Beyond ‘Fun with Flags’

The character of Dr Sheldon Cooper in the long-running series The Big Bang Theory produces as one of his hobbies a YouTube video series – or should that be a vlog – entitled Fun with Flags (e.g. here). I’m not going to attempt to ape that; indeed, I couldn't. However, for a long time now I have been meaning to place on record something about my favourite elements in the Periodic Table: those types of atoms that have shaped and even led my science career through four decades of research. I can’t make it as hilarious as the script-writers and actors manage in Big Bang, and there’ll be a little more overt science in this post than is usual for me. However, the scientific detail, such as it is, is almost incidental in a way. This post will be more like a collection of milestones: a potted summary of how I found myself moving seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, between Physics, the subject in which I was formally educated and trained, and other fields such as Chemistry and Materials Science. What became evident to me early on is that my driving motivation is not a subject or discipline as such but, rather, a desire to explore and to understand a particular material – usually an amorphous one such as a liquid or a glass (see here). If, in order to ‘scratch that itch’, I needed to learn something new or to join forces with those already expert in that area then so be it; this approach eventually attracted the epithet of a ‘materials-led methodology’ (see my earlier post, here). In essence, I have sought to understand and to be able to explain, at the atomic scale, why a given material has the properties and attributes it does. The narrow ‘tags’ we place on subject areas cease to have any real significance in this context. Thus, as if to illustrate this truth, I have emerged at this closing stage of my serendipity-rich research career as a Fellow of both the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry, and my University label me as a Materials Physicist. (In passing, I’d have preferred Chemical Physicist since that’s mostly what I do – an admixture of both disciplines, devoted to the understanding of novel materials at the level of the arrangement of their atoms.)

The teddy bear my son won in a
raffle many years ago: today sporting
a rather geeky Periodic Table tie.

In earlier posts I alluded to some of the more recent areas of my research activity (e.g. here), but this was built on a track record of experience gained through the investigation of liquid metals, molten salts, thin-film and narrow-gap semiconductors and photovoltaics, ultra-hard coatings and non-linear optical glasses. One might perhaps track further back in time to the beginnings of my love for science, which extend deep into primary school – but that’s a far broader topic than I’m willing to tackle here and now. What does occur to me however is the fact that, in pursuit of these varied scientific goals, I have, with my research team members and other partners and collaborators, synthesised and/or studied materials comprising elements from across the Periodic Table. Now, there are 92 naturally occurring elements in the Periodic Table – all the way from hydrogen to uranium – and then a slew of man-made elements beyond, such as plutonium*. Even this long list is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg in the sense that most of these elements – types of atom – can exist as one of several isotopes. The humble hydrogen atom, for example, is most often found in its simplest form comprising one positively charged proton as its tiny nucleus with a single negatively charged electron somewhere within a much larger ‘cloud’ surrounding it; but one may also find it in the form of deuterium or tritium. All three isotopes have but one proton in the nucleus, but deuterium and tritium respectively have in addition one or two neutrons in there with the proton; tritium also happens to be radioactive. Whilst it is the number of protons that dictates which element we’re talking about, it is the number of neutrons in its nucleus that determines which particular isotope of that element is at our focus; if one adds both numbers together we get the atomic mass number (- the electrons contribute less than a thousandth of an atom’s mass, so we’ll ignore them in this regard). Were there no isotopes, each element would therefore have an integer mass number; if we consider again our example of hydrogen, it is listed as having an average atomic mass not of 1 but 1.008 – the difference arising from the presence of small percentages of deuterium and tritium. My story is about particular isotopes as much as it is about their parent elements. 

There have been quite a few depictions of the Periodic Table over the years: the figure above illustrates the variety. From the geologist’s view of the relative abundance of elements in the Earth’s crust (top left) through a naïve historical display of the nations within which each was originally isolated (top right) to my personal favourite variations which show the elements set out in the style of the London Underground map (lower left, by fellow scientist and public engagement enthusiast Mark Lorch) and an edible depiction in chocolate I recently spotted on Twitter (lower right). 

Of course, one might instead break into song … 

A rather more conventional and contemporary layout for the Periodic Table is shown in the figure below. The design is such that it brings out similarities in chemical behaviour (within the columns) and trends and differences (along the rows). The elements that have figured in the catalogue of materials/samples I and my co-workers have studied are all tan-shaded, and in each and every case there is a story to tell if I had the time (and you had the patience). In addition I have shaded in aqua a few more elements that have, at one time or another, been vital in some other particular way in the context of experiments – perhaps as part of bespoke, ‘hand-made’, equipment. However, to keep this post short enough to be within the realms of the readable we’ll focus only on the small sub-set I have circled in red; even then, there is time only to skim across the surface. Between them, these elements – and some of their isotopes – exemplify important and/or particularly enjoyable aspects of my research. Carbon (C, 6), for example, has on occasions been at the very heart of things or a downright nuisance. For the decade or so when I was primarily focused on studying catalytically-active and then bio-active glasses, a key step in their synthesis was the removal of ‘left-over’ organic compounds through a process of heat-treatment: get this wrong and our final product was contaminated with residual carbon and therefore useless. By contrast, there was a period of five or six years when we were studying ultra-hard coatings made by depositing carbon atoms onto various substrates from a plasma gun; these materials became known as diamond-like carbon. Moreover, by adding a little hydrogen, we could generate a hard but bio-compatible coating with potential uses in prosthetic surgery.

Gadolinium (Gd, 64) is a metal within a series called the Lanthanides (so-named because of the element at the start of the row, lanthanum). I have singled it out for two reasons: as an example of the extensive study we undertook into a family of lanthanide-doped silicate and phosphate glasses which exhibit fascinating electronic, optical and magnetic properties, and because it sits at the core of some novel but particularly tricky data that is still in need of analysis some 15 years after the original experiments. Lanthanide-doped glasses are already used in the fibre optics industry as optical amplifiers and switches, and one aspect of our research was supported by industry; there is interest way beyond this realm however. Some of our more challenging experiments have been associated with this work, using neutron research facilities in the UK and in France and x-ray sources in the UK, France and the USA, and it is from a particular ground-breaking experiment at the latter that we have data which is still not fully analysed. When this task is completed – and I’m confident it will be, one day – we shall have a pretty complete picture of where the lanthanide atoms sit within their glass host matrix.

The Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s favourite warship, by William Bishop

The inclusion of iron (Fe, 26) in my selection is representative of the sheer fun that’s possible sometimes when one plays a 'wild card'. A few years ago a colleague of mine, Alan Chadwick, and I were approached by the Mary Rose Trust and asked to help them understand key issues of marine timber conservation and preservation. I have written a little about this project in an earlier post (here) but suffice it to say that iron turned out to be a culprit in that it greatly accelerated the conversion of sulfur present in the wood into sulfuric acid – never a good thing when one wants unique artifacts to survive. Using an experimental technique based on the absorption of high-energy x-rays and then some clever software written by one of my PhD students we were able to reveal for the first time the finer details of this process. After sharing the results with our friends at the Mary Rose Trust, they were published in my one and only paper in an archaeological journal. As part of all this we got to visit behind the scenes in Portsmouth and to see the amazing collection of artifacts not on public display, and of course it enabled me to do what I love – to learn about very different areas of endeavour by working with the experts, and thereby to make a contribution.

