Committees: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

(Reflections on a life in science: #7 making things work – discussion, consensus and decision?)

Being a member of a small body of people who have been ‘set aside’ to consider a themed set of issues on behalf of the wider group is ubiquitous in professional life, and beyond. If they are established and then led well, and comprise people of outgoing vision, they can be invaluable. I have been involved in more committees, working parties, advisory bodies, consultative groups, etc. than I would now have any hope of enumerating. To the best of my recollection, this activity began whilst a teenager at school (e.g. helping the local manifestation of BAYS – the British Association of Young Scientists, which no longer exists; a contemporary manifestation may be found here however). In the four decades that followed, there has been next-to-no period of time in which I haven’t been involved in this sort of activity in one guise or another. In my circle of academic colleagues I think it is true to say that I have had at least as wide a set of experiences as anyone, more than most. On the basis of these experiences I feel entitled to state, emphatically, that all committees are most decidedly not ‘equal’.

As an undergraduate in the ’70s I found myself responsible, as secretary to the student Physics Society, for identifying, inviting and hosting visiting speakers – which was a lot of fun as I not only got a ‘free’ dinner once a month but also got to eat it in the company of some of the big names of the day. This was, I suppose, an early example of being able to take enjoyment from the work: this still seems to me to be an entirely laudable approach since everyone tends to benefit more in the longer term. Similarly, as a postgraduate research student I discovered another benefit of getting involved in decision-making bodies – this time as the representative of my peers on the committee that oversaw space and other infrastructure allocations (called the House Committee for reasons I never did fully understand): it provided a vehicle for learning in detail about how the place ‘ticked’. These two early lessons have coloured my subsequent approach to committee involvement: if possible, learn and have fun.

Sadly, in the intervening period, I have also been obliged to join bodies which, although bearing the same title, caused a great deal of frustration, even anger, and stress as they wallowed ineffectually through swamps often of their own making. Perhaps one might call these ill-formed creatures the ugly face of committees, in which a lack of cogently defined purpose or terms-of-reference – or an unwillingness to adhere to them – leads to … well, to nowhere of much significance. (See here for a chuckle – just to lighten the mood a little.) These bodies are a ‘black hole’ for time and energy and are best avoided if one’s not willing and able to help to sort them out; oftentimes the only practicable way forward is to disband the committee altogether and take stock of whether a replacement is truly needed. I’ve also had to suffer my share of committees which have been chaired either by ‘tyrants’ or by those unwilling or unable to curb other members who themselves behave like tyrants or bullies. These are the bad ones, in which, for instance, it’s often hard for early-career people to have a voice or to grow in their professionalism; prejudice of various forms will often lurk in its undergrowth (e.g. the sort of sexist comments noted in an earlier post, here). I still remember keenly an occasion early in my career when a chair had, in essence, cynically set me up in order to ‘draw fire’ so that he could step in as the apparent hero of the hour; I didn’t fall for that one again. Committees which are over-powered by a small number of dominant self-serving people are best avoided if one has the choice – or, better, if one is strong or determined enough, the intimidation might be reformed or its effects mitigated through measured challenge. I make no claims to be a perfect committee chair, or indeed committee member, but I can honestly say that I regard it as important that we all try to learn, not only from our mistakes but also from those we perceive arising from others. My impression, for what it’s worth, is that things are not as ugly or bad as they used to be in these regards – perhaps people are indeed trying to learn from the mistakes of a more deferential and hierarchical past. Having said that, it’s clear to me that analogues of these problems do still exist; they are visible to those who have eyes to see.

However, I would much rather focus on the good. Thankfully, there’s a lot of it about. I have often been able to meet and to work alongside talented and creative people, the chance to learn, and the promise of being able to make a positive contribution to the wider good. The irony is that the latter benefit is often paired with the need to share in the burden of making difficult decisions that will inevitably upset some, even as the community as a whole hopefully gains. The ‘higher’ the committee, the more potential for professional reward and the more likely it is that someone will be upset. Without question, the pinnacle for me – in both senses – has been the work undertaken for the UK’s Research Councils and the facilities they are responsible for. I have written before about the neutron and x-ray research facilities that have played such a major role in my working life (see here, here and here for example) and it has been a privilege to contribute to their development. Although my principal contribution has been through the science published from results obtained through them, I have also contributed directly to their capabilities and their management. The former arose from the often leading roles I played in the provision of new instrumentation – about which I hope to write at some time in the future – and the latter, of more relevance to this post, through one committee or another. Whether through the tactical committees/panels that decide which of the many high-quality bids from research groups for access are successful, or via committees that seek to provide more strategic science-focused advice to facility managers, these activities have definitely ticked all three of the ‘boxes’ I defined at the start of the paragraph. Positive though these experiences were, I have been given the chance to practice this approach at a higher level still …

The whole of science research depends on funding. We need equipment, chemicals and so on, we need to be able to fund PhD research students and postdoctoral associates to do much of the work, and in my case there’s a need for those larger-scale facilities that must of necessity be provided nationally or internationally. Only the best can be funded from the finite budgets made available, and that means someone has to decide which projects go ahead and which are set aside or closed down. In the UK it’s the Research Councils that have that responsibility. I have had the privilege of contributing to the work of the Science & Engineering Research Council (EPSRC) since the 1990s through several standing, and some less satisfactory ad hoc, committees deciding on the allocation of many millions of pounds across a spectrum of research groups in the physical sciences. However, it’s my more recent committee work for the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) I want especially to write about. Quite why I was invited initially to join their Physical & Life Sciences committee (known as PALS to its friends) I couldn’t say, and at this level the scope for ‘Imposter Syndrome’ to cripple me was extensive. Setting those (very real) reservations aside, my time as a member and then as chair of PALS, and the subsequent years I spent on their highest-level scientific body – Science Board – ticked the boxes ‘big time’. To put it into perspective, the STFC has responsibility for all the neutron and x-ray facilities I alluded to above, but also for the UK’s major laser facilities, for our share of CERN and a suite radio and optical telescopes around the world. To be a part of strategic debate and decision-making at this level provided an astonishing array of opportunities to learn new things across a broad spectrum, to observe and work with some of the most talented and constructive people I have ever come across, and to share in the attempt to make a positive and constructive contribution to science in the UK. I remain grateful for these opportunities. I ought to add for completeness that these years were very far from the proverbial ‘walk in the park’. Prioritising excellent scientific projects and areas isn’t easy at the best of times, especially when such a wide range is involved, but if one adds to that the need to do so in the run-up to a government Comprehensive Spending Review (e.g. here) and at a time when budgets are under severe threat and it becomes all too clear that the potential for discomfort is high. Despite all the late nights and long days, the soul-searching and anxiety, the frustrations and annoyances, I wouldn’t have missed it. Here, although far from perfect, I found the best examples of leadership and well-prepared and selfless discussion, inclusive consensus and decision.

