Bernal was well known as a Marxist and peace campaigner, and he supported
the Stalinist regime long after it was prudent or sensible so to do. Nevertheless,
his distinguished war record was widely recognised – he was a scientific
adviser to Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations organisation, which was
responsible for planning the technological aspects of the Normandy invasion
and for the conception of Mulberry, the artificial harbour.

As we have already celebrated the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings,
what reason do I have for drawing attention to Bernal’s name? It has to
do with another of the great man’s interest – art, and the relationship
between science and art. Herbert Read, the British poet and critic, introduced
Bernal to the entrepreneur, Marcus Brumwell, who has described how he visited
galleries with Bernal and was always astonished at the physicist’s knowledge
of art.

Bernal established his credentials in this field in 1937 with an article
on ‘Art and the scientist’ in an international survey of constructivist
art entitled Circle, edited by Leslie Martin, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo.
The importance of the publication can be gauged from the fact that among
the contributors were Mondrian, Read, Le Corbusier, Barbara Hepworth and
Henry Moore. Bernal wrote that he regretted very much the separation of
the two cultures, art and science, and pointed out that the dichotomy was
harmful and unnecessary. He argued that it was interest in the visual arts
in the past which had led to the accurate observation of nature and that
the requirements of architecture had given rise to the discipline of mechanics.
He suggested the social responsibilities of the artist were similar to those
of the scientist.

Bernal became friendly with Moore, and the husband-and-wife team, Ben
Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Brumwell has described how, in Hepworth’s
studio in St Ives, Bernal would work out mathematical relationships which
most closely represented Hepworth’s sculptures. In the 1940s the sculptress
made a number of quasi-mathematical drawings, one of which Brumwell owns
and which Bernal defined as being ‘the locus of the ultimate intersections
of consecutive curves in a system of curves’ (there may have been a little
leg-pulling in these exchanges). He persuaded Ben Nicholson to look down
a microscope to experience the beauty of the structures of plant cells.
Nicholson – who was described as a completely unscientific person – was
fascinated by the images he saw.

Bernal’s friendship with his fellow communist, Pablo Picasso, had more
to do with their commitment to the international peace movement than art.
On 12 November 1950, following an aborted peace congress at Sheffield, Bernal
threw a party in his small flat in Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, to which
Picasso was invited. Someone asked Picasso to draw a souvenir and he agreed,
but he rejected paper, saying there was much more room on the wall. He started
to work on a clear area, about three square metres, above some bookshelves,
using a multi-colour grease pencil. At this point I can do no better than
repeat the words of Lena Jeger, former MP and Guardian columnist, who was
also present, and which Goldsmith included in his book:

‘He began with a swish of line that immediately became a real face,
but had devil’s horns, closed blind eyes and a shut little mouth. Then he
stepped back and shook his head, pounced on the wall and touched the horns
into a laurel wreath, opened the devil’s eyes, and widened his mouth till
he looked like an anxious god. Picasso stood back and said ‘Il a l’air
solitaire’ – he began to draw a girl, who arrived on the wall firmly and
suddenly. Someone then asked what this had to do with peace and Picasso
gave them wings.’

The portion of plaster on which Picasso inscribed his drawing was later
removed and Bernal presented it to the Institute of Contemporary Art, where
it was displayed in the foyer for a number of years. A few weeks ago, wishing
to view the drawing, I visited the ICA, only to be told that two years
earlier it had been removed during a refurbishing campaign and found to
be in need of extensive restoration. The institute decided to carry out
this work and then offer the drawing for sale; present plans are that it
will be auctioned this September.

Bernal was, of course, a fellow of the Royal Society, whose headquarters
are next door to the ICA in London’s Carlton House Terrace, so the foyer
of the institute was a convenient and appropriate location for the drawing.
It is sad, then, that the ICA has been forced to sell the work; it will
be particularly unfortunate if a work of art with such a fascinating history
should leave Britain. All that I can hope is that some wealthy benefactor
– a latter-day Brum-well, perhaps, who is interested in the link between
art and science – will purchase the work and present it to the Royal Society,
the Royal Institution or to Birkbeck College, each of which had close connections
with Bernal during his lifetime.

