Please be patient while I experiment with audio to drum up support for the “Science is Vital campaign”:http://scienceisvital.org.uk/. It will only take two minutes and forty-nine seconds.
Listen!
Thank you for listening.
Update (Sun 26th Sept): For those of you who prefer to read than to listen to my measured Northern Irish burr, here the text of the audioboo:
”Science is Vital to our society — and often in ways that are quite unexpected. Let me give you an example by telling you about the physicist, Patrick Blackett.
He was very much into blue skies research – almost literally so. At Cambridge in the 1930s Blackett developed the cloud chamber*, a device that could be used to detect cosmic rays — streams of sub-atomic particles that come to Earth from all over the universe and descend from the blue sky.
His work won him a Nobel prize in 1948.
Now particle physics isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you think that Blackett’s science wasn’t so very vital to the UK then consider this:
During World War 2, Blackett turned his scientific mind to the defence of the nation. He worked with the armed forces to improve air defences around Britain’s cities and to find new ways of protecting convoys of navy ships from attack.
But one of his most interesting discoveries shows how unpredictably brilliant science can be.
The Royal Air Force had been inspecting its bomber aircraft for bullet holes after bombing missions and concluded that they needed to add armour-plating to the parts of the planes that had been hit.
But when Blackett looked at the same evidence he said, “No. You should put the armour plating on those areas where there are no bullet holes.”
What Blackett realised was that the RAF’s examination of only those aircraft that returned was biased. Bullet holes in surviving planes marked positions that were not critical for staying in the air. Blackett reasoned that aircraft that had been shot down had probably been hit in places that were undamaged in the planes that managed to come home.
And he was right: by implementing his suggestions, RAF bombers suffered fewer losses.
Blackett’s aim, he said, was to base strategy not on gusts of emotion, but on numbers — on science.
Britain emerged victorious from WWII but faces fresh challenges today: economic hardship for sure, but also energy crises, global warming and the need to keep an aging population healthy.
To meet these challenges, I am pretty sure that Blackett would say, “Science is Vital”.
To find out how you can support the campaign to prevent cuts in British science, please visit the web-site at: scienceisvital.org.uk”
*Strictly speaking the Cloud chamber was invented by Charles Wilson. Blackett — and the Italian physicist G.P.S. Occhialini — developed the counter-controlled cloud chamber, a version of the device that allowed cosmic rays trigger the detector and therefore their own photographs. This made it a much more effective device for studying particles from outer space.
Stephen, this is awesome! I think it’s a great idea, and I really enjoyed hearing your story – with which I was completely unfamiliar.
Ha – thanks Jenny. Blackett is a bit of a local hero – he was head of the physics department at Imperial from 1953 to 1963. The building housing that dept now bears his name – the Blackett Laboratory.
I only heard about his operational research (which many other scientists were also involved in) via a speech given by Sir Aaron Klug when a new bust of Blackett was unveiled about 10 years ago. I must try and take a picture of it.
To let you into a secret, I had written this ‘script’ for a video but realised yesterday lunchtime that I simply wouldn’t have time to make it. Hence the diversion into audio.
Such a great story.
I downloaded the audio and did some aditing using Audacity.
Firsty, I bass boosted it a bit.
Next, I created track two and added some (CC) WW2 sound effects from The Freesound Project.
I added track three and this instrumental (CC) MP3 file http://www.macjams.com/song/50474
Finally, I mixed all three together and uploaded the final result which you can stream from here http://ff.im/r7gSd
Cheers Graham – your remix is certainly more atmospheric!
As soon as I read “I downloaded the audio and did some aditing using Audacity.” I knew it was Steel.
Lovely story, Stephen. Oddly, I had heard it before, but the way it was told it was about American fighters in the Korean War. Maybe it was rediscovered then?
Ah – that’s interesting Richard. Do you remember where you read the Korean War version – is there a link?
I imagine this was a particular piece of research that Blackett did not publish – hence the need for its rediscovery. Not, of course, the proper way to do science!
I got this comment from Sara Smile on facebook and thought it well worth re-posting here (and not just for the first line!):
Blackett was of course quite active politically, being a life-long socialist and an adviser of sorts to Harold Wilson’s Govt in the 60s. I remember my dad mentioning this in a review he wrote of a biography of the anatomist Solly Zuckerman (later Lord Z), longtime Chief Scientific Adviser in the 50s and 60s. Zuckerman, who was a few years younger than Blackett, was also heavily involved in WW2 operational research along with the famous crystallographer JD Bernal and others
I’m pretty sure Gerald (my father) must have at least met Blackett, so I’ll ask him to drop by if he has anything to add. Gerald’s Zuckerman bio book review is well worth a read, BTW, as it also bears on the role scientists (and scientific analysis) played in wartime research. There are many more examples too, like (inter alia) Bernard Lovell, Max Perutz, AV Hill, Alan Hodgkin, Andrew Huxley etc etc. Indeed, when I was a grad student in the mid 80s there used to be a joke that it was hard to find an eminent senior scientist of the vintage to have served in WW2 who hadn’t signed the Official Secrets Act as a result of doing secret wartime research.