And then I retired ...


Earlier posts in this series:
1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions.
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

Why so many?

Reflections on a life in science: #6 gender balance in the research team

I am acutely aware of the sensitivities surrounding gender balance in the sciences, and this post makes absolutely no attempt to define or to solve anything. It is a brief reflection from one retired scientist, in one corner of the academic world, of a few decades in which some wonderfully creative and talented people joined, and then moved on from, one particular research team; it’s nothing more than that.

In one of her many excellent posts, entitled ‘Why so few (still)’, Professor Athene Donald offered a handful of survey-derived statistics which made for depressing reading, and in the process defined for me the title to this post. One of these survey results suggested that two thirds of Europeans “think that women do not possess the required skill set in order to achieve high-level scientific positions”; the proportion is roughly the same for the UK alone. Initially, I found this difficult to take on board in the sense that I have always found it hard to ‘get my head around’ such a stance. The University I recently retired from is led by a woman of considerable talent, Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow, herself a scientist, and the department I was in (here) has a healthy gender balance in its staff complement and has been awarded an Athena-Swan Bronze Medal. Women of seniority are not a rarity on campus, even in the sciences/technology areas (e.g. here). Further afield, I have worked with staggeringly talented people of both sexes to whom I, and those around me, would freely offer professional praise. Having said that, a few seconds thinking through some of the decisions I’d witnessed and the comments I’d heard from colleagues in the earlier years of my career (and a few which, although often implied rather than overt, were still in play more recently) changed the mental image a little. In his novel ‘The Go-Between’, published in the year of my birth, L.P. Hartley coined the phrase “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. Maybe they do, but that alone is insufficient as a justification for anything. As a historical example, I recall a male scientist prone to declare that women simply didn’t have the sort of brain required to study Physics (- I got into trouble for openly challenging this view by the way). One is significantly less likely to hear those kinds of views expressed overtly these days – at least, I’d hope that is the case – but there evidently remains a problem. The stereotype regarding how men’s and women’s brain are put together, sometimes associated with the title of the book ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’, holds no water (see here for example, or here). However, the effects of ‘unconscious bias’ persist; thankfully, there is a growing awareness of the need to counteract its effects (see here and also here).

Athene Donald has written and spoken often on matters of equality in the sciences (e.g. here for another recent article), and I applaud her tireless efforts: I am most definitely a ‘fan’. Having said that, it was the direct challenge posed to me by two fellow scientists via Twitter that inspired this particular themed post in my ‘career reflections’ series: Dr. Emma Barney and Professor Jenny Martin, who also writes and speaks on matters of equality/diversity in the sciences.

The Twitter exchange behind this post was brief, but to the point. Note the time delay between their questions and this attempt at a response: whoever says there’s plenty of ‘free time’ in retirement! (On that particular aside, I did squeeze out an update on my new season of busy-ness: here.)

Until I read Jenny Martin’s original tweet I’d never thought of calculating the end-of-career summative proportions of women and men in my former research team. Her follow-on comment was entirely reasonable: on the surface, the figures do seem to label my team as an ‘outlier’ in the physical sciences. From my own – necessarily limited – observations over the years, the ratio of women to men at the levels relevant to us here is more typically closer to 1 in 3 or 4. (The ratio appears to vary widely between disciplines, with Physics suffering far more than Chemistry for example, and all the ratios seem to worsen as one progresses from an initial undergraduate degree through the PhD phase and into postdoctoral research and beyond. My research team principally comprised PhD research students and post-doctoral research fellows/associates; with its roots in materials physics/chemistry, the team members were drawn from both Chemistry and Physics backgrounds. I’ve alluded to this background fact before, e.g. here and here). The additional questions then set my thoughts into a chase for rational answers: was it a conscious decision on my part to aim for this, are there any ‘secrets’ behind the evident gender balance, and given the fact that all involved were in relatively junior fixed-term posts whilst in my team, what could I say in terms of the longer-term situation regarding ‘seniority’ attained after they had moved on?

I’d love to be able to set out a cogent set of pithy reflections at this point, but the honest answer is that I don’t know why my team ended up with this balance; I have no crystal-clear explanation; I have no great secrets to share.

Apart from the naïve effects of ‘busy-ness’, the other reason why there is such a gap between accepting the need to try to address the questions posed to me and posting this piece was the need to do a little research. The obvious first port-of-call had to be via e-mails to all the women who had worked within the team during my time as an academic and with whom I’m still in touch (- thankfully, quite a few). I asked them to look back and to try to sum up what had drawn them to the team in the first place, what their experience had been whilst a part of it and what impact this had had on their subsequent lives. Interestingly, they didn’t fully explain the unusual gender balance either. What they did offer has led me to a few generic conclusions, none of which is in any sense new or ground-breaking – unless I have missed something. The thought of quoting their words directly did cross my mind, and for the most part they seemed fairly relaxed about me using the material, but for one reason or another I decided against this approach. The single most significant point that shines through is that their choice to join my team was influenced by exactly the same sort of factors I’d expect to hear listed by the men who joined the team: the topic was of interest, there was evidence of sufficient research opportunities/funding and of prior published output, and that, for the aspiring PhD students, there was cash available to cover a studentship. There was a hint that the existing presence of women in the team offered some sort of positive advertisement, but this hinted point was not stressed. It’s a rather similar gender-independent picture when it comes to their time within the team. In one way or another, they all commented on the benefits of a friendly and professional working environment and the availability of opportunities to broaden their experience through working with collaborating teams at other universities and research facilities. (The latter, by the way, involved working away from home-base doing our experiments: we travelled hundreds of miles, stayed in hostels and hotels, worked ridiculously long hours and all-too-often eat the wrong foods – an excellent arena for getting to know people; for more, see here.) Guidance and support – both for the duration of the PhD or postdoctoral contract and at key career development stages thereafter – also featured as being important.

There was, however, one key comment which did seem to resonate with what I’d like to believe: “you could not have cared less if I was male, female, … it was all about the joy of the shared intellectual challenge”. When I read this I was immediately reminded, albeit whimsically, of the ongoing #LetToysBeToys campaign, which has spawned some great material on Twitter (see also here). Perhaps we ought simply to #LetPeopleBePeople in this context – a sentiment which emerged within an exchange of thoughts with another of my correspondents I might add.

