Sunny Bains unedited

Patrick Purcell versus the little grey man

My friend Patrick Purcell died just short of his 78th birthday last week. I'm still thinking about what I want to say about him personally, but his death has made me think about that of another friend of mine, about what they had in common, and about dealing with grief.

The other friend was Stephen Benton, who died in 2003, and to whom we devoted special issue of the Holography newsletter.

Editing the issue—looking through photographs, corresponding with colleagues, compiling lists of associated web pages—was difficult. But it was also therapeutic. With long-distance colleagues or people we don't see regularly, it is not so easy to grieve. Especially with those people in our field who we meet at conferences, because we often have no-one local to talk to about them. So we don't really have time to get over the loss. We just bury it and move on.

With Steve, I was lucky. The newsletter gave me no choice but to face up to his death and I also had Patrick to commiserate with. He had been friends with Steve much longer than I: it made a big difference having him to talk to.

We discussed at the time how sad it was that professors like Steve—a true inventor and scholar, someone with a real gift for inspiring people and helping people—were being replaced by what I call 'little gray men'. (Patrick was too much of a gentleman to ever use such a term). These were 'professional academics': smart but uncreative men (usually) with little or no passion for their subjects or interest in teaching. They can be identified by the fact that instead of having two or three themes in their research that they follow throughout their lives, they would 'follow the money', jumping on whatever funding bandwagon happens to be passing through. Other identifying traits include lack of imagination, arrogance, a penchant for collecting titles and awards, and respect for even the most rediculous authority. You can also throw in a general meanness of spirit.

When Patrick died, the the same thing happened again. I  felt the need to do something for him so contacted his colleagues, put up a memorial site, and offered to pass on funeral arrangements etc. I did this for Patrick, and to give his friends an outlet for their feelings. But I also did it for me. I couldn't have done any other kind of work that afternoon, and the project has allowed me to be around him for a little while longer.

All of us here have also, again, been commiserating with each other, and having the same little gray man conversation. Like Steve, Patrick was the opposite of the little gray man: he followed his interests regardless of the prevailing fashion. He made time to help others. He inspired. The people he met were changed by him. And, for both of them, it wasn't just one or two close friends who felt this, but most of the people they came into contact with. In my case, it was Steve who made me believe that I should start a PhD, and Patrick who made me believe I could finish it. I owe them both.

When I moved back to the UK, it was the thought of the little gray men that scared me most. Though they are not quite as plentiful as I feared, they are nevertheless around, sucking the life and creativity out of the people around them as they try to build their empires.

I can only hope that, by having known people like Patrick and Steve, I will try harder and do better myself, and so encourage the people around me to do the same.  A tall order, I know.

Roses in January

Global warming seems to have been following me around lately.

It was pretty warm before I left London in mid-December. Then New York was a bizarre 60°F (16°C) almost every day I was there, the feeling was quite incongruous with all of the winter holiday lights blazing. Leaves were still on many trees and the idea of a white Christmas seemed laughable.

At the end of the trip, on my way to Miami airport, I heard on the radio about a major ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic splitting off from Ellesmere Island. I then watched An Inconvenient Truth on the plane coming back to the UK and learned just how compelling the case for global warming was. I had always believed it, but never bother to fully inform myself about it. I'm a science journalist, but this is far from my beat.

Weirdly, though, the thing that tipped the balance and got me to actually do something happened last Thursday. I was walking through the Rose Garden in Hyde Park on my way to work, and was shocked to find that there were still roses there. Not just old ones that had managed to hang on, but new ones. I was so surprised I got out my PDA and took some pictures.

That night I went on to the Climate Crisis website and then tried several of carbon footprint calculators to find out the size of my own contribution to this problem. I was horrified to find that I was almost as bad as the average American. I try pretty hard to be a good citizen environmentally: I use the backs of printed sheets of paper instead of notebooks, recycle despite the lack of decent services in my area, buy recycled products whenever I can, and use rechargeable batteries in my radios. On top of that, I have no car and a small flat that's well insulated.

However, (as you may have gathered) I fly back and forth across the Atlantic a fair bit for both business and personal reasons, and that makes me part of the problem. Call it Western guilt, but I decided to go pay up to make myself carbon neutral at CarbonFund.org. Cost about $220 for a clean conscience for my entire household for 2007. This will, I understand, plant lots of carbon-absorbing trees.

I know this is not the real answer: I have to consume less rather than just pay more. And I'm trying. But as someone who inherited a family that is spread across North America, Europe, and even Asia—and is part of a profession that requires travelling to where the sci/tech action is—it's not always possible to take the train...