Most of us will have been told, even if only in childhood, that drinking milk is good for us because it contains the calcium (Ca, 20) which helps us to build strong bones. One can now take this to a new level: if one incorporates calcium into a glass, and gets the whole thing just right, it’s possible to make a bio-active scaffold for the regeneration of bone. In terms of the sheer scale of the undertaking (see here) and the degree to which all of those involved had to learn new things outside their professional comfort zones this project collects the prize. However, this is also the point at which I can begin to introduce the usefulness of isotopes. By conducting experiments on two samples of our bio-active glass which differed solely in that the calcium in one of them was a particular isotope only, Ca-44, we gained new insights. In essence, by subtracting the results from the sample with natural calcium from the one containing only the one calcium isotope, we eliminated the effects of the majority of the atoms in the glass – beautifully isolating the subtle, and hitherto hidden, environment of the calcium. In this one experiment we managed to offer an atomic-scale explanation for the remarkable behaviour of the material as it ‘grew’ bone mineral when placed in a body fluid (blood plasma or saliva will do). I have already used this experiment as an example in an article written for the non-expert readers of the magazine Laboratory News, so follow the link here if you want to know more.

Part of a poster campaign on local buses for public engagement with science

Titanium (Ti, 22) and nickel (Ni, 28) are in my highlighted selection for similar reasons, not least because they have both cropped up over and over again as my career has progressed, but there are enough differences to warrant separate mentions. Nickel was, if you’ll forgive the phrase, my first love as an element. It figured in my PhD work in the ’70s when I was studying the electronic properties of liquid metals, and in the research into the atomic-scale structure of molten salts (nickel chloride, as distinct from table salt) I undertook during my first postdoctoral contract. In that latter case, the rich choice of stable nickel isotopes available allowed me to design some particularly sophisticated experiments and led to the first measurements I conducted outside of the UK (at this place – still going strong). It cropped up again early in my academic career when looking at metal-doped semiconductors and more recently as an additive to the bio-active glasses mentioned above which may help promote the growth of new blood vessels through our bone-regenerating scaffold. When added to a suitable porous glass host, titanium, which offers some wonderfully useful ‘wrinkles’ my team could exploit in the context of x-ray absorption spectroscopy (the exact analogue of the iron case mentioned above), acts as a catalyst able to break down large hydrocarbon molecules. In the form of a doped silicate glass it also allows us to make transparent low-expansion protective coatings on optical components; we were again able to explain what the titanium does and why there is a maximum concentration that one can use. Most recently, within a collaborative team including a dentist and a metals corrosion expert, we were able to explore the way in which the titanium in medical implants gets into the surrounding tissue and even into living cells.

Perhaps, at some stage in the future, I’ll pick the above stories up and explore some of them in more detail: ‘Fun with Elements’ if you will. In the meantime, if you want to dig deeper I suggest that you use one of the many repositories of my team’s research papers (e.g. here, here, here or here). Until then, …

 __________________________________________________

* In truth, this statement is in need of clarification: things are not quite so clear-cut in that even some of those 92 exist only because they are created in small quantities as a result of nuclear reactions. Astatine (At, 85) is one of the more extreme examples: it exists for short periods only before it decays, and even then in the tiniest of quantities; by contrast, plutonium (Pu, 94) now exists in relatively large amounts following its first creation within nuclear reactors in the last quarter of the twentieth century. For the complete low-down I would recommend looking here or here. I must also record my indebtedness to a chemistry colleague at my University, Robert Benfield, who generously proof-read the particular table I assembled for this post and made some characteristically good suggestions.

Never Work with Animals or Children?

There’s a wealth of anecdotal ‘evidence’ regarding the unfathomable depth of truth to the adage that one ought never to work with animals or children (e.g. this old ‘classic’). Whilst animals have never figured in any public engagement or outreach event I have been a part of – well, not yet anyway – children most certainly have. I’m therefore focused in this post entirely on the latter. Although it’s an arbitrary cut-off, and ignoring any niceties associated with terminology, I ought to declare at this point that my working assumption is that ‘children’ migrate into ‘young people’ at some stage in the region of their early teens. Children can be ‘scary’, even intimidating; they are intrinsically unpredictable in their relative naïvety. Thereby hangs the issue: ‘random’ things may occur and these can lead one into a downward slide fed by loss of understanding or control. However, in my experience there’s an up-side to this naïve, enthusiastic unpredictability. In fact, looked at from this alternate vantage point, it’s positively inspiring – and certainly energising – to open oneself to their perspective.

In a former post (here) I included a photograph of one of my grandsons striking a pose outside the Turner Contemporary gallery’s commissioned installation Dwelling by Krijn de Koning (see here for details of the artwork/show). One of the observations I have made in recent months, through them and others, is that children can and do genuinely enjoy visiting a good gallery or museum if they’re allowed to. In this particular instance, we’d visited the gallery at the eldest grandson’s direct request: he’d been there on a school trip, loved it, and now wanted to go back because I’d casually announced there was a new show (see here). Three adults and two children piled into a car for an anticipated brief visit to the gallery. We stayed longer than expected. Not only did all five of us have our imaginations captivated by Jeremey Deller’s English Magic, we also got to lay unselfconsciously on the floor to view Atmosphere by ceramics artist Edmund de Waal (here) – children have an ability to release adults to do such things. Even after ‘exhausting’ these exhibitions indoors there was still Krijn de Koning’s Dwelling to explore outside. I’d never played hide-and-seek in an artist’s installation before, but I did that afternoon. Perfect. Turner Contemporary confirmed in me my love for the place and for what it achieves through its staff – they also cemented in two young boys’ minds a concept of art which does not exclude fun. However, the primary point of this particular blog site is to allow me to describe life as a scientist: we’ll move on to consider children in this context in due course ...

Turner Contemporary, though a personal favourite, is of course far from being unique in its welcoming attitude towards children. In my own city and environs I can name several examples, including the idiosyncratic Powell-Cotton museum: a mock pith helmet, clip-board and friendly staff can turn a seven-year-old into a virtual explorer.

