The Girt Pike

(Reflections on a life in science:  #1 beginnings and transitions)

“ ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Mrs Rendall, looking wonderingly at the great olive stripes and the bright speckles on its flank. ‘… I had no idea it was so beautiful! I almost feel sorry.’ ‘I feel sorry, missus,’ said Robert, his voice a little choked …
In his house … there would always be an overexposed photograph on the wall of the self-conscious and proud little fellow trying to hold up a pike that was too long and heavy for him. There would always be a photograph of the catch, laid out on the lawn beside a yardstick.
He was haunted by how beautiful the pike had been when it was freshly out of the water, and how its beauty had already diminished when it had been out for only an hour. He knew instinctively that beauty should last forever, and that this world would never be perfected until beauty was perpetual.”

Louis de Bernières penned these words in his gently evocative book Notwithstanding . He uses the situation of a boy who realises a particular ambition – a goal of mythic proportions within the limited horizons of his world – to probe the tussle between achievement and loss which is so often attendant on major events or transitions in life. All such change is intrinsically irreversible in that we are ourselves changed by it, albeit perhaps in ways that may seem imperceptibly small at the time. This is the story that comes to mind as I begin to write the handful of posts I find queuing up in my head and waiting impatiently to tumble out: reflections on a career in academic science as I approach the transition to retirement. Why write it all down one might ask: well, to paraphrase at least one author it is, I hope, sufficient to say that I write in order to discover what I think …

There is, however, a more easily defined catalyst for beginning to write this now rather than post-retirement. Put simply, a colleague of mine shared with me his nervousness at the likelihood of being asked to make a valedictory speech at whatever retirement ‘do’ my department might organise. Whilst he’s aware of my various contributions since his arrival near the turn of the century, he necessarily has a far sketchier knowledge of what went before and he wondered whether I might not try to fill in the gaps. Why not, given that I was minded to write something anyway irrespective of the obvious potential for self-indulgence and self-congratulation (or, perhaps, self-criticism). In passing, I ought to note that our ‘facilitators’ – oh, how I dislike that term – at a whole-day event, designed to prepare me, my wife and about 20 other souls for this change in our lives, were initially firm in their stated preference for the label “freelance” over “retired”. They went on to use “retired” and its derivatives almost exclusively however, and so shall I …

I have been fortunate in having four decades in research, and many more years as a ‘scientist’ – indeed, from at least the age of nine or ten I think. There’s no need to repeat what I have posted already by way of snapshots from the postgraduate/professional years (e.g. here and here) but it might prove interesting to explore a few of the wider or more generic aspects of this one scientist’s working life over time, even if only by way of sketches made with a broad brush. I am by both choice and inclination something of a nomad: my research activities have changed a lot over the years, albeit within the overall landscape of liquids and amorphous materials (see here and here for a bit more by way of scientific background). For this reason, if for no other, I have never expected to land the ‘girt pike’ in the sense of results that win awards or medals, a situation under-girded by a form of the ‘Imposter Syndrome’ suffered by many, perhaps most, academics. It’s not that the outputs and outcomes of my efforts and those of the evolving team with whom I’ve partnered lack interest, importance, impact or influence; rather, it’s that what has motivated and driven me has instead been the inestimable pleasure of working with talented and creative people to solve the intriguing puzzles of nature. To use my metaphor one last time, this is ‘the girt pike’ for me: being able to work for so long within a professional landscape offering such gems. I recently heard someone speak well on the fact that it’s not what we’ve done that gives us value, but who we are. Such a statement begs some large and philosophical questions of course, which I’ll not even attempt to explore here, but a wander around aspects of my science-filled life might nevertheless prove revealing – to me at least.

A ‘shelfie’: some of the now-dated Ladybird books from my earlier years which still survive in my study today – illustrative of the spread in my primary school reading.

There’s nothing like beginning at the beginning, as Dylan Thomas might say. My first declared primary school enthusiasm was not for science but for history. This transmuted over the years into an abiding interest in archaeology, fueled by the eventual addition of scientific insights and still providing highlights to my working life (here). I had great fun as a teenager spending my weekends as a volunteer for the local archaeological team (here perhaps, although my memory is a bit fuzzy on which body the group was affiliated to). However, even in Year Two at primary school there must have been some embryonic disposition towards the sciences: how else is one to explain the fact that, amongst the less pleasant memories I have of that year (huddling around the cast iron stove that provided our only classroom heating, waiting for the milk to thaw and shrink back into the third-pint bottles, and being forced to sit on my hands when I spoke in order to be ‘cured’ of gesticulating) I still recall having to copy off the board “The Russians have put a satellite into space, aren’t they clever” (here).