Jack Harris is a retired metallurgist living in Gloucestershire

The end of an industrial tradition which had lasted more than a century
and a half should have generated more protest, but we are becoming immured
to these losses of our manufacturing lifeblood. All credit then to The
Independent on Sunday, whose own future is seriously threatened, for devoting
a leader to this melancholy event (‘We shall not see their light again’,
16 January). The sordid details are: a takeover of Bryant and May by Volvo
in 1988 and then, after a cosmetic interval, the closure of the indigenous
industry and the removal of jobs to Scandinavia. It is all carried out at
low key, as the last thing the Swedish industrialists want to generate from
the friction match is frictional mismatch across national boundaries.

Of course, industry at the beginning of the 19th century was no picnic.
In the early days, Walker’s recipe for his match heads was a relatively
innocuous mixture of antimony sulphide, potassium chlorate, gum arabic and
starch. But in 1831, Charles Sauria in France substituted phosphorus for
the antimony sulphide, and this was very successful. Sauria neglected to
take out a patent, so his phosphorus formula was used all over the world
– with disastrous consequences.

It was discovered that fumes from the phosphorus enter the body, usually
through defective teeth, causing necrosis or ‘phossy jaw’ – gangrene in
the lower jawbone. This disease killed and maimed thousands of match workers
– a classic example of an industrial pollutant damaging the workforce. The
problem was eventually solved by two other French scientists, Emile Cahen
and Henri Sevene, who substituted nontoxic sesquisulphide of phosphorus
for the lethal element. Despite this success, flints were still in use right
up to the mid-19th century. Charles Dickens wrote that by this method on
a damp day one might get a light in half an hour ‘with luck’. There are
not many Victorian literary references to matches, but Robert Browning was
to write in Meeting at Night, ‘A tap on the pane, the quick sharp scratch/And
blue spurt of a lighted match’.

It is not surprising that the ability to create fire on demand has
attracted admiration, even veneration, throughout the ages. Predating the
friction match was the flint, and earlier still was the bow and fire stick
– in 2000 BC the Babylonians worshipped a god named Gebil, Ge meaning stick
and bil meaning fire. In more modern times, matches have attracted more
romantic names. They were universally called Lucifers in Victorian times
for rather obvious reasons, and today one would regret the passing of
such names as ‘England’s Glory’ and ‘Scottish Bluebells’.

As pointed out in The Independent on Sunday, there are advantages in
having a classical education when interpreting the names of matches. A contemporary
of the Walker ‘frictional’ was known as the Promethean, after the Titan
who stole heaven’s secret of fire to give it to mankind. Swan Vestas are
named after Vesta, the Roman Goddess of hearth and household – a comfortable
domestic image.

As a postscript, and an illustration of how ubiquitous foreign matches
have become, Jonathan Portch, in a recent letter to The Times (‘Dark secret’,
21 January), tells of buying some matches manufactured in Lithuania with
the unlikely brand name ‘Pandora’. He is very reluctant, he said, to open
the box.

Jack Harris is a metallurgist living in Dursley, Gloucestershire.

So here I am in Gloucester Royal Hospital, with no chance of being released
from pain or Procrustean bed for several weeks, perhaps months. I try to
read the newspapers. An article in The Times is headlined ‘An apple a day
keeps the doctor away’. Not for me it doesn’t.

I turn to The Guardian where, in the Country Life column, a rather smug
W. D. Campbell describes how thirty years ago he prepared for his retirement
by grafting all his favourite apples onto dwarf stock so that they he could
harvest them in his old age ‘without the aid of a ladder’. At 61 I guess
I should have given up climbing trees. Like Campbell, I should have thought
ahead – how I hate these well- organised people.