I’m not entirely sure when the evident change-of-heart descended on so many – though far from all – of our museums and galleries. What I can recount is my own observation through three generations: I have just shared some positive things about my grandsons’ experience, but I could also track back in time through my son, and of course to me. Let’s start with a story from last Summer. I had the scary pleasure of acting as a ‘responsible adult’ in a two-coach party of Year 5 primary school pupils as they travelled to the Science Museum in London on a day-trip organised by my talented teacher son. We had great fun, eat our lunch on the floor under the wings of classic aircraft and toured the museum in small groups, ‘following our noses’, and had a wonderful time in their hands-on exploratorium. Leaving to one side the perennial fascination with buying trinkets in the shop and my occasional surprise at what did and did not take their fancy amongst the exhibits, there were two noticeable things. The first of these was the outright success of a pair of talks by museum staff: highly interactive and entertaining, and for the most part accessible to the pupils (as far as I could discern). They’d obviously put some thought and effort into this. The other wonderful thing was the atmosphere of relaxed exploration that one senses in the museum: a place where boisterous 10-year olds could skim the broad landscapes of science, engineering and technology without being hemmed in and excessively ‘steered’. What came out of this were some quite animated discussions – that must be a good thing I think.

There’s nothing quite like seeing oneself on the big screen – even if it’s in an infra-red image.

 In passing, I recall giving an informal in-class talk on bioactive glass (one of my research areas; see here, here  and here) to a Year 8 secondary school class a couple of years ago. I had no slides and no show-and-tell with me (- indeed, only a few minutes to prepare at all: I was there to talk to Year 12-13 students a little later in the day). I chatted for 10 or 15 minutes about using 

Klingon skulls

these materials to regenerate bone and then the teacher opened it up for questions. The point is that their questions came at a fast rate, and were still coming as the bell went to signal the end of the lesson, and they were uninhibited in what they asked. I still remember with a smile being asked if these materials could be used to grow a Klingon skull and if so, how would one go about it. Wonderful. Not only had this person ‘got it’ in terms of bioactive materials, but the concepts had been assimilated without duress. When does this phase end? The older students I spoke to that same day were much more guarded, trying to avoid appearing silly I suppose – but perhaps missing out because of it. That having been said, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with them as well – but in a rather different, ‘grown up’ way.

If we skip back half a generation to the late ’90s, I accompanied another early-secondary school trip to the Science Museum: this time with my son and his peers. On this occasion, the teachers had taken a somewhat more ‘traditional’ approach to the day. Almost as soon as we arrived we were taken to a large room with tables and chairs in order to eat our packed lunches and each handed a long questionnaire. I could understand the reasoning: it would, for the diligent at least, ensure a focused march around the museum and some measurable ‘outputs’, but I still question the genuine educational value of such exercises. However, I have a confession to make at this point – and since the school is now closing down I don’t suppose anyone will be hugely upset by it: I cheated; well, sort of. On the basis of seminar-style discussion, my group dealt with the questionnaire over our sandwiches and then I accompanied them around the museum to the bits they wanted to see. I was amazed at their energy; they wanted to see so many things, and had several positively heated debates en route. We ended up on a space-travel simulator as a reward for their day of enthusiastic enquiry before piling back onto our coach. I realise that this may have been possible only because I could ‘fill in the gaps’ for them out of my own education, training and experience, but it was so much more fun and rewarding – certainly for me, and apparently also for them. Apart from anything else, and despite the evidence already present of a desire to draw younger people in, the place had not yet developed much by way of truly accessible displays; having someone of whom to ask questions was, arguably, vital.

My own early visits to the same place were as a slightly older teenager in the company of three school friends; this would have been in the mid/late ’60s. School trips were, on the whole, less ambitious then and visiting London’s principal museums had to wait until our parents thought it safe to allow the four of us to use the train/underground. The museums, the Science Museum included, were distinctly more ‘stuffy’ at that stage and one had to be prepared to ‘put the work in’ to glean knowledge or understanding. Having said that, for a studious (nerdy?) group like ours, the place was, even then, a great place to explore and for self-paced learning. However, returning to the present day, I can’t wait to accompany my grandsons to the Science Museum (or any of its Kensington neighbours for that matter): there’s such a rich child-accessible atmosphere in such places now that I’d hope to be able to stand well back and allow them to find the spot where they want to dig deeper of their own accord.

To return to the topic in hand, albeit in a round-about way: public engagement with science in the context of younger children. I had the honour to be invited to present a Christmas Lecture on my pet topic of glass at the University of Kent this year in the rather splendid Gulbenkian Theatre. 

I’d love to be able to compare these with the long-standing and prestigious Christmas Lecture series at the Royal Institution (here) but they’re in a different league. I was to give the lecture twice, and was told to expect close to 100 people for each of the morning and afternoon sessions, and that they would mostly be Year 12/13 school students. How wrong can a set of predictions be … maybe a couple of dozen people attended each session, and whilst there were some adults present the majority of those present were younger than 10 years old and almost exclusively home-schooled. (Apparently, as I discovered when chatting to a few of the accompanying adults afterwards, my talk usefully constituted a sort of ‘field trip’ for their charges.) So, having turned up with a set of slides and a suitcase full of artefacts to go with them, I had to try as best I could to adapt. I’m not sure I succeeded terribly well, but it did flag up for me an area of weakness in what I can offer as public engagement talks. Ad hoc general science-based events with younger children seem to have worked well thus far, but a subject-specific talk is evidently a very different thing. 

However, on a brighter note, another recent interaction with primary school children, which was great fun, has highlighted the scope for a possible new career direction! I was invited, with my wife, to be a ‘mystery reader’ for separate Year 4 and 5 classes and duly set myself the goal to find a story with a bit of science woven through it: a task which proved harder than it sounds. Finally, after an extended ‘Twitter campaign’, I was sent a suggestion for a series of books which seemed like they might work in the sense that the story-lines were reasonably age-appropriate and there were science-related plot elements sprinkled throughout. The author, Lucy Hawking, has written the series of books (here) with her well-known father Prof. Stephen Hawking; I bought copies of three of them as a present to the school and read the first few chapters of one of them to each of my two classes of children. The books are good, but there is scope for much more for a 9-11 year old audience it seems to me. Now, I can cope with the science, my wife is a talented painter and my grandsons (and son, and his partner) can advise on age-relevant matters of quality. So, all that’s needed now is a bit of time, some good ideas, a publisher, …

The Physics of Heritage: looking inside

There is, or so I gather from my colleague Chris Pickvance, a rare item of furniture in Kent: a wooden chest with metal bolts buried under a wooden cover. There is great interest in being able to generate an image the bolts non-destructively (i.e. in situ). In Chris’ own words:  “I have been researching a group of medieval chests c1300. One has an intact long sliding bolt used to secure the lid. Only a handful of these survive in England and they are all concealed under long wooden covers. No one has seen an image of one, though there is a photo of an uncovered bolt in Germany. Hence, it would be path-breaking to be able to see what is hidden away. The bolt is about 3 feet long. Whether 'seen' from front, back or above it would be through the thickness of the wood.”

In the run-up to Christmas I had to admit that I’d drawn a blank in terms of finding equipment and expertise locally that could be used at the site of the artefact and have therefore started to caste the net a little wider. This has included contacting a friend and colleague at the Mary Rose Trust – see below. If you have any good practicable ideas then do please get in touch.