The final challenge initiated by Jenny Martin’s tweet concerned destinations. This is not an easy question to address, in part because my information is incomplete but also because the associated time-periods are so variable: the first woman to join my team, as a PhD student, graduated in 1989 whilst the last woman in the team is still getting to grips with her first job after she got her PhD as recently as 2012. We are therefore not comparing like with like. However, I am encouraged by the fact that, as far as I am aware, the next step for all but one was into an area of their own choosing – a statistic strikingly similar to what I know of the men when they too moved on. Some have stayed in science, or a cognate field, whilst others have chosen alternate pathways; this is eminently understandable, irrespective of gender. After all, why not try to do what one is good at and enjoys, and celebrate serendipity (as I have done throughout my own career, e.g. here). For some people, men as well as women, training and working as a scientist is but one phase in their lives. Undergraduate and then postgraduate qualifications, and the fixed-term postdoctoral research contracts that may follow, can represent entirely sensible steps on a winding pathway that eventually leads away from a career in science altogether. The value of those steps is not diminished by subsequent choices, but the quality of that later life may nevertheless be greatly enhanced by what went before. As examples, I can cite career destinations for these talented women scientists which include voluntary work as a tax advisor, senior school science and mathematics teachers, a university professor, a laser specialist in a national laboratory, a university science outreach officer, a senior company executive*, … An important caveat I must add here is that a person’s life surely ought not be defined on the basis of work or career alone, or perhaps even primarily on that basis (speaking as one now ‘retired’): we are all worth more than that.

And finally, for something incompletely different (noting the abuse of a much-loved Monty Python phrase) take a look at this post on a vaguely topical subject: ‘Girls Explain Star Wars To You’ – however, be warned, it contains spoilers for the new film ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’.

* see here – which, amongst other things, is currently engaged on a project for CERN building the machines that will be used to build the next generation ALICE detector. This respondent, who graduated with a richly-deserved PhD in 1993, also recommended some pertinent reading, which I here forward: ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman. 

Earlier posts in this particular series:
1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions.
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.

On a Break (from retirement that is)

A greater spotted woodpecker is hanging on tight to the bird feeder outside my window. There’s a late autumn gale blowing intermittent rain and the first sleet of the season across my garden – and elsewhere one presumes – and his beak-full of peanut won’t be won without a fight. Tenacity, and hunger, will win the day. The electricity supply failed half an hour ago and I’m left feeling glad of the remaining daylight and of our new log burning stove, and of pens and paper in order to record these musings. The power cut will, I sincerely hope, be long over by the time I finish drafting this post – but it feels good to be making a start …

The woodpecker, or one just like it,

in action in kinder weather earlier this year.

One of the first thoughts that comes to mind as I sit, pen in hand, is of the language used by the ‘facilitators’ running the pre-retirement course my wife and I attended some months ago. They wanted everyone to couch their language in terms not of ‘retirement’ but of ‘going freelance’. At the time it sounded more than a little contrived, although I disliked it somewhat less than the word ‘facilitator’ itself. In the two months that have elapsed since the transition – call it retirement or going freelance, take your pick – I begin to see their point. For example, one of the enjoyable, if time-consuming, hobbies I wanted to be able to indulge more was writing: posting here in bobᴙeflected of course, but also in other ways. As it turns out I have been so busy with other good or necessary pursuits that I’ve simply not had the connected time necessary to sit and think and write … until the power cut, which neatly and effectively severed a part of my day from its former constraints. What I perhaps ought to do in such circumstances, with time on my hands, is draft the next in the planned sequence of reflections on my life as a scientist and my career as an academic. This series which, to recycle a description coined by Douglas Adams, rapidly became ‘a trilogy in many parts’, is in truth well on its way to completion in that five of these themed pieces have already been uploaded (see the list below or the links within the 5th post, here) and the other four are sketched out. However, I’m going to take a break and review my first two months of retirement instead.

Apart from being able to spend a bit more time with family and friends, which has been wonderful by the way, and doing a little bit of very necessary autumnal catching up in the garden, I have found myself with several new things on my plate. There have been several words-of-wisdom offered me in this regard, ranging from “Don’t say ‘yes’ to anything in the first six months” to “You’ll wonder how you had the time to go to work”; reality has comprised a mixture of both stances. Some requests or suggestions were easily side-stepped, like the not-so-appealing suggestion that I post a scientist’s appraisal of this year’s John Lewis Christmas advertisement (here, but there are some parodies out there as well, e.g. this). In a similar vein is the invitation to the South East Physics Network awards ceremony (here) on the basis of having been nominated for their Public Engagement Achievement Award – it’s hard to drum up the motivation for a self-funded trip to a London event when one knows one’s not the winner. On the other hand, time has been spent in ways that were predicted and have been enjoyable, like beginning to consider the telescope I have been promising myself for so many years. I could add to this the talk on glass I gave to almost 100 people in Milton Keynes and a return visit, behind-the-scenes, to the new Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth (- more on this later, with pictures).

However, there are tasks that have emerged that simply cry out to be done because they are intrinsically important, or in some other sense ‘necessary’. In my case, these have tended to arise from requests from, or on behalf of, friends and close former colleagues, or they arise from on-going commitments which just happen to need attention now rather than later. For instance, there’s a PhD student in Cambridge working on some hard-won and particularly inscrutable data I gathered several years ago in the USA (here) alongside her supervisor (- the latter, Jacqui Cole, was at the time a member of my research team). The student is feeling her way through some unfamiliar territory and needs timely advice, and I’m keen to see the data through to publication, so this takes priority over mere blog posts. Similarly, there are two colleagues who have played formative roles in my career progression through the years – I have mentioned them in earlier posts, e.g. here – who are individually to be honoured by the publication of a special edition of appropriate science journals (known as a festschrift in the trade): how could I not contribute something. Add to that editing some text written by another former member of my team, now a professor of Chemistry back in his home country of China, as he prepares to launch a conference in Beijing, as well as a few other small ‘tidying-up’ tasks from my former department and the apparent lack of time for my ‘retirement treats’ is rendered more understandable. 

Having said all that, there has been a little creative writing going on. I composed a short article at the request of a good friend of ours in California – the request coming via my wife, who had first met our friend when she and her husband came to the UK on a Fulbright Exchange in the 1960s. I have no idea where the draft will end up since it links Fulbright to Kings Canyon National Park to a town called Sanger, and all via the story of a home-grown sequoia tree … It’s in the hands of our friend now.