Within a few years I was doodling designs for spaceships and ray guns, and reading the comic-strip exploits of ‘Dan Dare: pilot of the future’ in my brother’s Eagle comic. My own regular weekly reading was found in the pages of Look & Learn, which had a distinctly more sober-sided content. (I’d been reading Look & Learn since its very first edition in 1962; sadly, my collection of the first hundred or so was lost in one of my parents’ later house-moves.) It’s perhaps useful to add some context here by noting that we had no TV to divert us until I was nine years old or thereabouts – and even then, given what was on offer and the inevitable headaches gained by staring at the 405-line (‘lo-res’!) monochrome sets of the day, one didn’t watch much; the radio wasn’t much better in terms of catering to younger people. 

During my early and teenage years of secondary school I started taking things apart, developed some naïve skill in mixing chemicals and in crystal-growing using the wonderful chemistry sets then freely available (similar to this) and started to take astronomy a lot more seriously. I even kept the occasional logbook describing all this (see the images below). Evidently, I survived the hazards I entertained, and I’m grateful to my parents for trusting me in this – in fact, they let me have part of the shed so I could ‘experiment’. Using a hacksaw to dissect an acid gel-filled battery was the least of the risks: I recall injecting potassium permanganate and other solutions into potatoes to ‘see what would happen’ (- yes, I’d obtained a syringe from somewhere), setting up a small methylated spirit-powered still to try to produce my own distilled water, using the power supply from my brother’s train set to electroplate stuff … and worse. A few years later, once I’d passed my driving test, I graduated to evening classes in observational astronomy and I could more easily visit the nearest sizeable library. I got the first of two parking tickets – thus far – at one such library visit: an example of the ‘perils’ of losing track of time when beguiled by some shiny new facts.

Even then, science was not my only intellectual love: archaeology was still in the running and I’d discovered a fondness for English Literature – the latter no doubt arising from a childhood spent under the chronic influence of asthma. (Before effective palliative care was available, adrenaline injected slowly into a vein by our local doctor was the norm for a serious attack, followed by a few static days in recovery; reading was one of the only diversions.) The constraints of selecting four ‘A-level’ subjects at 16 forced a choice. I decided to go down the physical sciences pathway and studied Physics, Chemistry, Pure Maths and Applied Maths; other interests remained, but had to take a back seat thereafter. The desire not to specialise remained however. Indeed, working in an agricultural college as a laboratory technician for year before going to university re-opened my eyes to the life sciences, and I even studied in my own time towards ‘A’-level Logic during the year – just for the fun of it. Even though I eventually, and due to a clerical error, undertook a degree in Physics rather than the combined sciences degree I had applied for (see here, fourth paragraph) I have been fortunate to have been able to broaden the scope of my work over the years since then, as noted above.

Logbook (aka a simple ring-bound notebook from the newsagent) entries on early experiments with electroplating and the insides of batteries, together with a couple of surviving ‘tools of the trade’ – a pocket microscope and an astronaut’s pen: necessities in their time.

As I approach retirement from my academic career I am grateful that this can in no way signify retirement from being a scientist, since that’s intrinsic to the person I am. There is undoubtedly a transition into another phase of whatever that term actually means. The themes I am minded to explore within this series of posts might be described as follows: 

• Inspirational influences and key people: who and what got me into the areas of science I have explored; 
• developing instrumentation and facilities: starting out before the internet existed, before the electronic calculator even, through to the development and use of large-scale, leading-edge international research facilities;
• ‘random walks’ in research: life at the interfaces between traditional subjects and the serendipity one finds there; 
• ‘the day job’: teaching and all that accompanies it, along with the good, the bad and the ugly of committees and of leadership and so on. 

In all of this I have decided to define a reasonably tight focus on my scientific career, although it is surely self-evident that no aspect of one’s life can ever truly be ‘isolated’ from any other. Thus, in that sense, the posts will be somewhat ‘artificial’ since important influences arising from relationships, health, politics and so on will not be explored other than to provide a bit of context here and there. Time will tell what actually emerges, but this is emphatically not conceived as an autobiography. The other themed posts will emerge as and when I get the time to write them, but hopefully within the next couple of months.