I’m not entirely sure why Chris contacted me initially, but this isn’t the first example of an interesting ‘random’ contact. (He has since pointed out that, in sociology, links such as ours are referred to as ‘weak ties’, and that there is a debate regarding their importance: all I would say in this instance is that I’m glad the ties exist.) For instance, until it was disbanded – sensibly, in my opinion – during a major overhaul I had the great pleasure of being the ‘tame scientist’ on Canterbury Cathedral’s Stained Glass Committee. This particular bit of serendipity came about entirely on the basis of someone bumping into me at work and hesitantly using those all-too-common opening words “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in …”. Whatever its genesis, I ended up having a golden opportunity to learn about what was to me an entirely new form of glass science, technology and art. Not only did I get to see examples of stained glass windows dating back to the Middle Ages with the sort of perspective denied to a tourist – high up in the galleries of the Cathedral building – but even more exciting were my visits to the Glass Workshop (here). At that time, they were expertly led by Sebastian Strobl (who later moved back to Germany to continue his work there). However, my longest, and continuing, contact there is with his talented successor, Léonie Seliger, who has not only opened my eyes to new realms of understanding and appreciation in the context of design, fabrication and conservation but has also shared with me a few of the many unsolved puzzles that cannot help but draw one in. If only I could figure out how to help solve them …  (You’d have seen Léonie in episode one of the recent BBC documentary series on Canterbury Cathedral: it’s currently still on iPlayer, although I suspect for a short while only). We’ve also found ourselves working together in a couple of exciting educational/public engagement projects. In one of these we contributed, in one way or another, to a new book in the growing series of excellent volumes by my friend Martyn Barr: this one’s entitled Paintings in Light (here).

Léonie, Martyn and me at the book's launch.

Another project was with my old friends in the Learning team at the Turner Contemporary gallery (here). As part of a longer project with a group of young people from NE Kent, who were supported through the challenge of making a film on the theme of ‘colour’, we spent several hours with them at the Cathedral (‘topped up’ with a recorded Q&A session a few days later) talking about light, colour and glass. Their short film is available here and there’s a bit of explanatory text here.

Léonie revealing the delights of stained glass using the Cathedral's Glass Workshop light table.

The other ‘historical’ example started way back, perhaps eight years ago or thereabouts, when a chemist colleague of mine, Alan Chadwick, and I were asked to help conservators at the Mary Rose Trust (see here) get to grips with a key problem regarding the preservation of archaeological marine timbers. This was associated with the fact that, buried for centuries under the sewerage-polluted silt of the Solent, the remaining timbers of this favourite warship of Henry VIII became rich in sulfur compounds. Once the ship was raised, these compounds oxidised; either by piercing the cell walls as crystals grew or by forming sulfuric acid and degrading the timber that way, the end result represented a serious problem. My involvement, through students attached to my research team, amounted to understanding this process at an atomistic level – and in particular, revealing the role of iron as a catalyst to some of the reactions (published here – if you want a copy of the full paper, let me know).  The project became more chemistry than physics afterwards, and it was Alan who carried the work forward. An unusually talented early-career postdoctoral researcher in Alan’s team, Ellie Schofield, went on the assume a leading role in the Mary Rose conservation programme (see here and here).

Using the world-class Diamond Light Source, we were able to study in detail both the position and the chemical state of the key elements in this game (sulfur and iron) and to do this with a resolution that enabled us to map all of that onto the cell structure of the timber itself. Here is part of the team in action at the I18 beamline at Diamond, with local beamline scientists, together with examples of timber cores and their original locations.

All of the above represent, in a way, the ‘hobby’ side to what I do. It’s rather nice to be able to engage in such hobbies.

The One on the Right

Way back in July I posted a short piece (here) outlining a few of the ways in which, as a scientist, I had been drawn into some distinctively uncomfortable, and yet simultaneously hugely exciting, public engagement projects. A common strand to all of these has been the conscious decision to accept invitations to work to the agendas of others rather than to attempt to ‘impose’ my science on them. Please don’t misunderstand me: I still enjoy doing plenty of the latter in the form of talks on my pet area of research interest, glass. A month ago, for instance, I travelled to Chelmsford to talk to about 100 physics and engineering people who ranged from school students to those who had retired. At the end of November I delivered a variant of that talk – twice in the same day – aimed at school groups of one sort or another and others visiting my university for the annual ‘Christmas Lecture’ series (here; not to be confused with the world-renowned original here). However, these I count as an integral part of my ‘day job’ whereas this post is about the wider landscape of public engagement in which I am still a relatively naïve explorer.

I’ll share a couple of recent examples; both, in their very different ways, relate to Chaos Theory. I don’t want to attempt to cover the detail of what Chaos means in the world of science; indeed, I doubt I could do the topic justice as it’s not an area of my expertise. On the other hand, it is perhaps useful to offer an overview in order to set these particular public engagement events into their setting. One first needs to differentiate the scientific use of the word ‘chaos’ from its everyday connotations of confusion and disorder: whilst a chaotic system is not ‘predictable’ in the conventional sense we associate with the physical laws of nature it is, nevertheless, neither random nor disordered. A chaotic system is in fact governed by those very laws of nature: it is in that sense deterministic. However, if the behaviour of this system is subject to more than a small number of variables (three, in fact) and if at least one of those is non-linear (varying exponentially, for example) we end up being unable precisely to predict the system’s future state: the smallest of changes in the variables’ starting values will have a large effect on the eventual behaviour of the system. Examples of chaotic systems include the Stock Exchange, turbulence and mixing in fluids, the functioning of the heart and of course, the weather. There are some excellent and accessible resources available should you want to dig a little deeper; these include radio interviews led by the quintessentially philosophical Melvyn Bragg (here), online/video introductions (e.g. here, here and here) and books (the classic arguably being Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick).

The first example is perhaps somewhat tangential. It arose from a commitment I made to the excellent learning team at the Turner Contemporary gallery, about whom I’ve written before, on more than one occasion, to be a part of their contribution to the Fun Palace concept: ‘Everyone an Artist, Everyone a Scientist’. October 5^th was the big day, nationally. I was the sole embodiment of their phrase “Meet scientists from the University of Kent …”, as shown in the blurb for the event (below, left).

In truth, I contributed very little to this particular event – not for lack of a desire to chat to visitors about what was going on but because for most people the artist himself, Emrys Plant, was a lot more fun to watch and to question. I can empathise with that; indeed, he and I had some fascinating conversations, when no-one else was around, during which I learnt a huge amount and was challenged by him to develop my own ‘take’ on his developing work. I also got to hold bits and pieces in place whilst he drilled holes and drove in screws which, if nothing else, took me back to childhood weekends working with my bricklaying father. For the record, it was relatively easy to see what was taking shape as a wave coming up the gallery’s steps from the famous Margate harbour and breaking on the boundary wall. (By the way, if you’ve not seen Mr Turner yet, which has the artist’s times in Margate as a core element to the film’s framework, then I thoroughly recommend it.) As engaging for me as any other aspect of the day was the development of our thoughts on the process of putting it together: was this an analogue of ‘chaos’? Certainly, there is a strong element of unpredictability in the sense that a small change in the placing of any one piece of wood would necessarily have progressively amplified effects on the position of later additions. It is also the case that this is not at all random: Emrys had no pre-determined plan as such, but there was a conceptual idea in his mind which developed from his appreciation of the place and was continually modified by what he saw emerging. It was a tempting idea, and one which easily captivated my thinking.