More interestingly, Campbell points out that birds, including of course
the magpies, just eat the flesh of an apple and leave the seeds and, therefore,
could have played no part in the evolution of the fruit. From this he concludes
that the forerunner of the modern apple, untouched by the millennia of selective
cultivation by humans, must have been small enough to be swallowed whole
by birds.

Most of my hospital visitors and correspondents are fellow scientists,
and without exception they cannot resist mentioning Isaac Newton and how
much more sensible he was, sitting beneath the apple tree and pondering
the significance of the apple falling. I had inverted the process – the
apple I had reached out to pick stayed complacently on the tree and it
was my poor, vulnerable body that was accelerated towards the Earth.

Newton reasoned that the force attracting the apple at the top of the
tree might extend beyond the Earth and even keep the Moon in its orbit.
Knowing the inverse square law and thinking at that time that the Moon was
some 60 times as far from the centre of the Earth as the apple, Newton calculated
the forces holding the Moon in place and concluded: ‘I found them answer
pretty nearly.’

Newton’s discoveries represented a sea change in the understanding of
the physical world as monumental as the later insights of Charles Darwin
and Albert Einstein. Even today there are many tributes to Newton’s genius
– his image appearing on paper currency and on stamps, for example. There
is also the newton, the SI unit of force, defined as that force which would
make a 1 kilogram mass accelerate by 1 metre per second per second.

I have mentioned already the success of selective cultivation in increasing
the average size of the domestic apple. An apple weighing a quarter of a
pound can be taken as quite typical these days, and it is one of those pleasing
coincidences that gravity exerts a force of 1 newton on such a fruit (more
precisely, the apple should weigh 0.225 pounds, or 0.102 kilograms).

It may seem bizarre, but I have not completely lost hope that my fall
might lead me to some saying or insight which is so amazingly clever that
the populace is persuaded to adopt another unit of force – the harris. This
is the force acting on a middleweight scientist when attempting to climb
a fruit tree. Larger units are sometimes useful, so: 1 harris is equal to
800 newtons.

I could, of course, write about the iconography of the apple for many
pages – from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of
Eden, to Snow White’s poisoned apple and the Big Apple (New York City).
As far as the Genesis story is concerned, having experienced the acute pain
of a cracked rib I can only admire the composure of Adam in having one removed.
Incidentally, tradition has it that Newton’s apple tree was a Flower of
Kent; my wife thinks it should have been a Newton Wonder. The tree lived
for almost 150 years after Newton made his observation, and a direct descendant
still grows in the grounds of the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington.

Among my visitors were those who were aware of my previous falls from
trees, who chastised me for my slowness to learn any sense. I agreed and
recalled ruefully the film The Story of Mankind, in which Harpo Marx plays
Newton and has a whole bushel of apples poured over his head in case he
should miss the point about gravity. I assured my visitors that my broken
bones were equivalent, as far as delivering a severe lesson is concerned,
to bushels and bushels of apples poured over my head.

My interrogators asked me why I had to climb to the top of the tree
to pick the apples and I was reminded of an essay by the nuclear scientist
Ross Hesketh in, I think, Physics Bulletin. In it Hesketh compared the picking
of blackberries to doing research – in particular the indignation one feels
when another researcher tackles a pet research topic and when a stranger
picks berries from a favourite bush. He went on to describe how in research
it is necessary to achieve the commanding heights to gain the richest rewards,
and in like manner the finest berries are the most inaccessible, at the
top of the bushes.

So it is with apples.

Of course, Newton experienced no difficulties in reaching up to the
choicest fruit. He stood on the shoulders of giants.

Jack Harris is a metallurgist who lives in the West Country.

When asked by BBC TV Breakfast News on 28 May what qualifications he had for
being appointed as the new Welsh Secretary in the Cabinet, John Redwood
replied he had visited Wales on holiday.