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Postscript (3/9/16): this is the actual series of posts in which I reflect on a few themes associated with my life and career as a research scientist and university academic:

1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions; i.e. the above.
2) Do Labels Last a Lifetime? – people and other influences.
3) Nomadic Research: random walk or purposeful journey? – a timeline in research.
4) Tools of the Trade – instruments and gadgets.
5) Suitcase Science: travelling in hope – tales from a travelling scientist.
6) Why so many? – gender balance in the research team
7) Committees: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly – making things work: discussion, consensus and decision?
8) Large-scale Facilities for Small-scale Science – the big ‘toys’ I’ve helped to build and to nurture
9a) Experiments in Teaching and Learning – teaching at a university (part 1)

9b) Flipping Lectures – teaching at a university (part 2)

Chaos and Regency Style

The week leading up to 7th June had evidently set the elegant Regency heart of Cheltenham throbbing with the annual Science Festival. I had never been before, which is hardly surprising as it falls in term-time and the timing coincides almost precisely with exam-marking deadlines. This year was different however: not only had my partial retirement freed up a couple of days in the week but I was a part of the team* presenting a modified version of the Chaos Cabaret I wrote about here. Even so, I could only be there for the day of the rehearsals and performance.

Source: http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/science/whats-on/2015/the-chaos-cabaret/

Rather than being a full-on and sober-minded science education event per se, Chaos Cabaret majors on fun and then injects some science along the way, which in no way signifies any sense of laissez-faire within the team – far from it. With the performance scheduled from 5:30, almost every minute from our midday access to the rehearsal venue had to be used to the full. Between the first performance at the 2014 Canterbury Festival (which I reflected on in the latter half of an earlier post, here) and this major showing at Cheltenham, Frank had modified and extended the script, two of our three musicians and two of the four actors had changed, and of course the ‘feel’ of the venue was completely different. On this occasion I had the privilege of sitting in on the entire process rather than only the dress rehearsal. It was fascinating to watch their creativity as script was melded with physical action and the whole was wrapped into a framework of music. The teamwork was inspiring. Having said that, the pace was such that there was almost necessarily a tension between the actors’ need for an element of spontaneity – which also helped them get through the all-too-brief time they’d had to master the new script – with the musicians’ understandable need for clear prompts. Apart from a couple of minor observations on the scientific accuracy of phrases in the script, my contributions comprised the folding of a couple of paper airplanes (at which I excel by the way) and being an obstacle. The latter required only that I sat on a chair in the middle of the rehearsal space to simulate the need for the actors to dive in and out of the audience during the performance; this was a role I considered myself born to.

Rehearsals: Frank (foreground) watching Tamsin (right, in the raincoat)
and crew working out their movements for one of the final scenes.

Lack of time or not, everyone needs to eat. Not only did this give me my first real look at all the events underway in the umpteen venues en route, but once I’d registered – as a ‘performer’ I might add – I became the proud owner of my very first Green Room pass in the form of a wrist band. This gave me a chance to stare at the stars of course, and in this context that included a couple of people one might see on TV like Jim Al-Khalili and Mark Miodownik: ‘heroes’ of science communication. The key thing, apart from eating, was to get a peek at the performance venue – the Pillar Room in the Town Hall, which was as grand as it sounds – and to chat to the lovely volunteers/helpers who’d be arranging the seating, operating the lighting and so on. Having said that, I was also keen to see what else was going on: the event is huge, and I’m now very keen to use the flexibility of my retired, or should that be ‘freelance’ status next year to pay a more extended visit. In passing, I’ll share with you the sound engineer’s excellent idea for producing something akin to the noise of a tornado: hold a microphone in front of the air conditioner’s fan and turn the amplifier up to 11.

We had almost an hour for a dress rehearsal before the performance itself. Apart from setting up a webcam on a tripod so I could attempt to record the performance on my laptop (which failed miserably I’m sorry to say as the sound quality was dreadful) I was given the role of resident artist. For anyone who knows just how poor my drawing skills are this statement ought to cause serious amusement. Thankfully, the need didn’t extend beyond drawing a few matchstick people on the sheets of a flipchart: even so, they were grotesque. I really ought to have photographed one of them properly, but there is a ghost of an image in the background of the picture below; unfortunately, this is the cartoon of someone who was quite evidently unsuccessfully ‘beamed’ through a Star Trek style transporter …

