I would like to think that my small fiction so impregnated the culture of northern Scotland that before long it gave birth to the fast-breeder reactor at Dounreay. One could have said that my words were a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do not mean by this that there was any link connecting my careless remark and the decision of government ministries in London, nearly a thousand miles away to the south, to build a fast-breeder reactor at Dounreay. No link was needed; in the minds of the locals the connection was readily made. There is no better fertilizer for a newly planted myth than secrecy, real or imagined. In those days, anything atomic was secret.
In a like manner, the 20th century legend of flying saucers received sustenance from inappropriately applied secrecy. The more the truth is guarded, the more the fiction grows and, as we say in England, ‘Never believe anything until it is officially denied.’ Some American government agency or one of its contractors decided to do experiments using mannequins as surrogate victims of parachute accidents, much in the way that car manufacturers test their new models by deliberately crashing them at speed into brick walls with dummies in the driver and passenger seats. From the damage sustained by these dummies, safety features and preventative designs can evolve. A wholly reasonable and scientific operation and one whose intentions are, of course, benign. Car manufacturers publicize their experiments as part of their advertising campaign, but bureaucrats hate publicity and given half a chance will make any information secret. In July 1947 in the USA they were in the mood to classify even the directions to, and the gender of, their lavatories.
The locals of Roswell, New Mexico noticed the sudden appearance of broken mannequins on the scrubby desert landscape near their town. They were puzzled, and when they saw soldiers gathering them up and placing them in body bags, their imaginations inflamed and the great myth of a failed alien invasion was born. The unwillingness of the authorities to explain the truth sustained and fed the myth until its growth became unstoppable. A recent Gallup poll showed that forty-two per cent of American college graduates in 1997 still believe that flying saucers have visited the Earth. Seventy per cent of Americans believe that the US government knows more about UFOs than it lets on and, of course, they are right. Bureaucrats, once they have a secret, gnaw and growl over it like a dog with a bone, and their one wish is to bury it and keep it from everyone. Like the dog they unearth it again after burial and guard it with a solemn seriousness, even when all shape and substance of the bone has gone.
Once science fiction or highly improbable events are sanctified by official or expert denial, they become a public myth. Even trained scientists and engineers become as gullible as do the lay public. One such myth, or remote improbability, is ball lightning, described as a glowing ball the size of a football that floats in the air or darts about like an insect and is usually associated with a thunderstorm. Sometimes it fades quietly; other times it vanishes with a loud bang. In the spring of 1979 I was returning to London from the United States by Northwest Airlines. I was sitting in my seat in the upper cabin of a Boeing 747. My seat companion had recently left his seat to go to the loo just above the helical stairway leading to the main deck. As he returned from the loo, making his way back to the seat, there was the most vivid flash and a deafening detonation. Lightning had struck the plane, not uncommon and usually harmless to large, modern aircraft. My friend of the journey regained his seat, turned to me and said, ‘Well, at least we’re still flying straight and level.’ He was an off-duty captain of the Northwest fleet and travelling to pick up an aircraft for a return to the USA. He was a cool, competent man, as one would expect of an experienced pilot. He turned to me again and said, ‘Did you see it?’ ‘See what?’ I replied. ‘The ball lightning,’ said he. He went on, ‘I saw it coming up the stairwell and it exploded with a loud bang near the top.’ ‘No, I didn’t see it,’ I told him. ‘I thought it was just a lightning strike on the plane.’ But my pilot friend was quite sure that he had seen ball lightning and he was believable. Maybe he had seen it. In a court of law, he would have been a convincing witness. I wondered then, and still wonder, whether he was mistaken. My memory was of a vivid flash brighter than a photographer’s flashgun straight into my eyes, followed by a lingering afterglow like a ball of light superimposed on the view of the cabin. Could my companion have mistaken this afterglow for ball lightning and confused unconsciously the history of the event? In his memory, the bang came after and not simultaneously with the flash. Despite anecdotal evidence from distinguished physicists, I put tales of ball lightning in the same category as those of the spontaneous development of crop circles, or the spontaneous combustion of humans. I regard them all as almost certainly untrue.
What bothers me is not that the public believes these myths as much or more than they do the facts of science, but that so many scientists believe them also. Far too many British and American scientists seem either to believe or to want to believe in life on Mars. Few are objective on this topic. At a Royal Society discussion meeting on Life on Mars in 1997, I was surprised to discover how many of the scientists gathered there were ready to accept that pieces of rock gathered from Antarctica bore evidences of life on Mars. Any sensibly objective scientist would have regarded the tenuous chain linking those pieces of rock with the possibility of ancient life on Mars as so stretched as to be worthless. But faith overcame scepticism and all too many of the participants used the fiction of Star Trek as their source of metaphor. There was even a government minister, Ian Lang, attending the meeting, as if it were an important event in science. Norman Horowitz of Cal Tech said, ‘The discovery of life outside the Earth would be a momentous event and change our view of the universe and ourselves.’ No one doubts the importance of such a discovery, but let us face it: founding a science programme as large as a space mission on the chance of Martian life is about as foolish as playing the National Lottery to fund a business.