There was another component to the Fun Palace event at the gallery that day, and this was a lot more engaging for visiting children I suspect (and for some of their parents): the opportunity to build something out of a giant set of plastic ‘scaffolding’. If the work Emrys was crafting so lovingly outside could be described as arising out of a chaotic process then how should one look upon the construction, and re-construction, of a ‘dwelling’ by children who didn’t know each other and were, on the whole, working independently of each other? Perhaps it’s best simply to describe this as fun. What did strike me as I watched it all unfold was the effect of the accompanying adults. On the whole, wisely in my opinion, they stood back and confined themselves to thoughts of safety and diplomacy. When one or more of them gave in to the desire to get involved it was remarkable how quickly ‘conformity’ set in: the word ‘dwelling’ was in the title of the exercise, so ‘dwelling’ it shall be …

It’s really rather wonderful to see people, of any age, having fun in an art gallery; also, bottom left, is a picture of one of my grandsons enjoying the Krijn de Koning installation ‘Dwelling’ which sat outside the gallery for several months and provided the inspiration for the Fun Palace event.

In all honesty, this story is but the warm-up act for the main event: my spiralling slide into participating in something that had the word ‘cabaret’ in its title! I’ll try to distil out the essence of the early steps and focus on the end result. About a year ago an ex-colleague who I hadn’t seen for a great many years, a now-‘retired’ but hugely busy bioscientist, Frank Burnet (see here), sent me an e-mail out of the blue: could he buy me a coffee in exchange for advice on a funding application for a science-inspired public engagement project (described at that stage as an ‘opera’)? Why yes, of course. After that – and a successful bid for modest levels of funding – came a request to listen to his outline ideas for a music/theatre-rich idea to convey something of Chaos Theory to a lay audience in a fun way. I’m no expert, as I’ve tried to make clear already, but I know enough physics to make some sense of the relevant articles I now cram-read and that was, thankfully, enough to be able to steer the plot ideas away from the biggest of potential pitfalls. For the first time in my career, I ‘played’ a character during a couple of read-throughs of an early draft script – one of these occasions was in front of a group of Science Communications MSc students, who were brimming with confidence-boosting ideas. Then came silence, for several months, whilst the project fermented alongside the other things Frank was engaged with, and in the hands of the collaborators he was already drawing in. I had all-but forgotten my ad hoc involvement when I spotted this entry in the Canterbury Festival’s science strand (which Frank helps to organise) …

I thought it might be Frank’s work, so I bought a ticket (along with tickets for several other events). A few days later I got an e-mail from him: would I be able to come to his house wearing my physicist’s hat in order to reprise my earlier role as a sounding board for script ideas? The composer (Joanna Ive), lead musician (Sam Bailey), one of the lead actors (Tamsin Fessey), the Festival’s Programme Manager (Alison Chambers ), project manager (Emma Weitkamp) would all be there; lunch provided. Well, if there’s lunch …

The lunch was excellent, but for me the joy of the afternoon lay not in the food but rather in watching, listening to and hopefully learning from this small group of committed experts. Observing, and very occasionally contributing to, the interaction between them was little short of inspirational. In this one package was encapsulated the kernel of why I feel so privileged to be invited to take part in these more encompassing public engagement projects: working alongside people who are knowledgeable, experienced, creative and enthusiastic in their respective fields is so uplifting. It was also a lot of fun to try my hand at playing a Tibetan singing bowl (see here for a little more information) – yes, the music was indeed growing out of an appreciation of chaos. I left with the invitation-come-request that I try to get to a rehearsal and certainly to the dress rehearsal on the day of the performance. Well, the rehearsal gave me the chance to meet the excellent principal actor/protagonist (Matt Fifield) but I contributed nothing of any note beyond a few nods and smiles. The dress rehearsal on the day of the performance was another matter entirely. Expecting only to sit and observe and to respond as best I could to any last-minute ‘physicsy’ questions I was rather taken by surprise when asked if I’d be on stage at the opening in order to introduce one of the key characters (Frank, playing Professor Lorenz, our mid-twentieth century ‘hero’ of Chaos Theory). “You really only need to be yourself Bob: you must have chaired no end of conference sessions.”

How could one refuse: after all, I had indeed spoken similar words in umpteen work situations over the years and all I really needed to do was stand up from my chair – the one on the right – speak a couple of sentences and then find the steps off the stage afterwards (with the house lights down, so trying to avoid falling over myself). In practice, I needed a bit of schooling from Tamsin; apparently I was changing position too often in my chair: I needed to pose, and then to move in synchrony with Frank as he mimed the end-stages of a lecture whilst the overture played. It’s all to do with maintaining presence on the stage I gathered. How did I get through decades of a career in science before discovering this whole new world now emerging around me; I love it. So far, so good – and in fact it did come out OK ‘on the night’ (I think). One of the benefits of getting my moment on stage out of the way in the space of one short overture and a one minute monologue is that I could then watch the rest of the rehearsal in peace. It was fascinating to watch the performers adapt their movements, cues and timings to the performance space – which included the audience, sat around tables in the Spiegaltent venue (a huge tent, supported by pillars faced with mirrors).

Tamsin and colleagues dancing as beekeepers – yes, seriously, it’s all on the theme of illustrating aspects of Chaos; Frank is on stage, in character.

There was one more twist before the actual performance that evening: I was asked – and I use that word in an amusingly loose fashion here since, by then, I had all-but painted myself into the “yes” corner – to front a Q&A session with the audience after the performance. This was the point at which it all unravelled, where my lack of genuine expertise in the subject was paraded in a particularly public fashion. I did my best, naturally, and I was certainly able to show genuinely high levels of smiling enthusiasm; I was, however, not only a long way out of my comfort zone but also well out of my depth. This final part of the evening was redeemed, it seemed to me, only by the presence in the audience of a retired colleague of mine who actually does understand the subtleties of Chaos Theory and who generously agreed to field some of the questions. And so it ended; I strolled out and made my way home – grateful for the experience overall, but painfully aware of my all-too-evident limitations.