It was most gratifying, and somewhat scary, to learn from a volunteer steward that tickets had been sold to all the seats in the room. Thankfully, the performance itself seemed, to me, to go reasonably well; later feedback was positive – phew! This was an opinion not shared by everyone, sadly: one individual left after less than five minutes, telling me as he did so that he found the performance to be devoid of science. However, I discovered afterwards from my wife, who was sat next to him, that he’d been disappointed by an earlier performance as well – and in that case the speaker was one of the ‘greats’ and a truly accomplished communicator; I guess there’s no pleasing some people. As with the version we premiered at the Canterbury Festival in 2014, the performance ended with about 15 minutes of Q&A fielded by me. It was an interesting session, notably because several of the questions were not about Chaos Theory at all (such as the one on ‘Intelligent Design’ and another on parallel universes). However, the really nice thing was the fact that questions came from a wide range of people: the young and the not-so-young, people who knew a little about science and those who were there to learn, and men and women in roughly equal number.

The Q&A session; an example of the flipchart artwork sits in the background.

I’ve no idea where this will go now. Frank has been chatting to a very well-known animations studio about extending the schools work we’ve started and perhaps developing an online version of the whole thing, and he’s already busy putting together funding bids. It’s clear to me that there is a potential demand to take this concept into schools; it’s easy to see how one might use ‘Chaos Theory Workshops’ to get science and arts students working together to generate their own Chaos Cabarets. If this can be accomplished it would tick a lot of boxes as far as I am concerned. Time will tell, as is always the case.

*  Frank Burnet conceived the idea, with project manager Emma Weitkamp, and wrote the script; Joanna Ive wrote the highly innovative score; our lead musician, accomplished as an improviser, was Sam Bailey; the lead actor was the hugely impressive Tamsin Fessey of The Angel Exit theatre company and she had with her a talented trio of colleagues (Simon Carroll-Jones, Jennifer Jackson and Tim Bell).

Finding the Needle

This is an edited version of a guest post in the August 2014 edition of Laboratory News magazine within their "Celebrating Great British Science" series; I nominated the work of John Enderby and Peter Egelstaff in the 1960s in the use of isotope substitution as a great British scientific breakthrough. I have included this version merely for completeness and ease of access - the original may currently be viewed here. 

The phrase ‘looking for a needle in a haystack’ was born as an idiom for the supremely difficult task of sifting out the kernel of an answer from the vastness or complexity of the particular situation in question.  Neutron diffraction with isotope substitution, NDIS, is one of the methods developed in the physical sciences to tackle just such a situation.  This is a sketch of its story, and of its origins in the work of two remarkable scientists almost five decades ago.

In case you missed it, 2013 saw the centenary of x-ray diffraction (e.g. see here) and a celebration of the work of the Nobel prize-winning Braggs; in 2020 we’ll reach the analogous landmark for Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron (here) – worthy of its own article. The early decades of the twentieth century were heady times for the physical sciences.  Whilst the exploitation of x-rays for research happened relatively swiftly after their discovery by Röntgen in 1895, and demonstrations of the analogous potential for neutrons appeared as early as 1936 (Rep. Prog. Phys. 16, 1, 1953), it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that the first diffraction experiments using genuinely practicable beam intensities were conducted by Clifford Shull and Ernest Wollan.  There is a reason for this.  X-ray beams could be produced in abundance and the x-ray interacts strongly with matter whereas, by contrast, neutron beams are necessarily of much lower flux and interact only weakly with the nuclei of atoms.  (To discover more about the neutron sources currently supported by and for the UK scientific community, take a look at the respective websites for the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source and the Institut Laue-Langevin.)  However, the neutron has attributes – including its weakly interacting nature – which make it a wonderful probe of liquids and solids, and once this had been established there was, and continues to be, a strong desire to use neutron beams to the full.  Because the neutron has no charge, its primary interaction is not with the electron cloud surrounding an atom (as it would be with the x-ray) but with the central nucleus; the very weakness of this interaction makes a fully quantitative analysis of the resultant data far more tractable, even if the sample is held within a relatively massive containment vessel.  Moreover, the neutron has mass and this means one can not only use its wave-like properties for diffraction experiments on the positions of atoms, but it becomes possible to probe the dynamics of a material’s atoms as well – as first demonstrated in the 1950s by Betram Brockhouse.  Crucially for this story, there is more: because neutrons scatter from the nuclei of atoms within a material, the nature of that event is affected by the particular isotopes present.  Thus, whilst x-rays are sensitive only to the elements present, neutrons are also sensitive to the admixture of isotopes associated with those elements … suffice it to say that neutrons are marvellous.