How do they master their new portfolios so quickly? The answer is that they
don’t. Speaking on radio within 24 hours or so of his appointment as
Environment Secretary, John Selwyn Gummer claimed that Norman Lamont’s
much-criticised energy tax, by reducing the demand for burning fossilised
fuel, would help to save the ozone layer. It will not. The minister was
mixing up global warming and ozone depletion – not a good start for his new
ministerial career, one might think. You or I, had we dropped a similar
howler in an interview for the most junior job in his ministry, would have
been sent away with a flea in our ear. Neither the Shadow transport
minister John Prescott nor Alan Beith, the Liberal Democrat MP, who were
being interviewed on the same programme, picked up the mistake – scientific
ignorance recognises no political boundaries.

Pendennis, The Observer’s columnist, spotted Gummer’s mistake and smugly
reported it next day. What he did not mention was that Richard Ingrams, his
fellow scribbler in The Observer, had made precisely the same error some
weeks earlier. I wrote to The Observer pointing out Ingrams’s mistake but,
of course, my letter was ignored.

To make matters worse, Ingrams and Simon Hoggart, his fellow columnist in
The Observer, have orchestrated a campaign playing down the potential
importance of global warming on the nonsensical grounds that there is at
present no direct evidence that the increases in carbon dioxide have
actually led to an increase in global temperatures. This is in fact hardly
surprising in view of the smallness of the temperature rise expected and the
size of the random variations in climate from year to year. Ingrams and
Hoggart imply that scientists are overemphasising the dangers of global
warming in order to improve the flow of research monies.

What they miss is that parallels can be drawn with ozone depletion, the
occurrence of which represents a sea change in human affairs. For the first
time man’s activity has produced a measurable and truly global influence on
our atmosphere with possibly catastrophic consequences for our health and
welfare. All this has been due to the release of relatively minute
quantities of CFC gases. How does this compare with the potential problem of
global warming?

The point to realise is that the very small concentration of carbon dioxide
in our atmosphere, of the order of 350 parts per million, has a profound
influence on our wellbeing. First, it provides just enough greenhouse
warming to make life possible (were it not in the atmosphere, mean global
temperatures would be about 30 °C lower than at present, making most
life unviable). Secondly, atmospheric carbon dioxide provides through
photosynthesis the carbon for all carbon-based life. Everything we see
around us, grass, trees, shrubs, animals, ourselves, owes its origin to
these minute quantities of carbon dioxide in the air.

The carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is, then, rather important, and so too
presumably is its concentration. Bearing in mind the example of the damage
to the ozone layer, it would seem to be sensible to adopt a policy of
minimum disturbance to natural levels of atmospheric ‘impurities’. (A
criterion something like this exists in the nuclear electricity industry
which contributes less than 0.1 per cent to the background radiation level –
any increase in this would cause a storm of protest.)

To what extent are we affecting ‘natural’ levels of carbon dioxide? It is
known that the ‘pre-industrial’ level, that is, from 1850 back to the end of
the last Ice Age some 10 000 years ago, was about 280 parts per million. On
present trends it is likely to rise to about twice this level halfway
through the next century. We are not then talking of adding 0.1 per cent, or
1 per cent or even 10 per cent, to natural levels, but actually doubling the
content of this vitally important constituent of our atmosphere.

Of course it is entirely possible, as Ingrams and Hoggart imply, that such
an increase in carbon dioxide could be on balance beneficial. On the other
hand, it could be catastrophic. Dare we take the risk? I do not think so.

Global warming and ozone depletion are two of the most serious environmental
problems facing us. It is tragic that Britain’s Environment Secretary cannot
distinguish between them. It is as though a newly appointed arts minister
was under the impression that Hamlet was written by William Wordsworth.

As a footnote, on the same day as the Gummer interview, another MP, Winston
Churchill, in another radio interview, defending himself from charges of
racism, claimed that ethnic minorities constituted over half the population
of the cities of Leeds and Bradford. The actual figures are 8 per cent and
15 per cent.