Photos

Top: Old roses are still hanging on in London's Hyde Park, despite it being January.

Bottom: Roses are not just hanging on, there are new buds and blossoms too. The gardener told me that he'd never seen these May Gold roses (usually the first out in the spring) bloom in January. He was especially surprised to see them as he'd cut the bush back hard in the autumn.

My philosophy about philosophy

I've recently been working on a major article, for which I've interviewed something like 30 different people. Obviously you do some investigation before you set up a meeting, so you have a reasonable expectation that it's going to be interesting. And indeed, most for this story were. All but one: with a philosopher. I actually walked out of the room early using the words, “I mustn’t take up any more of your time.”

One sign that an interview is not going well is that, instead of explaining something more clearly, your subject tells you to read their book. This happened here. I just couldn’t nail down how what he was saying related to the picture I had been piecing together talking to scientists and engineers. And he didn't seem to want to help me out.

I think the problem may have been on my side, and it’s one I’ve had with philosophers before. I can’t understand what they’re talking about because I don't feel you can pin it down to something real. I trained as a physicist, so I’m always looking for a reality check for any premise in an argument. In philosophy, there often isn’t one… and that’s not considered to be any kind of drawback!

One example of something that has preoccupied some philosophers but seems ridiculous to me is the so-called philosophical zombie, a thought experiment that’s used to discuss the philosophy of mind. The idea is that you have something that behaves in every way as if it’s conscious, feels pain, etc., but in fact is not really conscious. Given this scenario, they then discuss what it means about nature of consciousness and where it resides (is it in the body? in the soul? can machines have it? etc.). Many philosopher hours have been spent thinking about and discussing this.

My reaction? Where are these zombies and how do we know they don’t feel anything? And if they don’t exist then what exactly do we think we can learn from them? 

I count philosophers among my friends and have great respect for many of them, but am also suspicious of their field. Physics, indeed science, is (eventually) all about being able to prove and test things. There are areas of philosophy, however, that seem to be about taking a premise and building a theory on top of it, with no attempt to try to get to any kind of ‘truth’. I call this a castle in the air, because there is no ‘route to ground’.

Of course, we have thought experiments in science. But somewhere along the line there always emerges something that can be tested in the real world, allowing the theory to succeed or fail. Without we couldn’t make progress. I’d love to know how philosophers manage.

Research without the workout

Though sometimes exciting, my job is more grunt work than glamour. I was recently visiting UC Berkeley and walked by the Kresge Engineering Library. I couldn't resist going in and having a quick look at this place where I had spent so much time in 1998/1999. This also got me thinking about other libraries where I'd probably spent a day a month: like the Robertson Engineering and Science Library at the University of Edinburgh and the Barker Engineering Library at MIT. It made me realize that, in more than five years back at Imperial College London, I'd probably made it into the library an average of once a year. The reason for the change, of course, is technology.

My routine used to be to go in monthly to look at the new journals, laid out out on racks in alphabetical and/or subject order. (I explain this only because I'm not sure how long libraries will continue have current periodicals sections like this!) First I'd look at the table of contents, then go to bodies of the papers I thought might be interesting, and—if I was still convinced—I would finally go and make photocopies of the paper for me to read properly and hopefully to pitch as stories to editors. I would go home after several hours on my feet, a little poorer but with a big stack of (hopefully very valuable) paper.

Of all the libraries, Barker, in the Great Dome at MIT, was by far my favorite. As I remember it, the huge periodicals room had the current journal racks laid out in a huge circle, with armchairs in the middle. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of obscure journals (obscure to anyone outside the field): things like The Journal of Bridge Engineering, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, and Advances in Applied Ceramics. Of course most of them meant nothing to me: I probably looked at 10% of the issues on the shelves. but there's really something humbling about knowing just how tiny a slice of knowledge one can even aspire to get to grips with.

These days I can sit at my desk and search hundreds or thousands of new articles for particular subjects that I'm interested in. I can download them, read them, and discard or pitch them without ever having to print a thing. And instead of making a monthly trek to the library, I can check for new stuff weekly or even daily if I want. Not to mention having access to material that won't come out on paper for days or weeks.

Of course, there are downsides: I can't flip through a journal for interesting figures or see the relationsips between the different papers in a particular issue the way I used to. And I'm less likely to find new journal titles. I also have to work harder to find an excuse to stretch my legs. But I'm not one to wallow in nostalgia: at my age, I'm happy enough to get my information at my desk and my exercise at the gym.

Photo

The sulpture at the entrance of the Kresge Engineering Library, in UC Berkeley's Bechtel Building.