A (rather poor) image taken from a special edition of the London Illustrated News marking the 25th anniversary of the reign of George V: these two pages celebrate the scientific advances made in these years, and the images around the article include some 'big' names in the formative stages of modern science.

Returning now to the problem at hand, we need to consider the ‘haystack’.  In the May 2014 edition of Laboratory News, and then in this series of blog posts, I wrote a short piece about disordered materials: obtaining information on the positions of atoms within the regular array that is a crystal is one thing – take away that sample-wide order and one faces a more challenging problem altogether.  Given a liquid or an amorphous solid (e.g. a glass), neither of which possess order to the arrangement of their atoms beyond that driven by short-range chemical/electrostatic forces (i.e. over a distance corresponding to only a few atomic diameters), how does one extract quantitative information about the distribution of atoms of one element with respect to the other elements present?  We may illustrate the complexity of this question by considering a ‘simple’ amorphous material containing only two elements: A and B.  For a full understanding of the atomic-scale structure of the material one needs to know the distribution of A atoms around Bs (and equivalently, Bs around As), A atoms around other As, and Bs around other Bs.  Thus, from one diffraction experiment yielding a single ‘combined’ data set – the structure factor –  we must attempt to extract three distinct distributions, the partial structure factors: this is, self-evidently, not possible.  The complexity of the puzzle increases rapidly if we add more elements; in general, there are ½N(N+1) partial structure factors for a sample comprising N elements.  Tissue-regenerative/anti-bacterial bioactive glasses studied by my own team in recent years, for instance, include materials containing up to six elements: there would in this case be 21 distinct partial structure factors contributing to the single experimentally determined curve.  Add to this the fact that the scientifically key partial structure factor may be associated with an element present at low concentration and/or which scatters neutrons only weakly, and therefore making a relatively weak contribution, and the problem truly begins to warrant the idiom ‘looking for a needle in a haystack’. 

At this point our two scientific ‘heroes’, Peter Egelstaff and John Enderby (later Prof. Sir John Enderby FRS in recognition of his contribution) enter the fray.  In a paper published in July 1966 in Philosophical Magazine (Phil. Mag. 14, 961, 1966), with research team member D.M. North, they successfully demonstrated an elegant method by which one might overcome these limitations in the right circumstances.  The key step was to make use of the isotope-dependency of neutron scattering.  If we return for a moment to our A+B sample, imagine that element A has a stable isotope, let’s designate it A*, which scatters neutrons with a different ‘strength’ to the naturally occurring mixture of isotopes that make up A.  Imagine now two samples, identical in all respects save for the fact that in one of them the natural A is replaced with isotope A*; x-ray diffraction data gathered from these two samples would be indistinguishable from one another.  If, however, we conduct separate neutron diffraction experiments on them we’d obtain a total structure factor for A+B and another for A*+B, each of these totals will of course be the combination of three distinct partial structure factors: AB, AA and BB in the one case, and A*B, A*A* and BB in the other.  Subtracting one data set from the other means that we have immediately removed the BB partial term since it is common to both – leaving only those partial structure factors related to element A.  If we take this further by adding a third sample, and corresponding diffraction results, in which the mix of stable isotopes varies again (e.g. a mix of A with A*, or perhaps using a stable isotope of element B) then we’ll have another data set to add to our armoury.  At this point, by analogy with the basic methods for solving simultaneous equations in mathematics, all three of our partial structure factors may be derived: we had three ‘variables’ (A around B, A around A, and B around B) and now we have the necessary three ‘equations’. 