It’s enough to make you weep.

Jack Harris is a metallurgist who lives in the West Country.

Even scientists, who should be well informed about these matters, will
tell you that all they know about William Murdock is that he was pioneer
of gas lighting and, oh yes, didn’t he land a job with Matthew Boulton and
James Watt by wearing a wooden hat to his interview?

Is there anything more to be said? There is, and in this outstanding
book John Griffiths seeks to demonstrate that Murdock stands beside Watt
as one of the most brilliant and innovative engineers of the Industrial
Revolution. There seemed to be no limit to this taciturn Scot’s inventiveness.
To his achievements in gas lighting can be added his development of the
sun and planet gear, the oscillating cylinder engine, the D-slide valve,
isinglass, a method of conveying energy (and messages) pneumatically and,
most importantly, the first working model of a steam carriage.

In view of all this, why is Murdock relatively unknown outside the esoteric
world of the gas industry? This is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. The enigma
is Murdock himself and his almost complete lack of ambition amounting to
eccentricity. This selflessness was exploited by Watt, whose middle name
should have been Plagarius, the kidnapper of ideas. The mystery is the missing
Murdock documents and letters, perhaps destroyed by Watt’s relatives to
maintain his ascendancy. All this was unnecessary, for Watt’s premier position
was secure from the moment he invented the separate condenser.

Even allowing for all this obfuscation, the impact of gas lighting on
19th-century life was so immense that it is astonishing that The Third
Man should be the first significant biography of Murdock. At this point
we stumble upon another mystery – Griffiths is distinguished for his fiction
and books on Afghanistan, so how did he come to write a book on Murdock?
Was his choice dictated by the bicentenary in 1992 of Murdock’s claimed
use of gas lighting at his home in Redruth? And what was British Gas’s role
– who approached whom?

The book is excellently written, though long-winded. The chapter on
gas lighting, for example, does not appear until page 238. The background
research is exemplary and Griffiths has absorbed his brief, though his lack
of knowledge of related technologies is a disadvantage. A comparison of
the early days of gas and electric lighting would have been . . . well,
illuminating.

Great names edge across the stage: James Boswell, Humphry Davy, Joseph
Banks, Joseph Black, Marc Isambard Brunel, Rudolph Raspe, Erasmus Darwin,
Richard Trevithick and so on. In 1808, the year that Davy invented the electric
arc light, Murdock was awarded the Count Rumford Medal of the Royal Society
for his development of gas lighting. Curiously, the paper recording these
achievement was written by James Watt junior and presented by Joseph Banks.

Murdock never appeared before the Royal Society, nor for that matter
the Lunar Society, due perhaps to his low social status – another cross
he had to bear. Nevertheless, here is a stirring tale well told. All involved
with this publishing enterprise should be heartily congratulated.

Jack Harris is a metallurgist

But what is the potential value of the site? How much is Battersea worth?
This is a difficult question to answer. The imposing, albeit redundant power
station occupies a prime site, overlooking the Thames only a kilometre or
two away from central London. Suppose that the government, as represented
by the CEGB (of blessed memory), had kept the site and, in the way that
governments can, exerted pressure to get rather more realistic treatment
from the planning authorities.

Suppose also that it put in charge a smart, commercially minded civil
servant determined to extract the most value from the site for the benefit
of the public. Our financial wizard, being in no hurry, would have waited
until land prices recovered their value such that an acre alongside the
Thames became worth, say, Pounds sterling 10 million or even Pounds sterling
12 million. As the site is close on 40 acres, its value might approach half
a billion pounds.

Of course, this is the price a property developer might be prepared
to pay for the site, but a developer would be looking to make a 100 per
cent profit on its investment within a few years. Equally, such profits
could accrue to the government, should it decide to finance the development
of the site itself. In such circumstances, the worth of Battersea to the
government might approach a billion pounds.