As well as experiments on remote Scottish islands I found time at Harvard Hospital to improve my skills at instrument building. Among the instruments I made were two anemometers. One was an ionization device, the other an ultrasonic anemometer. I made these instruments in response to the experimental need of my medical colleagues to measure very low air movements, or draughts as the English call them. The public firmly believed that colds were caught by getting cold, hence the name. They needed objective, experimentally repeatable criteria for defining the coldness of an environment and this meant measuring the temperature and the humidity of the air, which is easy, but also measuring the speed of air movement, which was difficult. At the time, there were no instruments in existence capable of measuring air velocities as low as five millimetres per second. The ionization anemometer met the need. More important for me it was the inspiration behind several important ionization devices I invented ten years later.
The Voyage on HMS Vengeance in 1949
The invention of the ion anemometer also led to an exciting voyage. I have always loved travel by ship and in 1949 my smouldering itch to go to sea ignited. I was at a committee meeting at the MRC headquarters in London. In those days, the council occupied an elegant old house in Old Queen Street, Westminster. We met in a gracious room with a large window looking out on to St James’s Park. It was a pleasant enough place to be in but we were discussing what, to me, was a dull and pointless experiment in air hygiene in some schools in Southwark, a London suburb. One of the committee members was also a member of the Royal Naval Personnel Research Committee. During ‘any other business’ he asked if any of us would be interested in making air hygiene measurements aboard the HMS Vengeance on its cold weather winter cruise into the Arctic. I was suddenly awake. Here was my chance to satisfy my longing for a ship voyage. After the meeting I buttonholed the naval colleague and said, ‘Look, I would be glad to go. Please include me on the ship.’ Fortunately for me, ship journeys are not popular with scientists and there was no competition. I rediscovered this reluctance to leave dry land years later when I was a member of the Marine Biolo
gical Association’s Council, and later its President. Few marine scientists seem to want to go to sea. To me, this is extraordinary. My employers, the MRC, were reluctant at first but the Navy, having a willing volunteer, would not let go. Soon my naval friends and I were planning the experiments we would make on the voyage.
Preparing for a scientific expedition is not usually part of a scientist’s training but it is something that must be done right. Nothing, not even the small things usually taken for granted, can be forgotten if you are off on a trip to distant places. More than this, one must duplicate all essentials whenever possible. Murphy’s Law rules supreme: if anything can fail, it will. The scientist and well-known science writer Robert Matthews recently demonstrated by good experiments that toast does indeed nearly always fall on the buttered side, and that the supermarket queue we choose is more often than not the slowest one.
For the six-week Arctic cruise of HMS Vengeance, they were letting me off lightly. This was to be my expeditionary apprenticeship. Here I had the thorough and painstaking support of Frank Smith, a member of the Royal Naval Personnel Research Committee, who had served in the Navy as an engineering officer. Fortunately, the Vengeance carried ample stocks of most of the things that we might need and, in addition, had an engineering workshop able to make and repair anything we broke. We were taking to the ship our slit samplers to collect the bacteria-laden particles from the air. We intended to sample the sailors’ quarters and mess decks; we were also taking some medium-sized forty-cubic-foot cylinders of helium to use as a tracer gas to measure the ventilation rate of the ship’s compartments. There was as well my ionization anemometer to measure air movement and so decide whether the spaces the sailors lived in were or were not comfortable. There were also all the small things of a laboratory: Pasteur pipettes, glass-marking pencils, stopwatches, chemicals, batteries, electronic spare parts, and so on, to say nothing of notebooks and pens. Because of these preparations, the voyage filled my mind for weeks before the ship set sail. I was still young enough then, twenty-seven years old, to lose sleep with the excitement of the prospect.
At last February came round, and after breakfast, I said my goodbyes to Helen, Christine, and Jane and set off with Tom Thompson and Frank Smith in the Harvard Hospital station wagon. Frank Smith, the retired naval officer, was to be my colleague and guide aboard the ship. Our equipment and luggage completely filled the back of the car. It is only fifty or so miles from Salisbury to Weymouth, which in those days was still a place of naval significance. From the dockside, we could see the huge bulk of the Vengeance lying in the middle of the calm water within the breakwaters. We loaded our gear onto a cutter, helped by sailors, one of whom made me immediately feel at ease when he called our helium cylinders boffin bombs. Soon we were at a sea-level platform lowered from the ship’s quarterdeck and they started the boarding ceremonies. The ship’s company piped the naval personnel on board and they saluted the quarterdeck. This caused me concern because my dyslectic tendencies would cause me both to face in the wrong direction and do the salute incorrectly. But Frank Smith calmed me and said, ‘No need to salute, you’re a civilian and as far as the ship’s concerned, you’re invisible.’ He was a wonderful companion, just the guide I needed for such a voyage. It is agonizing to be a virgin in a new ceremonial environment and he saved me an immense amount of embarrassment.