There is a footnote to this, or perhaps it should be a caveat. Apparently, someone from the renowned Cheltenham Festival organisation (science strand here) was in the audience and liked what he saw: Chaos Cabaret moves to the Festival’s science week next year …

Something Good This Way Passed: the Rise and Demise of a Research Partnership

On 20^th March this year I wrote an extended e-mail to a select group of four fellow scientists. In it I outlined why I endorsed the view that we call a halt to our research partnership of almost two decades’ standing. It was an amicable – no, mutually affirming – parting of the ways. Indeed, we have since committed ourselves to an annual dinner in order to honour what we enjoyed together; the first of these takes place this week, and prompted this post. This is, like all my posts, a thoroughly personal reflection on what was, to my mind, an extraordinary partnership, although in this instance I have shared a draft of the text with my former partners so that any inadvertent errors might be addressed.

One might structure these reflections in any one of several alternate ways: perhaps using the oft-present effect of serendipity combined with the best in ‘personal chemistry’ to generate a dendritic image of our joint efforts. However, here, as is common elsewhere, the beginning is arguably a more reasonable place to start …

In the mid-’90s a colleague in my department, Mark Smith (who is now Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University), began a coffee-time conversation about some novel materials he’d been working on and asked whether my team’s expertise would be able to shed further light on them. Mark was, and is, an expert of world-standing in the use of solid state NMR (a distant cousin of the sort of NMR used in medical imaging) to unravel the atomic environment of key atoms in materials; my expertise is in the use of modern x-ray and neutron scattering methods (again, very distant relatives to the ubiquitous medical x-ray) to uncover the atomic-scale structure of amorphous solids and liquids. The materials at the heart of our exploratory conversation were sol-gel glasses, which are a form of porous, glassy solid made by chemical routes rather than by melting components together in a furnace; in this case titania-silica glasses.

For a little general science background to all this please take a look at an earlier post and at the short article I recently wrote for Laboratory News magazine. A talk on glass I gave a few years ago in Canterbury’s Heritage Museum is also available (here, on YouTube) if you want to learn more.

It became apparent very quickly that the complementarity of our approaches provided significant new potential: perhaps the whole would prove to be greater than the sum of its parts. It was. Our first jointly-authored paper, entitled “The role of titanium in TiO₂:SiO₂ sol-gels - an X-ray diffraction study” was published in 1996 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry (the abstract is here, and if you can use it, the DOI is 10.1039/JM9960600337). Our first joint research award, for a little over £230k, came a year later from the UK’s Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, EPSRC. Since then, there has been over £2½M in direct research funding into our work (with more than £1M into my own team for our contribution to this – and a lot more in the guise of access we have won to national/international neutron and x-ray research facilities: mostly here & here + here in the UK, and here & here in France). Much of this was earmarked for personnel of course: postdoctoral researcher salaries and PhD student support, but we also needed additional equipment, chemicals and so on – science research is not cheap. This financial input has enabled research leading to about 120 journal papers between two or more of the partners (~90 involving my own team), innumerable talks at conferences etc. and a lot of schools outreach and public engagement activity. Between them, these represent the more easily measurable outputs from any given research programme. Moreover, without the financial support we would not have been able to train and send out into the world the small army of successful PhD students and postdoctoral researchers that were drawn to the project; from my team at Kent alone no fewer than 15 chemists and physicists have been trained and equipped in this way since 1996 – all now making a positive contribution to society in their own right. Indeed, I must at this point make absolutely certain that I offer each and every one of my research team members over the years the sincere compliment of declaring that the chance to work with such enormously talented people represents one of my deepest professional joys. If you’re interested, there’s a great deal more in terms of detailed information here, including the minutes of our quarterly meetings – a focus of which were the short updates delivered by each and every one of our respective team members, turning our meetings into the very best sort of mini-conference.

I’m getting ahead of myself however: such summative information was never to be at the heart of this reflective post. Allow me to step back a little in order to introduce the other key players in our partnership, and to consider the type of research we sought to undertake – indeed, to pioneer. Keep in mind that all this arose from an initial chat over a hot drink (- most probably Earl Grey tea in my case). At this juncture I can’t help but highlight the value of the humble tea/coffee/lunch break in terms of fostering the new from the free-form coupling of creative minds. Prof. David Colquhoun FRS, a pharmacologist, encapsulated this truth rather well when he said (in one of his own blog posts, here) “failing to waste time drinking coffee with people who are cleverer than yourself can seriously damage your career (and your happiness)”. I think I’d relax this a little by taking out the bit about relative cleverness since, in the present context, it’s an ill-defined concept but otherwise it’s spot on; more than that, it became a characteristic of the partnership that eventually emerged.

What Mark and I started to weave, if you’ll forgive the metaphor, was a cloth which derived its strength from the warp and weft of two of the arguably most potent advanced probe methods available for the quantitative study of the atomic-scale structure of complex amorphous materials. Solid state (magic angle spinning) NMR on the one hand and neutron/x-ray scattering on the other each represent powerful approaches to the study of materials; put them together in a cogent fashion, often with the help of some computer modelling, and one is able to take a big step forward in terms of fundamental understanding. We found ourselves beginning to think along the lines of what we termed a ‘materials-centred’ research methodology in relation to our teams’ work. Broadly speaking, I’d describe this as an approach shaped and defined by what needed to be understood of these novel and usually ‘inscrutable’ glassy materials rather than determined or limited by the particular methods and techniques in which we individually possessed some expertise. We added rapidly to this through the realization that our own background as physicists imposed a limitation: we needed the insights that chemistry brings if we were to be able not only to unravel the structure of these materials but also to generate exciting new materials as well. That first jointly held research award, mentioned above, enabled us to recruit a superb chemist into our embryonic partnership (Dave Pickup – still a collaborator after more than 15 years I’m glad to say). I believe that moment marked our move from a multi-disciplinary collaboration into the deeper world of interdisciplinary research – wherein we strove not simply to derive new insights from the overlap of more than one technique or method but, rather, to synthesize a fresh and holistic way forward from the true merger of distinct creative approaches. To take my analogy further – probably to its limit, or further – we had begun to transform a decent cloth into something more evocative of a tapestry. (See here for an interesting recent article on the wider aspects of interdisciplinary research.)

Serendipity steps in at this stage, as so often is the case in life (- the ‘trick’ lies in being able to spot it and to exploit it). I went to a small conference in Nottingham which was primarily focused on the sol-gel glasses we’d been working on and was asked to be a judge in the poster session (- literally that: mostly early-stage researchers, PhD students etc., seeking to attract attention to their work via a large poster pinned to a display board; there’s often a prize for the best). There were a couple of dozen posters there as I recall, but one attracted my particular attention. As is my habit, whether as a judge or not, I asked a few questions of the PhD student standing next to it, Priya Saravanapavan. Her answer to one of these initiated a transformation in my research and provided a new focus to what was about to become a much-expanded research partnership. She was working on sol-gel glassy materials that were bioactive, which was new territory for me and so my questions were even more naïve than usual. In essence, if one gets it just right, these amazing chemically synthesized porous glasses dissolve harmlessly in body fluids (blood plasma, saliva and their like) in such a way that the body is ‘fooled’ into growing new living bone which directly replaces the glass – shape for shape. Thus, via a combination of straightforward chemical processes and the associated up-regulation of the right genes, one can, in principle, use these materials as a scaffold for the regeneration of bone. It’s not hard to see why this would catch the eye. The key element in these silicate glasses is calcium. Priya explained that, if it is released at the right rate, the formation of the mineral component to trabecular bone from elements like phosphorus etc. in body fluids is inevitable and that the cells which ‘organize’ this into bone, osteoblasts, can get to work. The obvious question for someone with my interests was therefore “Do you know why the calcium comes out as easily as that; where is it in the glass structure?” Well, to cut a long story short, this was not a part of her project and she therefore couldn't tell me … so, I got in touch with her supervisor (a ‘hero’ in the field, Larry Hench). Mark, by then at Warwick University, and I went to see him at Imperial College. After a seriously long conversation, in which he said he couldn't answer my question either, and rounded off with my first and only taste of Jonnie Walker Blue Label, our partnership had expanded to encompass bioactive glasses. (In passing, I looked this whisky up as I was drafting the post: a bottle costs upwards of about £150!)