It is not always necessary to be able to derive every single distinct partial structure factor of course; sometimes all that is needed is to narrow the field a little.  Take for instance some of my own team’s work on bioactive glasses.  A ‘simple’ silicate glass containing some calcium and hydrogen will, if the composition is right, dissolve in body fluid (e.g. blood plasma) and supply a chemical signal to the body which promotes the formation of the mineral component of bone: these materials can provide a scaffold for bone regeneration.  Central to the understanding of how this material works is gaining an understanding of why it is that Ca leaves the glass at the rate it does.  In other words, we need to know where the Ca sits in relation to its surrounding atoms: we need the partial structure factors associated with Ca.  Now, given the presence of four elements (Si, Ca, O, H) a single neutron diffraction experiment yields a structure factor comprising 10 partial components; calcium’s contribution to this is effectively hidden within the total.  Thankfully, nature has provided us with a suitable stable isotope of calcium, Ca-44, which enables precisely the sort of experiment outlined above.  The majority silica component to our diffraction data could be subtracted out, along with the OH terms, leaving only the partial structure factors associated with calcium’s environment, as shown below.  Of the six oxygen atoms surrounding the average Ca atom, only two of them tie the Ca into the silicate glass network by forming bridges to Si – the others bridge only to H or are non-bridging.  The mystery of calcium dissolution is thereby solved (J. Mater. Chem. 15, 2369, 2005). 

Isotope-enriched sample data is on the left, the difference between the two is shown on the right, from which our conclusions were ultimately drawn.

This is but one example of the continuing beauty and the strength represented by John Enderby and Peter Egelstaff’s breakthrough; here is a method by which, metaphorically speaking, the ‘hay’ may be removed in order to see the ‘needle’.  From their first experiments in the 1960s, through the development of high flux neutron sources of the 1970s, and on to the remarkably powerful and diverse facilities UK scientists have access to today, their ground-breaking work continues to enable exciting new science.  Indeed, earlier this year the Royal Society elected another talented expert in the use of isotopic substitution to their pantheon of Fellows: Alan Soper.  Although the use of hugely important complementary probes such as solid state NMR and x-ray absorption spectroscopy have emerged in the intervening years, together with computer modelling, NDIS remains a powerful technique in the worldwide study of materials, and there is little sign yet of any decline to its scientific impact.

I am indebted to colleagues Alan Soper and Robert McGreevy at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source for their helpful advice and input.

Biographical footnote:  I have been publishing research in the field of liquids and amorphous materials for more than three decades - the link to my ORCID account, in which all this work is listed, is accessible via the QR code shown on the right of this post.  A pertinent snippet is that my final year undergraduate project at the University of Leicester was supervised by John Enderby, who later recruited me as a PhD student; we share authorship of four journal papers.  Perhaps surprisingly, given the nature of the above post, it was only afterwards, as a postdoctoral researcher with R. Alan Howe, that the use of neutrons – including the use of NDIS – and later x-rays, emerged as a career theme.

Cool Week: alchemy to roller-coasting via a film script and some chaos

Some weeks are special, in a good way; this week* has been a classic of its kind: an excellent illustration of where ‘Public Engagement’ can lead if one is pre-disposed and disciplined enough to say “yes” by default. I spent Monday afternoon in a primary school with two Year Five classes and by Wednesday morning I was discussing potential project ideas with someone from the re-opening Dreamland amusement park in Margate. Into this pot went an extended skype interview on some recent secondary school workshops, agreeing to deliver a series of U3A talks and checking the science content of two scripts – one for a stage performance, the other for a film. Much of this is outside of my ‘day job’ of course, but that simply underlines the benefits of being able to work part-time.

When I’m asked what sort of public engagement/science communications I get involved with I usually kick off with statements implying a pre-disposition to working with adult lay audiences (e.g. in this guest post, and here), but the truth is that I still love spending time in schools as well. On the whole, this tends mostly to be in the context of Year 12/13 groups – but there are exceptions (e.g. here). Monday’s outing to a local primary school (here) was the second time I’d been in a room with Year Five pupils (so, about 10 years old). However, the first event was relatively ‘safe’ in the sense that I was a mystery reader – I simply read from a book I’d found which wove science into an age-appropriate story (see here, final paragraph) – whereas I was on this occasion much more accessible to the class: distinctly unsafe! My brief was to play the role of an alchemist and to engage with the five groups in each of two classes as they undertook a series of experiments. The back-story had been well-defined by the two excellent class teachers, Miss Brisley and Miss Holbrough: I was to be introduced enigmatically as The Alchemist; apparently I lived at a place called Dragon Vine Towers on Alchemy Island, and although I already had an apprentice I was on the look-out for more. I’d travelled to the school through a portal – de rigueur these days I suspect. The potential for disaster was present from the first moment I stepped into the room in that the pupils were given a few minutes to ask me about my work (as an alchemist that is: tricky in itself given my professional pedigree). Although I had mastered the basics of the back-story, I soon discovered that they’d prepared wall displays showing ‘maps’ of my island home and had explored this ‘territory’ in all sorts of contexts. I had not prepared myself for the persistent, no-limits probing of 10-year olds: lesson number one …

“Where’s your portal?”   
“I don’t like to frighten people so I only switch it on in quiet places … the remote control is in my rucksack … No, you can’t see it, it’s top secret … no, sadly I’m not allowed to let you try it.”