I promised something on our visit to the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth (here). I have written about my research team’s modest contribution to the on-going efforts to conserve Henry VIII’s favourite warship within earlier posts (here and here) but that was all some ago and I relished the chance to catch up with the current state-of-play. Our host for the day was conservation manager Eleanor Schofield, who first got into this particular line of work whilst working with my colleague Alan Chadwick in our research group. As a bonus to wandering around behind the scenes with Ellie, the day also afforded me the chance of chatting with two people who were there at the very start of our scientific input to this amazing project, Mark Jones and Simon Ware. There is a wealth of background material available on the Mary Rose Trust’s website, naturally, but also via the BBC (e.g. here, in which some of the research we undertook is gently introduced, here and here).

The very first research paper in what became a significant series to be published out of our links with the Mary Rose Trust appeared in 2008: outline details may be found here; as per my usual practice, the people who did the bulk of the work – often students – are listed first and the ‘overseer’ comes last.

Geoff Hunt’s painting of the Mary Rose sinking.
(Credit: Geoff Hunt PPRSMA; accessed 1/12/15)

I don’t want to expand the post by repeating all this existing material; the key point is that, about a decade ago and after Alan and I had been asked to help the Mary Rose Trust understand the basic science associated with conserving their archaeological marine timbers, I set about kick-starting a research programme. Before getting the larger sums of cash required to fund a PhD student and then to recruit a talented materials scientist like Ellie we had to demonstrate the feasibility of our physical sciences approach. We needed to use major, leading-edge X-ray facilities (e.g. here and here) in order precisely to understand the so-called ‘sulfur problem’ whereby sulfur from sea-bed silt, which has suffused the timbers over centuries, changes its chemical state once the timber is in the air to become damaging compounds like sulfuric acid. In addition, there is the potential for iron, from the original ship’s fixings, to catalyse that chemical process. Alan and I already had a good track record in competing for access to the facilities, but needed ‘pairs of hands’. Thankfully, the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights agreed to my request to fund some work by talented undergraduate Physics students Kate Wetherall and Rob Moss and the rest, as they say is history. (The proof of this particular pudding may be seen in their lead-author positions on that very first publication I cited above.) As the research moved on from the initial phase of understanding the basic mechanisms in the specific case of Mary Rose timbers to devising mechanisms to slow or halt the damaging chemical processes, so the research moved further into mainstream chemistry and my involvement necessary reduced. My interest, however, has never declined, and it’s against this background that my wife and I stepped into the new, purpose-built, Heritage Lottery-funded museum back in September. The remainder of the post represents my inadequate homage to the on-going conservation work behind the public museum spaces, steered by Ellie, and the over-arching collections management by Mark and by Simon and fellow team members. The photographs were taken either by me or by my wife, and all with permission of course.

The day started well: coffee with Mark and Ellie in a room boasting a door decorated using an old conference poster derived from our joint research.

With the rigging of HMS Victory just about visible before us, it’s time for Ellie to sort out security passes for us: the Mary Rose is hosted within the historic naval dockyard, and some of the places we’re to visit are not in the publicly accessible zones.

Whether one ought to refer to this as ‘good fortune’ or not, the Navy’s need to dredge an approach channel meant that it was urgently necessarily to raise this Tudor anchor from the Mary Rose site. It’s now undergoing the initial processes associated with conservation. For a metallic object like this it’s a matter of soaking away the salt and removing any accretions from the surface. For organic material, which in the case of this unique Tudor warship is primarily wood, but also leather, rope etc., the physical conservation process is far more complex (see below) and bacterial effects also become important.

Through one of the largest volume vacuum drying chambers around go all the organic artefacts small enough to fit inside: huge numbers of timber and carved/worked wooden items like longbows and eating utensils, leather and other clothing, ropes (like the fragment of an anchor rope shown here) etc. Indeed, there were unopened boxes of new longbows raised from the wreck site and currently safely stored – one only needs a few for the museum displays. The conservation process is similar in broad terms for all such items: long periods in water to remove the salt, followed by drying in such a way that the object doesn’t ‘shrink and disintegrate. For smaller items the vacuum drier can be used, and a waxy substance called polyethylene glycol (PEG) can be added to ‘replace’ the water and provide longer term stability. In addition there are stone cannon balls by the score – far too many to go on display …

In the case of the remaining ship’s timbers – essentially, the half of the ship that was protected by being buried under sufficient silt that the effects of tides, and of all those oxygen-loving living things that ‘feed’ off dead wood – conservation has been a Herculean effort from the very beginning. Once the ship had been raised in 1982 it was placed and supported in a dry dock in Portsmouth harbour (the concrete blocks under her are shown lower left – interestingly, even this dry dock is a listed heritage site) and ‘24x7’ spraying commenced first with water and then with increasing levels of ever-more waxy PEG (see above). As an aside, it is apparently the case that the Mary Rose Trust was the UK’s largest consumer of PEG for the duration of this phase. This went on for years, and was still in progress during and after my research involvement. Building the new museum around the Mary Rose’s dry dock home coincided with turning off the spray pumps – an honour which fell to Ellie (here). However, there must remain a screen between visitors and the ship for a while longer as we enter a protracted final period of drying. This in itself is a complex process, requiring additional supporting scaffolds, laser monitoring to detect signs of movement and a huge air conditioning system – the controls for which may be seen lower right, housed in the lower reaches of the dry dock.

There are lots of stunning artefacts on display in the museum, which can be previewed on their website or in person, but many more in storage, undergoing conservation or at the heart of on-going studies. Innumerable glass objects have come up from the site of the wreck, but most of them are of later origin, often Victorian, and which simply happened to settle on the site. The bottle fragment shown above, alongside part of the meticulous record cards associated with it which Simon Ware curates so well, was found below decks as it were and so is definitely Tudor. Given my passion for glass (e.g. here), this fragment immediately caught my eye as Simon open the drawers in one of his extensive storage areas. I imagine that this would have been an expensive vessel in its day; it’s finely blown, although subsequent exfoliation has marred its beauty a little. The scientist in me was curious about the composition though. It is in essence a fairly ‘standard’ soda-lime glass, most silica but with added sodium (Na, and in this case potassium, K) to reduce the melting temperature and calcium, Ca, to make it workable over a broader range of temperatures. The precise mixture of these components, and the presence of other elements such as magnesium, Mg, can give us a forensic-style ‘fingerprint’ relating to the origins of the glass. The addition of iron, Fe, would have coloured the glass – the precise colour depending on the chemical state of the iron. The presence of aluminium, Al, is a little unexpected however. There’s a great deal of potential for further research here I think … oh, but I’m retired now.