Larry later retired and returned to his home in Florida, but the biomedical materials group continued to go from strength to strength in Imperial College’s Materials Department under the leadership of the oh-so-talented Julian Jones (see here). Julian’s role in the expanded research partnership proved itself to be of central importance in the following years.

Serendipity entered once more; on this occasion a couple of members of my team returned from a conference and told me that I ought to contact Jonathan Knowles at University College London (see here). Apparently, he was developing bioglasses based not on silicates but on phosphates, and doing so in the context of the Eastman Dental Institute – so a whole new realm of study might be on the horizon. Just as with Larry and then Julian at Imperial, so it was with Jonathan at UCL: my expectations were eclipsed by the reality, with the eventual result that almost the entire focus of my own team’s work, and major strand to Mark’s, would soon revolve around these two major classes of bioactive and bioresorbable glasses. Between them they had the potential to act as bone regeneration scaffolds, to help in dentistry (e.g. with porous tooth enamel: ‘sensitive teeth’), to provide antibacterial coatings, drug delivery systems, … It’s wonderful to be able to say that variants on these materials are indeed being deployed clinically, and that the potential for further development continues to expand.

Now, in all this my own contribution and I think that of Mark (see here) and his successor at Warwick, John Hanna (see here), has primarily derived from an abiding fascination with atomic arrangements in amorphous materials. Indeed, I am confident that analogous statements could be made about Julian and Jonathan (and the others who have, from time to time, joined us for a season within the adventure). However, what set this research partnership apart as far as I am concerned is the rapidity with which we all ‘gelled’ (sorry, obvious pun – I could have talked in terms of personal ‘chemistry’ I suppose …) and the degree to which we, all of us, were able to rely upon and to trust each other. In the process, we have each actively striven to learn the ‘language’ of the others and in so doing to expand the genuinely interdisciplinary approach to our work beyond the confines of merely adding some chemistry to physics. The openness required to achieve this has itself been inspiring to see in action, and the outputs and broader outcomes arising from it provide ample evidence that something good did indeed germinate, grow and flower. Indeed, a peer reviewer of one of our joint applications for research funding coined the epithet “dream team” as a summary of their assessment of us. And that’s the point really: by placing ourselves at the disposal of the others, by forging a genuine partnership rather than settling for a more traditional formal collaboration alone, there arose a whole that really did exceed the sum of its parts – by quite a margin.

The reason we have called time on the partnership is simply that, for a couple of years now, we have been unable to raise the funds required to carry on as a partnership. Although working in this symbiotic fashion brings enormous scientific benefits, there is a financial cost to it simply because we need the personnel to be funded across all the sites if we are to have the coherent flow of data required to fuel our research methodology. The intrinsic strength of the partnership lay in its interdisciplinarity: we covered the full range from fundamental studies at the atomic scale to the initial exploration of potential clinical application, but that necessarily made our projects complex. It is never ‘easy’ to get a research proposal funded – rightly so – but getting the broad spectrum of support needed to fund science across this range is exceptionally hard (even in more buoyant economic climates). Given the high levels of competition even for single-discipline proposals, all it takes is for one reviewer to say something, anything, less than wholly effusive and the entire application fails. This effect has been compounded in recent years by significant changes to the funding regimes; the outcome of this for us was ‘fatal’ with regards to sustaining the partnership. As a consequence, the individuals within it have necessarily and wisely evolved new research priorities and career directions – which will, I hope, prove to be as uplifting and satisfying as the years of the partnership itself. The fact that we have decided to celebrate the extraordinary season of our work together with an annual dinner, above and beyond the continuing ad hoc e-mails, tweets and so on, is testament to one other characteristic of the partnership that must be recorded: friendship. It is, I suspect, an uncommon thing for four independent and ambitious researchers to coalesce in the way we did: rarer still is that we became, and will remain, friends.

What Grinds my Gears

A long time ago my son introduced me to the TV cartoon series 'Family Guy'. He's introduced me to some great programmes in the past, and no doubt will do so again, but this particular recommendation has never taken root. Having said that, there's one line from it which has at least provided the title of this post.* Don't concern yourself: I'm not about to launch into a tirade of moaning and groaning about 'the state of the world', just a couple of things that act as the sort of mildly amusing irritant within my professional life as a (now semi-retired) academic. Indeed, if once I allowed a full and unexpurgated account of all the things that irritate me in one way or another, mild and not-so-mild, to begin to flow then I dare say I'd be here a very long time and nobody would persist to the end. In fact, any such tirade is more likely to turn the blog post, in the minds of its readers, into an annoyance in its own right. So, best not to start eh? Whilst the label 'angry young men' held some caché once upon a time, I suspect few people warm to a ‘grumpy old man’ …

The examples of 'gear-grinding' that spring to mind which have served to inspire this short post relate to an infrequent, but usually interesting - even pleasant, part of my job: acting as the external examiner for a PhD research thesis. Allow me to explain what I'm talking about before we get to the heart of the post. The systems set up to promote and maintain standards with regard to allowing someone to put 'Dr' in front of their name on the basis of a significant body of original research vary around the world. (We're not concerned with medical doctors here, who gain their professional titles from an extended undergraduate degree course and practice.) They have in common the need to establish whether someone's work, as enshrined within their written thesis and/or other published material, clears an accepted threshold of quality. One other fairly common element is the person and role of the 'external examiner'; this is someone relatively senior/experienced from another university/institute who possesses relevant expertise and is therefore able to offer a reasonably authoritative evaluation of the PhD student's submission. (A somewhat comparable system exists in the UK with regard to undergraduate degrees: I've done this job in the past as well.) A typical scenario, once the external examiner has been invited, accepted, appointed and taken the time to read the submission carefully, is that a date is agreed on which the PhD candidate will be 'grilled' for two or three hours by the external and another examiner from the student's own university. 