Our cabins for the next six weeks were in the officers’ quarters towards the stern of the ship. They were cramped quarters and in our six-bunk cabin there were only two wash-hand basins. There were more than enough cupboards and drawers to stow our clothing, which included Arctic gear. It was lunchtime before we had settled ourselves and arranged the equipment in our lab—a spacious suite of rooms in the ship’s sickbay. We expected no enemy action on this voyage so these quarters seemed a natural place for us. The officers’ wardroom of the Vengeance was forward and was a room of luxurious spaciousness. Tables with white linen and good cutlery were there to welcome us. The food, after the privations of post-war rationed England, seemed almost like a daily banquet.
After lunch, we went on deck to see the ship leave port and go into the Channel to commence sea trials along the Dorset coast before setting sail for the Arctic. It was strange to watch the so familiar Dorset coastline from Lulworth via Brandy Bay to Kimmeridge and on to St Alban’s Head as we travelled past about three miles away. Those high cliffs I had climbed so often seemed no more than the saucer rim of a quiet sea. It was a mild and weakly sunlit February afternoon. Later that same day we began our journey down the Channel towards Land’s End, and then turned north past Wales. It was calm and easy progress at a speed of not more than about 14 knots (16 mph). The weather was unusually quiet as we sailed past the west of Britain and we were able to go on deck to see the snow-covered mountains and islands of Scotland. We sailed on north through the Minches and up past Cape Wrath. The next day the Faroes came in sight as more snow-covered mountains.
We were now well into the routine of our work. We went onto the seamen’s mess decks and negotiated with them for a table on which to set up our gear and start taking measurements. I must admit that this kind of science is not my favourite occupation. Had I not had the joy of being on a ship I would not have been doing it. I always have found tedious the endless repetition of comparatively easy measurements. Nevertheless, I knew that we must do them if our observations were to have significance. It was easy to be distracted by conversation with the sailors and by watching the hobbies they enjoyed in their off-duty periods. Who would have thought that knitting and embroidery were amongst the pastimes of a warship crew. To me and to Frank Smith, who knew much more about ships than I could ever know, the Vengeance was a contented ship. The crew could have seen us as uninvited intruders, like social workers; instead they accepted us kindly and courteously.
Walking through the ship carrying our equipment was our greatest difficulty. The curse of a naval ship is its need for watertight compartments to keep it afloat after the enemy has shot it full of holes. The oval doorways with heavy clip fasteners every few yards and the vertical steel ladders between the decks made travel across the territory of the Vengeance hard and painful. Novices like me always barked shins. However, compared with the naval ships to come, like the aircraft carrier Victorious that I went on ten or so years later, the Vengeance was spacious and enjoyable. A journey on a present-day large aircraft carrier is like living in a nightmare version of a London Tube station in a permanent state of rush hour.
We spent our evenings in the wardroom playing cards, drinking modestly and telling stories. On British ships liquor is freely available, but something about shipboard life seems to hasten the metabolism of alcohol and lessen its capacity to stupefy. As one sailor said to me, ‘You never need exercise on this ship; even in bed you have to work to stay put.’ Sailors had it easier than the officers did; they slept in hammocks, which insulated them from the ship’s considerable motion. It was winter when we left England and our course was into the Arctic almost directly toward Spitzbergen, which is a mere 800 miles from the Pole. We expected cold but for the first part of the journey, we did not get it. Even at latitude 70° N, close to Bear Island, it was merely damp, wet, and about 40° F, typical of English December weather but not what I expected well within the Arctic Circle in February. Not until the eleventh day of our voyage close to latitude 75° N, did we see ice in the sea; even then the wind was still from the south and west and unusually warm for the Arctic. All the time, though, imperceptibly but on a daily basis, the weather had grown stormier.
The Vengeance was nearly as long as the Queen Mary, with only about a sixth of the mass of that great liner. It was also a welded ship. This gave her a vicious motion in a rough sea, especially if it was a following sea, with the waves racing to catch up the ship from behind. As one seaman put it, ‘It was like being dragged down a flight of stairs in a tin bath.’ In the wardroom, the curbs were now around the edges of the dining tables almost all of the time. One of the nav
al constructors travelling with our party was so seasick that the ship’s physician had to ask the engineers to rig a bed for him suspended in gimbals, a clever mechanical contraption that ensures that whatever the ship’s motion the suspended bed remained level. It was a large version of the gimbals used to hold a ship’s compass level. The bed was in the sickbay, which was near the metacentre of the ship, the place where the movement is least. He spent most of the voyage in this bed.
As our course moved west and south towards Jan Mayen Island and Greenland, the wind grew stronger and was often storm force or higher. The naval purpose of the cruise was to see if an aircraft carrier like Vengeance could operate and fly its aircraft under winter conditions in the Arctic. Flying was, in fact, limited to the few quiet spells, and even then expensive in both lives and aircraft.
Homage to Gaia Page 14