“Why does your white coat say University of Kent?”   
“I called in there on my way and borrowed it.”

“Aren’t you Mr Newport’s dad?”   
“Who’s he?”

“What do you really do?”   and on and on.

This is the set of investigative tasks – experiments – the Year Five pupils were undertaking.

The experiments got started, with small groups of pupils moving in a carefully orchestrated way between the set-piece investigations which had been replicated in their two classrooms. I just enjoyed myself, kneeling at all the tables in turn and chatting with them about what they were doing, what they had observed, what it might mean and why it was important to write it all down. It also gave me the most wonderful opportunity to try to answer their many and varied questions – not least of which were the variations on the theme of how gold is really made (no, it’s not quite like Minecraft … thank goodness my grandsons have inducted me into the basics). I have no idea what short- or longer-term impact I will have had on these Year Five pupils; I can but hope there’ll be some positive legacy from the event. What I am sure of is their impact on me: a couple of hours of sheer fun engaging with these aspiring young people, and without the need to cope with the ongoing extra-lesson pressures piled onto their teachers, almost necessarily leaves one in a better place I think. I can however share with you the tweeted feedback from one of the talented teachers involved ascribing to me an attribute with which I’d not previously been associated:

Dreamland (here) had its heyday in the two decades after WW2, when pre-package holiday crowds filled the lovely sandy beach at Margate and spilled over the road into amusement arcades and food outlets, and into this theme park which boasted a Grade II listed wooden scenic railway roller coaster. I have vague and disjointed memories of being in the throng a few times as a young boy – although never on the roller coaster, not then, not since. Never. Some months ago, the ever-talented head of the Learning team at Turner Contemporary (Karen Eslea) suggested that I contact her homologue at Dreamland once the restoration programme was underway; she wondered whether they might also find a use for a ‘tame scientist’. The catalyst for following up on this advice came in the form of our on-going search for suitable external partners to work alongside final year BSc student projects – hopefully to mutual benefit. On Wednesday I had the pleasure of meeting Donna Watford and of introducing her to my Physics Group Projects colleagues (Vicky Mason and George Dobre). The meeting was a great success and I have high hopes of getting one or two groups of physics students learning from and investing into the Dreamland outreach efforts next academic year. However, given my retirement at the end of September, I’ll not be involved with this myself – my ‘teaching’ is likely to reside within the University of the 3^rd Age (here) from then on, and I’m rather looking forward to the change of audience. Who knows, maybe the ‘tame scientist’ idea might yet come to something – in Dreamland.

Source: http://www.dreamland.co.uk/rides-and-attractions/map

I’ve written about my involvement with Chaos Cabaret before (here). Since then I’ve been helping its originator, Frank Burnet (here), to take the concept into secondary schools in the form of workshops wherein the students work on their own journeys from a butterfly flapping its wings to a tornado (- a route postulated by one of the key people in the development of Chaos Theory, see here for example). The workshop idea has been trialled in two schools thus far. We’ve learnt a lot from these trials and there are some exciting possibilities emerging (hopefully, more news to come later). At one of the workshops we had an observer, Charlotte Thorley of the Public Engagement team at Queen Mary College, University of London (here); she is , it seems, undertaking research into science communications – hence the request for an extended Skype interview. It’s all go … . However, to get back to my present focus, the more immediate challenge is a performance of Chaos Cabaret at the Cheltenham Science Festival (here) – including the operatives of the Ministry of Chaos, naturally. The original script needed a revision; given my primary role in the team as their tame physicist (yes, there’s the concept again) I had the pleasure of checking it through for obvious/serious scientific errors. Frank is very good at this: I had rather little to say. Let’s hope the performance runs as smoothly. Apparently, as a ‘performer’, I get access to the Green Room at the Festival; this will be a first for me.

This isn’t the only script I’ve been sent for review this week. The other is for a proposed film to be ready for the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 2016. It’s loosely based on the plot of his ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’, but set in India and with a strong thread of science and engineering woven through it. The writer is a freelance journalist and author, Carole Jahme, with whom I’ve worked before (- on a project for pop-up street theatre during the Cultural Olympiad). Although it took longer than looking through revisions to something I already knew fairly well (Chaos Cabaret), I have to say that I found reading and commenting on this all-new script a lot of fun. I hope it gets funding: I’d like to see the final product.