Outside the UK one finds a few differences of detail. When I undertook this task in Sweden for instance, much of the 'quality control' work had already been accomplished prior to my arrival (- in part, as is more usual there, because much of the candidate's work had already been 'tested' within the peer review process required for publishing stand-alone pieces of research in appropriate international journals). The real novelty for me, as the external examiner, was that it was I who had to explain the research topic, and I had to do that to an audience of over 30 people - including friends and family of the candidate herself! Never mind, there was a great celebratory party afterwards ... and I was paid a small fee for my input. In fact, loosely speaking, it's these nominal fees that underpin the post. The problem, such as it is, comes from the fact that all sorts of bureaucracy pops up once money is involved - even modest tokens of thanks like the fees paid to an external examiner which, if calculated as a payment for the actual work/time involved, would be a rather long way below 'minimum wage' rates. In the Swedish case I needed to have a social security number. I'm not Swedish, so I don't have one. The solution? I had one invented for me by my hosts, based on my date of birth as I recall. That, one might say, was actually a moderately sane response to a bureaucratic formality. Other cases are arguably less so.

Take, for instance, my examination of a PhD thesis from a well-respected Australian university.

Sadly, they only wanted me to provide a detailed written appraisal of the work and send it to them. So, no trip to Australia for me to do this face-to-face I'm afraid - but there was again the offer of a small 'thank-you' in recognition of the out-of-hours time I needed to invest in the task. The sticking point here wasn't the transfer of money as such - it all happened very efficiently - but the fact that this evidently made me, de facto, a member of their staff payroll. Everyone on the payroll was automatically enrolled in the pension scheme, called ‘UniSuper’ in this case. For several years afterwards I got annual statements - on several sheets of paper, sent from Australia - telling me how my pension contributions were shaping up: from memory, I think I might have been entitled to enough, at best, to buy a small cup of coffee once every few years. Eventually, in a document explaining to me the self-evident fact that my Australian 'pension' was decreasing by the year and essentially worthless, I was told that my account was being closed. (Note the address by the way: I'm absolutely certain I had not informed them that Canterbury was in the West Country, nice though I'm sure that would be.)

Is the UK immune? Sadly, no. Despite the fact that, in all cases, I've been asked to act as external examiner by fellow scientists who know me well - in some cases, we've known each other for decades - the now universal bureaucratic interpretation of the law requires that I prove who I am before the examination takes place. The upshot of this is that one now has to show up with a passport which the invariably embarrassed hosts must photocopy for their university's administrative files. Although I've now been through this many times in universities the length and breadth of the country I've still not come to terms with it: however irrational this may be, I nevertheless feel as though I am being declared 'guilty' until and unless I can demonstrate my 'innocence'. Oh well, c'est la vie I suppose. Just to finish off my tongue-in-cheek gear-grinding I'll share with you a letter from a university for which I acted as external examiner recently; this also amused me (but not much). It compounded the sadness of whole box-ticking theme by illustrating the blasé attitude towards the individual in the days of drop-down options menus. Thus, it seems that I not only had to prove that I wasn't an impostor and answer out all sorts of payroll-related questions, but even then run the risk of being regarded as merely one of perhaps several versions of me ...

Ho hum.

* I haven't watched the episode, as you might guess from my second sentence, but the phrase was quoted to me in conversation recently and I've found the clip on YouTube if you want to watch it; beware.

Ah, the holidays are upon us: no time to write ...

I seem to be accumulating a growing pile of ‘post-its’ and notepad scribbles with ideas for pieces I want to write here. One of the hindrances to getting it done arises from the fact that I dislike writing in short snatches of time - but the busy joys of a holiday, followed by the inevitable 'catching-up' process and then our University’s resit exam season seem to have left me with only the odd half an hour here or there when I'm not too tired to focus. Oh well, c'est la vie I suppose.

What I can do during this hiatus is cite an article I wrote for the monthly magazine Laboratory News and which appears in their current (August) issue. It's science-based, but mostly about the history and use of a particular experimental technique first demonstrated by someone who was influential in my early career, Professor Sir John Enderby FRS, and a couple of his colleagues. (We're talking mid/late '70s should you wish to know - I did a final year undergraduate project with him in '74-5 and then joined his research group as a PhD student.) Anyway, if you're at all interested in this important part of my research team's toolkit you can read the article here; I tried to write it without a lot of specialised language. There's an earlier guest post I did for the same magazine here (with a slightly expanded blog-post version here) which is on glass: the class of material at the very heart of my team's research for the last decade or so and the target of several experiments using the technique described in this most recent article.

In passing, and vaguely linked to this reflection because it's on the topic of glass, I stumbled across a video clip last week which was made a decade before I was even born. Although not on ‘my’ regions of the fundamental science of glass as such – rather, it's geared to what we might think of as excellent R&D – it nevertheless provides a fascinating introduction to manufacturing methods as they existed just after WW2 and is held on the British Council's web site (here). This was at a time before Sir Alastair Pilkington had perfected his float glass process for making the plate glass we now take

for granted - a process invented in the UK and then replicated across the globe. The British Council's 1943 movie shows very clearly why large windows were so expensive back then, and hints at why they were more expensive still in even earlier days.

Now, to test the boundaries of my developing theme even further, allow me to recommend that you watch the film Slow Glass by artist John Smith if you get the chance (details here). Sadly, for copyright reasons, all I can point you to in order to whet your appetite is a six-minute clip (here) – the full version is of course part of the artist’s portfolio. I take issue with his central definition of what a glass is, but leaving that aside this is a wonderful short film: do watch it if you are given the opportunity^*. Glass art has of course been around for a very long time indeed and those fortunate to live in a beautiful place like Canterbury have copious evidence for this in the form of large areas of lovely stained glass windows. At this juncture I hope you'll allow me to promote a well-illustrated book on this very topic by my friend and near-neighbour Martyn Barr: Paintings in Light. However, we must not to overlook the more modern work, including that in Canterbury Cathedral (e.g. these by artist Emma Lindsay and by Alison Eaton). Can I push the limits of my meandering theme further? Why yes, of course. We could get into music with a glassy theme: Heart of Glass by Blondie, or perhaps Breaking Glass by Nick Lowe; and if we stretch it to breaking point, if you’ll forgive the pun, we might even get to the music of Philip Glass (perhaps his Glassworks album? SciFi fans would almost certainly recognise his Metamorphosis variations).

Enough; I must by now have demonstrated my point that writing a post with only a short period of time available is not such a good idea – despite the fact that I enjoy the writing process and have had some fun along the way. Hopefully there'll be a more considered reflection in due course ...

* I am grateful to Ayisha De Lanerolle for letting me watch her copy a couple of years ago.

P.s. I first drafted this post online yesterday at the Blogger site – but due to some unknown/freak event it suddenly disappeared, irretrievably, leaving me only the title and a print-out of an unfinished earlier version. What appears above is an edited version of a scan of the print-out using OCR (optical character recognition software): if I have missed some of the many typographical errors induced by this process, I apologise.