At this point I’m minded to return to the woodpecker: sometimes there is a need to hang on and to focus on the good things in front of us. The first couple of months of retirement have been full, even busy, and there continue to be louder and more protracted ‘echoes’ from my pre-freelance career than I had expected. However, all-in-all, I’m grateful for the reassurance that there will be no shortage of interesting things to engage with – even if that means, in effect, taking a break from ‘retirement’ now and again.

Existing posts in the career-reflections series (i.e. the series I ought to have been finishing):

1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions.

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

Suitcase Science: travelling in hope

(Reflections on a life in science: #5 tales from a travelling scientist)

I am told that the Head of Department who had, earlier that year, appointed me to my one-and-only academic post launched into a speech of welcome at the staff Christmas party. I think it was in this context that the labels ‘suitcase scientist’ and ‘seasoned traveller’ were used (but perhaps those came in a later newsletter piece and I am conflating memories …). Unfortunately, by the time he felt it appropriate to quieten the gathering in order to speak, my wife and I had already left. A somewhat inauspicious event one might imagine; it certainly caused me more than a little discomfort when I found out about it, despite the fact that I had acted in complete ignorance of the planned formal welcome. Thankfully, he made no mention of it to me and evidently managed to move on; eventually, so did I. However, the label ‘suitcase scientist’ stuck with me for years and it is against that backdrop that I thought it might be interesting to review the less lustrous side of my research travels. Things that can, and do, go wrong and consequently mar the supposed glamour. However, before embarking on this trail of woes it is important to point out that in about four decades of research, the bulk of which has been dependent upon experiments at shared sophisticated national/international facilities distant from my university base, the outcomes of which are oft-times shared through conferences in one location or another, everything has progressed uneventfully, even pleasantly. Indeed, so uneventful in many cases that one might almost refer to it as blissfully boring.

The original Physics Laboratory building, site of that first staff Christmas party in 1985. (Line drawing by my wife; the 'social area' venue - now one of several snack bars - was behind the ground floor plate glass windows shown on the left.)

El Rancho will start the ball rolling in style. Against the backdrop of a difficult period for science funding in the mid-1980s, I was seconded from my job at the UK’s pulsed neutron facility (here) to the neutron research facility (here) housed in the ‘open’ part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (LANL). With my wife and our two-year old daughter we made the long haul for a four-plus month sojourn in this southwestern corner of the USA.* It really was a long haul: London to New York to Albuquerque, where we collapsed into hotel beds for a jet-lagged night before taking an 18-seater twin-prop for the final flight to Los Alamos. Oh how lovely it was to meet our hosts, with whom we stayed for a few days before decamping again, this time in our ‘compact’ leased car, to the single story house we had agreed to rent for the duration. The rental had been arranged prior to our journey via an office at LANL, although they were careful to point out that they were acting only as go-betweens. El Rancho was a small town at the end of a dirt road about 1000 m down from the 2000+ m elevation of the Los Alamos mesa; New Mexico can be hot in Summer, but altitude provides some relief from this and adds the benefit of low humidity – El Rancho had, shall we say, fewer such benefits. The property was of regionally typical adobe construction, and were there no other considerations one might have thought it quaintly reminiscent of the Old West (- we’re not far from the Rio Grande and from the Pecos wilderness, and Sante Fe was ‘only’ an hour away across the desert). However, the warning signs began to emerge very rapidly. Even before entering the house we were told that a neighbour had very recently been shot and killed on his drive and that alcohol-related crime was not uncommon. Inside the house we discovered informative documents laid out for us concerning the existence of rabies and the prevalence of fleas carrying ‘bubonic plague’ via the local mammals. We were also warned of venomous snakes and insects (noting the log pile just outside the door) before exploring further and finding that the beds comprised mattresses on the floor – one of which had a hanging basket of indoor plants (hosting goodness knows what) suspended over it. Imagine it: hot, vaguely hostile and insecure, and us with a two year old child. The final straw came early the next morning, after a less than completely restful night. The water for the house came directly from a bore hole via an electric pump; the water first turned yellow and then sputtered into nothingness. We learned later that this is not uncommon in the summertime, but no-one had mentioned this to us beforehand. We gave notice and left, a month’s rent out of pocket.

There was a silver lining, which began in the kindness of strangers in this strange land. Not only did my long-suffering host’s family generously offer to put us up again for a period, but after a visit from my wife a local realtor (= estate agent in the UK) took it upon herself to sort something out for us. She very quickly put us into a vacant unfurnished house for the interim, for which my new colleagues offered sufficient furniture to enable us to ‘camp’ there for a few weeks, before she come up with a delightful small apartment in the central part of town. What stars these folk were.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of other unpleasant stories associated with travelling to and from LANL as part of this project. If you’re nervous about flying then I suggest skipping this paragraph; seriously, move on. One occurrence concerns a problem with a DC10 that took me from London to the Dallas-Fort Worth gateway. On this occasion I was travelling with my UK line manager. Less than an hour out of Dallas there was a loud bang and almost immediately the plane began to descend. The descent was very rapid but, not that I’m an expert, it didn’t seem to be uncontrolled; in a strange way, the more concerning thing was observing the flight attendants rapidly strapping themselves into their seats. The other noticeable thing was the silence in the cabin: no outward panic, no screaming and shouting, just silence. People were lost in their own thoughts and prayers. After what seemed like several minutes, but was probably far less, someone from the flight deck informed us, in a voice that I recall as being almost laconic in its measured control, that a compressor which operated part of the landing gear hydraulics had ‘blown’ and that the landing might prove to be a little bumpy. We circled for a while and then began our final runway approach – which turned out to be towards a runway having all sorts of emergency vehicles ready and waiting to chase us as we touched down. The landing turned out to be as smooth as most are and after disembarking, clearing immigration, collecting our luggage and going through customs, my boss and I walked across the airport to our connecting flight; back in the saddle one might say. I have delighted in ‘boring’ flights ever since. The second bit of excitement takes us to a winter blizzard swirling around the canyon-bordered finger of land that was the Los Alamos local airport. This was a white-out of significant proportions. I had chosen this, unwittingly, as my arrival time from Albuquerque (two hours away by car, and bathed in winter sunshine as I recall) on the small twin-prop STOL (Short Take-Off and Landing) plane that made the trip several times a day. These were normally relaxed flights, in the days when the pilot could pin back the cabin door and chat with passengers. On this occasion, we were instructed to strap ourselves firmly into our seats as he would need to undertake a powered dive down towards the runway in order to counteract the effects of the turbulent wind coming up the canyon walls. This was unquestionably more exhilarating than I’d have chosen it to be but, again, all went well.

