary – again, all of this is introduced in earlier posts. What the passage of time, and a set of subsequent experimental collaborations (see here for an example), has allowed is further reflection on what it’s all meant and on the outcomes (as distinct from the outputs).

Apart from the realisation that my entire Public Engagement world-view has been completely renewed in the space of only a couple of years, it has also dawned on me – slow learner that I am – that the driving force that has motivated all this (unpaid) work bears comparison with that which drove my research and still empowers my teaching. It really is all about the people: building and nurturing relationship with talented, creative, enthusiastic, committed people – almost irrespective of the context. Delving even further back, I’m also reminded of the pride and amazement I used to feel when watching what my dad could achieve with only rectangular bricks/blocks and some mortar to play with: he was a hugely talented bricklayer who loved getting it ‘just so’. I have a similar reaction to my wife’s work with young people with Asperger’s Syndrome. There’s a common theme emerging, evidently.  Perhaps my ‘random walk’ isn't quite so random after all, just 'unplanned' and delightfully full of serendipity. 

But what of art? After all, the tweet that started this particular hare running mentioned me alongside a talented local artist and an internationally renowned sculptor. I realise I've still not addressed the title or genesis of this post explicitly (although there is an implicit, perhaps tangential, reference via the wonderful Turner Contemporary gallery). I must make it crystal clear – another term calling out for scientific explanation, but not now – that I am not an artist. No, that's an understatement of huge proportions: when it comes to drawing, painting, modelling, ... I am close to hopeless. The drawing of me shown on the right, made in the sand at Joss Bay, North Kent, by my five-year old grandson Jacob, exemplifies a stage in ability that I have never really grown out of. Having said that, I love beautiful, challenging works by those who are indeed artists, and I am blessed with a wife who does have artistic ability and understanding (in spades!) and who has helped to open my eyes. Similarly, I am, if anything, even less musical than I am 'artistic' although I love listening to music – across a wide spectrum, and particularly when performed live. Thankfully, this lack of ability hasn't stopped me enjoying the challenge of trying to explain Chaos Theory to local communications guru and opera librettist Frank Burnet as he and his team create a new work: Butterfly. Now, up to a point, I can and do write, and I enjoy the ups and downs of the process that goes with it; were that not the case, neither this blog nor a great deal else besides would exist. However, my efforts are a long, long way from the award-winning fiction of my ex-colleague Emmi Itäranta or Nancy's captivating poetry (see links above). But that's the point surely ... that's exactly what makes my contact – no, my willing and naïve engagement with those whose talent does emerge within these areas such an adventure. Alex's tweet uncovered a truth I think. One can't help but be reminded of what J.R.R. Tolkein said through Bilbo: "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door ... You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to."

Long may it remain so.

One day last week ...

I'm procrastinating. It's not something I'm prone to, but sometimes it happens. For months I have been meaning - indeed, wanting - to write a long and serious-minded reflection on the passing of a cornerstone research partnership that has been at the heart of my professional life for more than a decade ... but the words just won't come. So, here is my latest bit of illustrated frippery instead: one working day amongst so many, and the thoughts it evoked.

From time to time I get invited to do a job for another university or some other organisation. Sometimes these last for several years, like the approximately six years I spent, until last Autumn, as a member/chair of a couple of high-level Science & Technology Facility Council committees, and sometimes they last only a day or two (although usually requiring a bit - or a lot - of preparatory work). Acting as an external examiner for PhD students fall into the latter camp. Last week, however, I had a one-off role to fulfill which was new to me: acting as external assessor for a proposed new undergraduate course at the university at which I was myself a student many, many years ago. The details are irrelevant (and are, as one might expect, confidential) but the occasion illustrates nicely part of what it means to do the job I do. This was not a typical working day, far from it - and I'll probably not write about those in any depth until I have fully retired, but neither was it unusual. As with all such tasks it was voluntary and I had chosen to 'opt in' for the same reasons I decide on all such invitations: it sounded interesting, it might inform what I and my colleagues seek to do at my home university, it came from people I know/know of and who I like and/or respect, and I thought I had the knowledge and experience to make a reasonable stab at it. (That latter point is often the toughest hurdle by the way: chronic 'imposter syndrome' affects me and so many others ...)