A billion pounds is a useful sum. Within Britain’s National Health Service,
for example, it is generally reckoned that the cost of saving a life, by
introducing more medical checkups and mass health screening, is about Pounds
sterling 100 000. Thus a billion pounds spent on the health service, if
used in defined ways, could result in the saving of 10 000 lives. Think
of the blessing this would bring to those who would otherwise have been
bereaved.

Another way of coming to grips with the significance of the potential
value of Battersea is to compare its worth with the value we place on other
national monuments. Because of its huge size and dominance – and because
its architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, also designed Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral
– Battersea is known as a ‘Cathedral of Power’. So what about real cathedrals
then, what value do we ascribe to them? The best way of discovering this
is to find out how much we would be prepared to pay to prevent them being
destroyed.

It so happens that the Archbishop of Canterbury has just written to
Margaret Thatcher saying that unless Pounds sterling 70 million is found
our cathedrals will ‘fall into a spiral of decay’. This is in part due to
pollution from fossil-fuelled power stations – of which Battersea was one
– which is dissolving away the stonework and glass (it is known as the ‘Second
Dissolution of the Monasteries’, and in a way is a consequence of the ‘First
Dissolution’, which led to Protestantism, the Protestant Work Ethic, the
Industrial Revolution and hence the pollution). It is highly unlikely that
the Pounds sterling 70 million, or anything approaching this sum, will be
forthcoming. We can only conclude, sadly, that in Britain our cathedrals
are worth to us rather less than a tenth part of our redundant power station.

Comparing the values of such disparate things as redundant power stations,
human lives and cathedrals is fraught with difficulties and errors. How
about measuring the value of Battersea against the cost of a working station
of comparable size? A good starting point to find the price of a working
station is the amount of money various consortia, including the Hanson conglomerate,
are prepared to bid for PowerGen, the company which has inherited 30 per
cent of the CEGB’s generating capacity in preparation for privatisation.
Prices in the range of Pounds sterling 1 billion to Pounds sterling 1.4
billion are being discussed, but the power stations themselves are valued
at rather less than a billion pounds.

Can it be that poor old Battersea, which has long since ended its useful
life, and is in fact now gutted, is worth as much as vibrant PowerGen’s
21 power stations supplying as they do almost a third of the electrical
needs of the whole of England and Wales? Putting this another way, if PowerGen
generated all its power (18.5 gigawatts) from stations the size of Battersea
(0.5 gigawatts) then it would need 37 of them. That is to say that redundant
Battersea has the same cash value as 37 working Batterseas.

It doesn’t seem right somehow, but then, as I’ve said, I’m not very
good at economics. But I do recognise an asset-stripping opportunity when
I see it.

Jack Harris is a metallurgist who lives at Dursley in Gloucestershire.

I have the sneaking feeling that even Jonathan Porritt is beginning
to be persuaded that nuclear power has some advantages. Porritt, who recently
stepped down from being director of Friends of the Earth, was allowed some
uninterrupted half hours or so on TV this month to put forward his usual
panegyric on alternative energy sources. On one, this was followed by a
studio discussion in which Ian Fells was in cracking form.

Fells, professor of energy conversion at the University of Newcastle,
can be a severe critic of the nuclear industry. In the studio discussion,
he pointed out that we must conserve energy and use renewables. This, he
accepted, left a huge shortfall. If we were really concerned about carbon
dioxide pollution then this gap simply had to be filled by nuclear generation.

Porritt seemed almost to agree.

This is not the only onslaught Porritt has had to bear. Just the day
before there was a TV profile of the originator of the Gaia hypothesis,
James Lovelock, who was pictured sharing a platform with Porritt at a meeting
of the Welsh Branch of the FoE. The film then cut to a view of Hinkley Point
nuclear station with Lovelock in the foreground delivering the following
monologue: ‘Often when I speak to sensible and intelligent Greens I find
that their common sense drops out when one mentions nuclear power. I don’t
regard it as any particular danger. I notice in the air around us there’s
plenty of haze pollution, plenty of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning
stations all across Britain and Europe and I think they represent a far
greater danger.