Despite having read many of George Orwell’s books, I’ve never read his first full-length one: ‘Down and out in Paris and London’. It’s reputed to be semi-autobiographical, and although I suspect I could compete with him on some biographical fronts my own tale of Parisian woe is far more modest. Back in the days of yore, before mobile ’phones and when my wallet had yet to house a credit card, I found myself stranded in Paris. This misfortune arose from the inefficiency of the travel office that my university obliged us to use back then (the late 1980s): they had used the summer timetable to book my train tickets to/from the Institut Laue-Langevin http://www.ill.eu/ in Grenoble, France so that I could conduct a few experiments there – but this was wintertime. The times happened to be the same on the outward journey, and even on the Sunday return journey the initial Grenoble-Paris leg maintained my state of blissful ignorance. It was only once I’d crossed Paris to the Gard du Nord that the reality of my situation became evident: the last train of the day had already departed for the Calais ferry terminal. To say that I’m limited to survival-level schoolboy French is to be kind, but at least I could make a reasonable job of pronouncing the words in a phrase book, and armed with this I found an enquiry window still open in the station. In broken French and equally broken English the two of us came up with the agreed facts of my predicament and the only practicable options – I won’t call them solutions – to address the situation. There were no trains to Calais for more than 12 hours and the news regarding Boulogne was no better. I had very little currency with me: barely enough for some food, let alone a cheap hotel for the night. I could however cross Paris to Gare Saint-Lazare and use my existing ticket to get to Dieppe on a very early morning train and thence across to Newhaven. I’m not sure why I chose the latter option, although I suspect it simply felt better to be doing something rather than nothing. Off I went. I found somewhere to sit in the station concourse which looked quiet but wasn’t isolated, and I settled in to watch the night away. It happened to have been the day of a France v. Wales rugby match which at least meant I had a few wandering groups of fans, arms around each other to steady their wandering progress, to break the stressful monotony. I also got to see pools of yellow light emerge from dark corners now again as a match was moved to and fro under some aluminium foil for a while. Ah, the glamour of international science research. It was still fairly dark when I got on the train; never have I been happier to sit in an old and grubby carriage. I don’t recall speaking to anyone until I was on the ferry and in one of the lounges. The crossing took about four hours and everyone seemed to want to while away the time chatting to neighbours (- apart from a few rugby fans who were, evidently, hunting down a ticket tout accused of all sorts of wickedness). A rough-and-ready game of ‘What’s my Line’ seemed to emerge. One of our party was apparently returning to the UK after having run away some years before to join the Foreign Legion; I knew enough not to ask for additional details. Story-telling added something quite positive to the journey, whatever the veracity of their content. Amusingly, my coyness about volunteering that I was a physicist – learnt through years of watching eyes glaze over – led to the conclusion that I worked for the secret service; my amused denials of this seemed only to convince my companions all the more. I slept for a long time when I finally reached home.

Then come the riots and the earthquakes: oh yes, all the best stuff comes to us suitcase scientists. Although a year or two apart, both took place in San Francisco whilst I was there presenting research outcomes to a very large annual conference (- well over 1000 delegates, spread across more than two dozen themes running in parallel). I can brush off the earthquake as it happened at night and I was completely ignorant of it until hearing the news over breakfast. Thankfully, the damage was relatively minor and there were no serious injuries. It’s hard to miss or to forget a riot though. The troubles (see here for background/cause) were centred in Los Angeles, but rapidly spread along the coast. Along with two members of my research team, I was staying in a hotel a few blocks from the conference venue; as was our habit, we met in the lobby that evening in order to find somewhere to eat. However, there were armed security guards on the door and we were politely advised to eat in the hotel that evening. One doesn’t argue against advice of that nature. After the meal we sat in darkness in whoever’s room was on the highest level and watched it all progress through its scary sadness. Helicopters beamed spot-lights from above; small fires illuminated the unfolding tableaux below. By the morning, all was silent. We walked guardedly to our conference venue, passing shop front after shop front with their new borders of shattered plate glass fragments; it was a sobering sight.

The saddest story of all is a particularly personal one. I was spending a couple of weeks doing some experiments at a research centre at Studsvik in Sweden (now closed, here). It wasn’t an easy place to get to: a flight to Stockholm followed by a train journey of more than an hour to Nyköping, here) and a final 45-minute bus ride to the Studsvik site. In many ways this was a lovely place to work, sited as it was on the shores of an inlet off the Baltic Sea and within the woodland home of moose and other animals – but it was definitely isolated. For the duration, I shared one of the self-catering houses reserved for visiting scientists and engineers. In the early hours of one particular morning one of my housemates woke me to say I was wanted on the ’phone. It was my wife, informing me that my father had been taken seriously ill and that I ought to get back to the UK as soon as I could. Nothing could be done until the local staff started work; they were wonderfully helpful in terms of sorting out flight changes and getting me to Nyköping station, but I nevertheless arrived far too late. There is far more I could add at this point, but I’ll refrain.

I could talk about the sounds that kept me awake as they came through thin walls in cheap hotels used during the early years of my many experiments at the ILL in Grenoble, France (see here, and also, in later years, here), or of being stuck on trains and in airports in all sorts of places. I could mention the tight timing between an experiment and getting to my own wedding, and the longer-term issues associated with managing a sustainable work:life balance when so much of the work had to be conducted away from my home base. I won’t do that: I’ve probably written too much as it is, and you’ve probably got enough of your own ‘horror stories’ already. I will finish simply by reiterating that these tales represent the exception: most of my travels as a ‘suitcase scientist’ have been, as I said earlier, blissfully uneventful and for that I am grateful. Moreover, as I’ve said many times before, I have in the process been afforded the opportunity to make a small contribution to our knowledge of the material world around us, and I’ve had as an integral part of my job the privilege of meeting and working alongside some lovely, talented and creative people.


Earlier posts in this series:
1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions.
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.


Footnotes
* In fact, although the three of us were there for less than five months, the project I was running extended over 15 months and as a consequence I made the return trip no fewer than five times for repeat stays of two or three weeks at a time. I wrote a little about this work here in the fourth paragraph; I’ll pick up on this again in a later post I hope.