The day began with my usual arrival at my office, shortly after 8 am; this gave time for a last scan for urgent e-mails before packing my small rucksack: my all-too-obviously old laptop (don't forget the charger, and the one for my 'phone!), necessary instructions and notes and something to read. I took the bio-fuelled Unibus into town and walked to the station (- Canterbury's attempt at coping with too many vehicles on 'Medieval' roads means that the bus no longer goes past the train station ...). The journey to Leicester was as straightforward as they all should be, and for this particular journey there was the added bonus of arriving at and leaving from the same mainline station: St Pancras. Since I had half an hour to kill before the service to Leicester, I started to wander around the upper levels. Although I'd seen and admired it on many occasions from the ground floor, this was I think the first time I'd looked closely at Martin Jennings' 2007 statue of the railway-loving poet John Betjeman. It really is a gem, overflowing with personality. There's another statue up there, which is so large that I was amazed I'd not seen it before: this is the 9 m tall The Meeting Place by Paul Day. It's a lovely statue, but what really caught my eye was the set of friezes encircling the base. They're fascinating in their own right, but it was a particular 'detail' I noticed; at three points the bronze has been especially noticeably polished by the touch of umpteen fingers: a dog's head, the pockets on the back of a woman's shorts and a child's outstretched hand. I carried these with me in my mind's eye for the rest of the day; they seemed to offer a commentary on life, or society, or some combination thereof.

In my humble opinion, the best route towards Leicester university means ignoring the instructions provided and heading across the road in front of the station and walking the three minutes or so required to reach New Walk (then turn left). This is, I think, one of the jewels of Leicester; from 'Vicky Park' at one end, it passes the university before reaching into the old heart of the city at the other: a Grade II listed pedestrian way tracing its origins back to the 18th century. It's proportions, green spaces and atmosphere of past-world leisure provide a great way to gather ones thoughts on the approach.

I first walked its length in 1972, as a student embarking on a degree in Physics (by mistake: I had applied to do Combined Sciences but someone there had ticked the wrong box; however, by happenstance, this matched my revised ambitions so I kept it to myself). The signs by the door are new, but the essence of the main student entrance remains the same today as it was back in the day. It's been totally remodeled internally during the intervening years, as has much of the rest of the compact central university campus. However, my job for the day would unfold in the Fielding Johnson building, itself Grade II listed and home to the university's managers and administrators (- although originally a lunatic asylum in the 19th century). Two hours later I was heading back down New Walk and on to a train southward.

I've been very fortunate of late to be invited to launch parties for two very different books, both written by women who have been or are my colleagues. One was associated with a novel, 'Memory of Water' by Emmi Itäranta, set at some time in the future after climate change and the associated societal upheavals have wrought their effect on the world. Emmi worked in my department for a while during the time she was writing this first book (originally in Finnish by the way) and I'm proud now to have a signed copy. I'm also distinctly envious of her ability to imbue her characters with such reality. However, it was the other one I packed to read on my homeward journey: 'Continental Drift' by Nancy Gaffield. Like her previous collection of poems, 'Tokaido Road', now also used to inspire the libretto for an opera, the effective solitude of a train journey seems somehow appropriate for the necessarily measured and contemplative reading required. (Tokaido Road was read, and re-read, on my way home from Glasgow University as I recall.) I love this second collection of poems as much as the first, although they are very different, but in this one I was confronted in one section of the book with the role of scientists within the Manhattan project and with the consequences of their work. An important part of Nancy's lineage has its roots in Japan, and I spent some time, almost 30 years ago, working at Los Alamos (albeit in the civil research side of things - armed guards and high fences blissfully isolated me and my colleagues from the military sections of the place). Poignant doesn't seem to cover it at all - in fact, my paucity of words and their use is one of the things thrown sharply into relief by the excellence of her writing.

After delays caused by trespassers on the lines near St Pancras and the associated knock-on effects, I eventually got home about 12 hours after I had left. Another day.

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.

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[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 ...