Cheers Austin – you (and your Dad) are mines of information (gold – not coal!).
I knew that Bernal and Blackett were comrades in arms, so to speak, though I think I’m right in saying that Bernal was more left-leaning. For those who want the inside scoop on Bernal — a more colourful figure that Blackett I believe — try Andrew Brown’s The Sage of Science.
Ach, wish I could remember, Stephen. A not-so-quick google doesn’t throw any further light on the subject, although there are lots of hits for survivor bias, so a huge HUZZAH! for British science, what?
Hey Stephen,
I must admit that I find your post incredibly disturbing, though my reasoning will probably not earn me many friends. But I feel strongly about this and need to get it off my chest.
I knew that Blackett was a great scientist. After all, a building at Imperial is named after him. Plus, he earned a Nobel Prize. His discoveries are worth celebrating because they helped explain the world better, making the case for antimatter and the positron and leading to the development of the Geiger counter.
What I didn’t know is that he made the firebombing of Dresden the resounding success that it was. And you know what? That’s something I can’t celebrate because I don’t think that’s what science should do. The objective of science is not the methodical bombing of an entire city, in two waves to maximize civilian casualties, the flattening of all buildings but one in a 15 square mile area, the destruction of priceless architectural treasures and pieces of glorious art, and the incineration of a thousands in the world’s biggest barbecue of human life.
If you say that murder and wanton destruction were justified and that all the people killed in Dresden were Jew-slaughtering Nazis anyway and no innocent lives were lost, I’m not going to argue with you because I’d consider you beyond arguing. But I would point out that military research is never unambiguous.
The great physicist and Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg was instrumental in German nuclear fusion research during World War 2. His research was vital to Nazi Germany. Are you celebrating that?
Someone developed the technology behind the guns that were vital in the suppression of the Easter uprising and in the bloodying of that fateful Sunday in 1972. Scientists worked to make the police and military safer against Republican terrorist, which increased, relatively, the losses on the other side. Are you celebrating that?
Advancing knowledge is what science does, and for this alone, it is vital. If you have no better argument than war for the support of science, then you’re running a pretty poor campaign indeed. I, for one, won’t sign up to British War Research is Vital.
Andreas
The question of the uses to which research, especially wartime research, can be put is a long-standing and difficult one – one could call it the Oppenheimer Dilemma. In this specific example, Blackett is probably getting a bit of a bad rap in Andreas Forster’s comment. People who have read down the thread will remember that I asked my father Gerald (who worked in biophysics in London in the 50s and 60s) whether he had known Blackett. He sent me the following to repost:
PS More info on the people named in this comment can be found by searching for them on Wikipedia
Andreas,
Thank you for your heartfelt and passionately articulated comment. I am glad that you felt able to voice it, even if you disliked the post so much. You make many valid points.
I alighted upon the subject of Blackett since, as you point out, I have the connection that my labs are in the building that bears his name. On those mornings that I come in by bus I walk past the bust of his head that is affixed to the wall near the entrance. I was aware of his war-time work and cited just one example of how his scientific ingenuity had been put to the use of the defence of Britain. I perhaps should have reflected more deeply on the wider context of defence work but, truth be told, I was pushed for time and wanted to keep the audio piece as short as possible.
You will know also from a perusal of the Science is Vital web-site — and my post from yesterday — that the case is certainly not predicated on the contribution of science to the development of military hardware.
I hope you know me well enough to understand that my account of Blackett’s work in no way implies approval of the bombing of civilian populations. Of course I understand that the benefits of science have been a very mixed blessing for humankind, especially through the 20th Century when we became more and more adept at killing.
But humans are a fractious lot and the reality of history is that wars will happen. Governments have a duty to protect their populations and science, for good or ill, can help with that. Had I lived in Blackett’s time I imagine that I too would have put my science at the service of the nation. This inflicts a moral cost but it does not necessarily mean that scientists who participated in the war effort were fully responsible for how their work was used. As Austin’s father has reminded us, Blackett was not in favour of the horrendous bombing of civilians in cities in Germany during the war and favoured selection of strategic targets.
(By the way, If you are interested to read more — following Gerald Elliot’s recommendation — I’d be very happy to lend you my copy of the Bernal biography).
Co-incidentally I am writing this comment from a hotel room in Hamburg. I have come here to do some experiments at the synchrotron here tomorrow (DESY). Hamburg is one of those cities that suffered so much during World War II and had to be extensively rebuilt afterwards. I am glad that now Germany and the UK are allies in science and indeed that science can often provide a shared purpose that brings nations together. Tomorrow I will be working with German engineers and Russian scientists to complete these experiments.
The synchrotron is another elegant example of the need for public investment in science. It is an expensive facility that no private firm would ever have constructed but has generated results that have allowed us to probe into the heart of biological molecules, and the physicists here to pull apart the very structure of matter — this is where the gluon was discovered, I believe. It is very much a blue-skies facility but one that lays the bedrock for developments in medical research and new technology.
Austin – please thank your Dad massively for his recollections on Blackett – absolutely fascinating stuff. I’ve read Bernal’s biography and am now wondering is there a good one on Blackett?