Tools of the Trade

(Reflections on a life in science: #4 instruments and gadgets)

Vacillation and procrastination are amongst the enemies of this series of posts, as well as the unexpectedly long time it takes to choreograph and follow the steps necessary to achieve a relatively ordered transition into retirement. My office is now reasonably clear, although there are several boxes of ‘stuff’ that still need to be transported home and squeezed into our painfully re-organised study; thankfully, this volume has been much reduced by a sustained programme of scanning – computer files are so much easier to handle and store. I also need to summon up the reserves needed in order to release the majority of my beloved collection of books into the hands of students, colleagues and charities: about five metres of them still await their fate. What I am bringing home falls into two broad camps: the useful (what I’ll continue to use in public talks on glass etc.) and the sentimental. There are however several items I’d love to have been able to keep but must simply photograph or scan and leave behind. Amongst these I include a few samples and measurement cells from truly key experiments – I don’t want the headaches associated with their safe disposal and so will gratefully rely on the services of our technical support team – and the more bizarre items like the 1926 Kelvin Double Bridge shown below.

Rescued before it ended up in a skip, this thing of beauty has served as a talking point, a coffee table and a footstool in my office for a great many years. It has ‘broken the ice’ with innumerable visitors, alongside the impressive high voltage rectifying valve from a WW2 radar unit and my home-made ‘sol-gel’ clock. (To give you an idea of dimensions: the Kelvin Double Bridge has an approximate box size of 64x46x25 cm – or 25x18x10 inches in its original context – and weighs a lot. It is going to a good home, but I’ll miss it. The vacuum valve is about 40 cm tall)

However, I mostly wanted to record a few of the ‘artefacts’ associated with my career that I have dragged out of various cupboards or off high shelves. Apart from the inevitable nostalgia, it’s been a sobering process in certain respects. The area of numerical calculation for example, which is intrinsic to the physical sciences, represents a particularly notable progression: my career grew out from the days before personal computers and electronic calculators. Similarly, I began my life as a scientist relying on hand-written documents and carefully drawn diagrams and graphs; even with a typewriter available the equations would remain hand written, and modern-style printers scanners and photocopiers were unheard of. Open access to telephones (landlines all) was reserved for the more senior people, and international calls were very rare indeed. The arrival of fax machines represented a huge step forward in timely communication, with e-mail and the internet following on behind; indeed, I still love the idea of e-mail’s immediacy – even though I have long-since tired of all the dross that gets transmitted. I might add a little context here by mentioning that I was the first regular user of e-mail in the Science Faculty of my university, that I defined the first framework for our presence on the web (and later chaired a working party to do much the same for the university as a whole), and that I had one of the first ‘personal’ desktop word processors in the Faculty; much of this practice I brought with me when I moved from the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory to take up my new academic position. It’s easy to see why, on reflection, I have been a little taken aback as I review the scale of developments during one modest scientific career. In essence, this post comprises a collection of images with a bit of surrounding prose; it is in that sense even more self-indulgent than earlier posts in this series.

These are some of the artefacts from the more ancient levels of my career. Compasses, protractors and set-squares were ‘universal’, and are still used now; ‘Rotring’ pens and stencils, flexi-curves and Letraset transfer sheets  were arguably a little more specialist in their nature. My detailed calculations were initially performed using four-figure Log Tables, later up-graded to five-figure when more precision was required; the double-sided slide rule enabled fast ‘reasonable’ estimations to be performed. (By the way, slide rule operations were themselves based on the use of logarithms: for example, adding/subtracting lengths to perform multiplication/division.) The first truly ‘consumer-level’ hand-held calculator I saw, in the hands of a fellow undergraduate with rather more cash at his disposal than I had, was the Sinclair Scientific. I didn’t get a calculator myself until I was part way through my PhD; the one shown above is the second one I purchased – it handled all but the most protracted calculations required for my thesis (The Electronic Transport Properties of some Liquid Metals and Alloys, finished in 1978 and awarded the following year).

I’ve written before (here) of my visit to the working re-build of the very first electronic computer: Colossus, at the National Museum of Computing, next door to Bletchley Park. I’m buoyed by the fact that my own first experience of ‘high-level’ computing was on a machine – the PDP11 should you wish to know – which by modern standards wasn’t fast, but at least that didn’t run on valves. The programming language required, which we learnt in one of the post-exams courses we were obliged to take as first- and second-year students, was the rather inelegant Basic. Even so, as a course exercise, I managed to write a working programme to balance instrument packages aboard an imagined multi-level spinning orbital satellite. Later calculations, necessary for some of the final parts of my PhD research, were based on the much more powerful (although now passé) Fortran-IV language; these had to be run in something called ‘batch mode’, meaning, in essence, ‘overnight’. Current desktop computers and laptops are far, far faster and easier to use.

These are all relics of a bygone age of numerical computing. Although lighter and in many ways more convenient, the paper tape was nevertheless fragile: one tear could wreck several metres of program and/or data. Punched cards were certainly more robust, but a failure to stick to colour-codes for the various parts of a batched computer run (delineating program, data, end-of-section etc.) or to number each card within a given section would be disastrous if the deck of cards, which might be over a thousand deep, were to be dropped! For my early neutron scattering experiments I bought a large rucksack simply to carry the data on the train back to my university. Magnetic tape represented a huge step forward (this one, about 1 km long and in a roll of diameter approximately 27 cm, holds datasets from the 1980s at 3250 ‘bits per inch’ and is essentially unusable now – it’ll be destroyed). The output from each batch run could be on tape/card, but it wasn’t at all uncommon to get results printed onto fan-fold paper; print-outs of programs etc. would be done in the same way.

Let’s move on from numerical calculation. One of the many documents I have flicked through as I decided whether to recycle their paper, scan them or keep the original was my final year undergraduate research project report. The report was the first thing I had authored which made it to type: a friendly typist agreed to do the text part, and I inserted the equations, graphs/figures/diagrams by hand using the tools illustrated above. In order to have a copy of this for myself the typist had to use carbon paper between the top sheet of paper and a second one beneath* – and I had to re-draw everything else! The production of my PhD thesis was a little more advanced. After I had written it all out by hand another typist, in this case a friend who was under-employed and bored in her role in another department, typed up the text and my recently-wedded wife and I spent four long days inserting the mathematical content in the spaces left for the purpose. For this, we had the loan of our friend’s ‘golf ball’ typewriter which I augmented with a ‘ball’ of maths/science-related symbols I purchased. However, all the diagrams and graphs still had to be drawn by hand. I’m not an expert draughtsman, far from it, so I ‘cheated’ a little: everything was done on A3 paper, using my Rotring pens, letraset sheets, flexicurve etc., and then photographically reduced to A4 – that way, all my small mistakes were rendered ‘invisible’. (In passing, one might also reflect on the fact that there were photographic darkrooms aplenty back then and one could make a living doing this sort of thing. The story of photography, however, is well outside the scope of this post.) It took me almost six months to generate the top copy of my PhD thesis. Thankfully, photocopier machines had begun to appear by then and the university had a couple of them in its main library; I gratefully paid to have the requisite copies generated – indeed, I’d have gone without food in order to cover the cost if that’s what it would have taken. Research students have in more recent times asked about the curious formatting rules & regulations they had to follow in order to submit their own theses: many of these were anachronisms associated with the laborious nature of generating a thesis ‘in the old days’. For instance, although self-limiting in some senses, strict page/word limits were imposed in order to render the task tractable#; double-spacing to the lines of text allowed one to incorporate by hand any small corrections or revisions required by the examiners (imagine having the retype an entire section in order to correct a few words!); wide margins enabled the binder to guillotine the pages more than once if new pages needed to be inserted. Word processing, scanning, drawing packages, printers and so on have rendered all this work so much easier. Bliss.