All-in-all, it’s been a more than averagely busy and varied few days in terms of Public Engagement; definitely a cool week.

* In truth, this isn’t quite as timely as it seems: although I drafted much of this at the time, it’s taken me another week in order to pull it all together into its present form. In passing, I ought also to note that the school staff underwent ‘trial by Ofsted' a week after my visit: if there’s any justice it’ll work out well for them. I’ll edit additional images into the post when they arrive, after being checked against the parental consent/permissions information held by the school – naturally.

Ma’am, as in Jam: a Grand Day Out

A friend of ours, Fiona Keyte, recently went to Buckingham Palace to collect her richly-deserved MBE: she’s worked tirelessly within a small charity called Time Out which was set up to enable and support the work she and her small army of volunteers does within parts of the local community.  Fiona has now got closer to a member of the Royal family – the Queen no less – than I ever have, or probably ever will.  However, earlier this month I did have a ‘near miss’ …

I’ve written before (e.g. here) about the small projects I have had the privilege of undertaking with some hugely talented people at the Turner Contemporary gallery and ought one day to pull my reflections on these experiences together into a more coherent post.  There is plenty of scope for such an exercise: dropping a scientist into the work of an art gallery is almost bound to generate ‘sparks’, and I have certainly learnt a lot – and perhaps I have changed a little in the process.  In the meantime I thought I might describe my own grand day out at a reception at the gallery in honour of a visit by the Duchess of Cambridge – well, it was only a morning actually and for the most part not very grand, but it was interesting.  Presumably on the basis of my modest input to the work of the Learning Team at the gallery, I received an invitation to the reception and was sufficiently flattered and intrigued to accept.  Having never been invited to anything quite like this before it was all novel to me.  In all honestly this is probably as close to the reason for this brief post as I’ll be able to express: as a scientist and an academic – and presumably it’s the same for most of us – one doesn’t get the opportunity to be a part of this sort of event very often.  Indeed, this was a first for me and I’ve been doing the job for four decades in one place or another.  (It’s not the first time I have posted something along the lines of ‘a day in the life’: see here for an earlier example.  I’ll not write too many, I hope.)

The scene outside Turner Contemporary as I arrived: a flag-seller,
the press and others beginning to stake their respective claims to a spot.

Out of curiosity and an innate need to ‘be prepared’ I turned to Debrett’s, where else, to learn more of the etiquette.  Evidently there are orders of Dukes and Duchesses: only four carry the epithet ‘Royal’ according to Debrett’s (Cambridge, York, Gloucester and Kent – although one might imagine Edinburgh ought to be in there somewhere …) and in conversation one ought to open with “Your Royal Highness” and continue with “Ma’am” – correctly pronounced, naturally.  As it turned out my research was not necessary, although it did inspire my title for this post.  One had to arrive early, and most people got there at least an hour before the royal party were due to arrive, replete with two forms of photo-ID.  Everyone was directed to a large open room in which a handful of chairs and some tea/coffee/water were provided.  It’s good that this particular room has a wonderful view of the sea.  It was also good to be able to catch up with folk I’d not seen for a while and to meet some new people.  But mostly it was standing and waiting whilst, out of our sight, the visitors arrived and were greeted and shown around the current exhibition.  Once the more private events had concluded we were directed into the main foyer – beautifully filled with the sound of a youth orchestra – in order to await the return of the visitors from their viewing.  Those pre-chosen for ‘the line-up’ stood separately from the bulk of us, and in turn in their three small clusters, were introduced to the Duchess; after this there was a speech of welcome before the Duchess went into the room we’d just vacated in order to have some lunch.  With the reception now over, we who had provided the reasonably well-behaved and moderately well-dressed backdrop began to leave. 

In all honesty, I’d think twice before committing more than half a working day for this sort of engagement a second time.  Having said that, I was happy to be able to support the gallery’s work in this small way, glad to have had the chance to chat to people I don’t see often, and pleased to have had a harmless novel experience.  Photography was banned for those of us inside, but there are some images here if you’re interested.

Next stop, if I write according to my current loosely-framed plan, are a few thoughts on some of the committees I've known: the good, the bad and the ugly?

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, …