Three pages from my PhD thesis are shown above in order to illustrate the laborious nature of its production – even setting aside the preceding 30 months or so of experimentation, reading, calculation and so on. The diagram on the left is of a bespoke sample measurement cell I made (in fact, I made several of them … more below); drawn on A3 paper with pens and stencils and then reduced to A4 to yield this final result. In like manner, the graph next to it was put together; note that each and every data point and error bar was hand-applied. On the right is a page of equations typed, symbol by symbol, under my guidance by my wife into the space left for it by my volunteer typist.

Now to the equipment – all those things required in order to get the results I needed. Developments have been no less remarkable in this sphere. If you’ve read the opening post in this pre-retirement series (here) you’ll have realised that I gravitate to the experimental side of the sciences; the more hands-on the better. It’s a mild curiosity then that at the heart of my undergraduate final year project was a rather impressive, and presumably expensive, ‘off-the-shelf’ spectrometer (see below). However, my PhD years put all that to rights. Not only did I piece together a project from ‘clues’ left by an absent supervisor, who referred me to the log book of an academic visitor who had by then returned to the his home in the USA, but, almost literally, I had to piece together much of the equipment necessary to make it happen. The sad truth is that there was next-to-no funding for this work, so if I didn’t do it myself it wouldn’t get done. To cut a very long story short, which is lodged forever in my memory, and formative within my evolving research ethos, I built my own furnaces in order to make my chosen molten metal alloys. I designed and built others then to hold these samples at precise temperatures in vacuum. I also had to design and fabricate the calibration/measurement cells to fit inside the furnaces such that I could accurately probe a given sample for its electronic properties (resistivity and thermopower). There was plenty of scope for hands-on experimental science. I have no recollection of any formal risk assessments being carried out at the time; in practice we were all aware of the potential hazards and took reasonable steps to mitigate the possible consequences. Having said that, I recall finding out what happens when one (accidentally) shorts the 12V car battery being used to drive a motor on a screw-jack: did you know that one could spot-weld things together quite effectively that way? I think I'd better stop at this foolish accident and say no more ...

I could go on for quite a while about instruments, equipment design and development and so on. Indeed, there is probably enough material for several posts on the ups and the downs of equipment and instrumentation developments alone. However, I must discipline myself to focus on the goal originally set: a themed skip through the decades, picking out a number of examples along the way. I hope to write a post at some stage on the more major projects I’ve been involved with, but that’s not my intent now. Herewith a few more pictures, and the necessary explanatory words …

Shown above is the EPR spectrometer (electron paramagnetic resonance at the heart of my undergraduate final year project. I’ve mentioned this in an earlier post (here) in the present series; it was the first ‘off-the-shelf’, ‘big-league’ item of equipment I ever used but despite its impact on me at the time you’ll spot that the controls are mostly analogue rather than digital and the output of results comprised a plot from a chart recorder. Note also the hand-written labels to the report’s photograph, which itself was of necessity limited to monochrome.

This painting by my wife illustrates the contrast rather well as I entered the world of an almost completely unfunded PhD project: the inset caption is from my thesis and blandly mentions the need to calibrate each of the measurement cells I made. The calibration setup I put together relied on a modified marmite jar (which had more robust metal lids at the time), rubber sheeting, cling film, masking tape and a contact adhesive. I need say no more.

These are the principal furnaces used: the vertical one on the left, which stood about 2m tall and accessed temperatures in the region 1600°C, and the smaller more ‘flexible’ unit on the right. The latter was made by me from scratch – from winding and cementing the heating wire onto the furnace tube through to the vacuum system. Notice the very early ‘computer’ on the desktop for data collection and basic analysis (details here); this contrasts nicely with the fact that I raised and lowered the furnace using a old car jack. Look carefully and you may also notice, on the shelf to the upper left of this image, the dark glass of the marmite calibration unit mentioned earlier and the plastic bottle of liquid mercury used as a ‘model’ for my high temperature molten alloys.

These are some of the measurement cells I fabricated in order to study the electronic properties of molten metals. For those alloys melting below about 1250°C I used pure silica glass. This meant learning enough glass blowing to fuse a length of wide-bore tubing to a capillary tube (the walls of which I drilled through in places, using an ultrasonic drill and a hand-made drill bit, and ‘plugged’ using hand-finished graphite pegs to allow electrical connection through to the liquid metal). The assembly shown here had a total length of about 40 cm. For the higher temperature work, which went up to almost 1700°C, I had to use multi-bore alumina tubing (the ceramic version of sapphire) and use a diamond wheel to grind the end to provide the right sort of shape to get the resistivity measurements when dipped into the liquid metal. The bottom right-hand image shows the ground tip of the alumina tube next to the end of one of my fingers in order to provide a bit of scale. There’s a lot more to it, as you might expect, but you’d need to read extracts from my PhD thesis for that …

Earlier posts in this series:
1) The Girt Pike – beginnings and transitions.
2) Do Labels Last a Lifetime? – people and other influences.
3) Nomadic Research: random walk or purposeful journey? – a timeline in research

Footnotes

* hence the term ‘carbon copy’: the ‘CC’ used in so many e-mails. If a third, often secret (i.e. ‘blind’) copy were to be made – transmuted to the ‘BCC’ line in e-mail headers – then another sheet of carbon paper and third sheet of plain paper were required; the quality of this additional copy was generally very poor. 

# It is also important to ensure that students are able to communicate their science in an effective manner, and that never requires ‘padding’ the text. Furthermore, one’s examiners are likely to baulk at having to read and assess an overly thesis: I know, I’ve examined a great many since those early days.