‘I appeal to you not to be carried away by this hysterical propaganda
of the anti nuclear movement. We need nuclear power at the moment, we don’t
want to get rid of it. So let’s be glad we’ve got it and not close it down,
because it just does not add to the greenhouse (effect).’ One could not
wish for a warmer testimonial than that.

My final ‘independent’ witness for the defence of nuclear power is an
equally distinguished environmentalist, Kenneth Mellanby, first director
of the Monks Wood Experimental Station (set up by the Nature Conservancy)
and founder-editor of the journal Environmental Pollution. It was he who
first injected scientific objectivity into the debate, originated by Rachel
Carson, on the environmental harm of unrestricted use of pesticides.

So concerned is Mellanby by the greenhouse effect that he advocates
that all advanced countries move towards a position of zero use of fossilised
fuel (‘Controlling the greenhouse’, Forum, 23 June). This would involve
an expanded use of both renewable power sources and nuclear electricity,
and the electrification of all surface transport. His proposal is so sensible,
and so visionary, that it is bound to be widely ignored.

Inevitably, not everyone accepts that nuclear power is so environmentally
friendly. Although carbon dioxide is not released during operation of the
nuclear stations themselves, small quantities of the gas are emitted during
the burning of fossilised fuel to provide energy to mine and process the
uranium. Nigel Mortimer of Friends of the Earth has developed a scenario
in which the industry is forced to mine such low-grade ores that there is
no net saving of carbon dioxide emissions. However, the absurdities of the
assumptions he used in this analysis were exposed in the February edition
of Atom, a journal published by the Atomic Energy Authority.

‘Nuclear electricity is too expensive’, is another complaint, and so
it is. But it is the activities of the objectors themselves which is causing
it to be so; they are making a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Writing in the Royal Society’s journal Science and Public Affairs, Richard
Southwood, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, reminded us that the nuclear
industry has to spend up to thirty thousand times as much as the National
Health Service on taking precautions against adventitious irradiation in
order to save a single life (Pounds sterling 100 million and Pounds sterling
3000 respectively). It is this factor of thirty thousand which is crucifying
the industry, and those responsible for inflicting it should carefully think
through the consequences of their actions as far as environmental pollution
is concerned.

It is all a little sad. We all seek the same ends – the protection of
the biosphere. Perhaps we should rename the phenomenon the ‘glasshouse effect’
because this might remind us that we shouldn’t throw stones.

What is so puzzling is that intelligent, sensitive and caring people,
such as Porritt, Fells, Lovelock and Mellanby, can come to such widely differing
conclusions when faced with the same evidence. Sometimes one can determine
what makes a person ‘tick’ by discovering his or her hobbies.

Porritt enjoys walking, an activity shared by Lovelock. Fells lists
‘energy conversation’, which might seem a little obsessional. But the best
recreation is that chosen by Mellanby because it contains the germ of a
solution to all our problems. His single spare time activity is ‘austere
±ô¾±±¹¾±²Ô²µâ€™.

Jack Harris has just retired after spending a third of a century in
the nuclear industry

Richard Brooks, who writes the ‘Pendennis’ column in The Observer, and
who must surely be an arts man, didn’t find the piece fascinating at all.
Indeed, he picked up on it in his column a few weeks later and suggested
that it rivalled in tedium the famous (he called it the infamous) headline
in The Times: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile: Not Many Dead’. In short, Brooks
was suggesting that the New York Times headline was one of the most boring
in the history of newspapers. He even called for the resignation of the
editor.

Before challenging Brooks on his attitude to decay, I must ask a question:
What do journalists consider an interesting headline? As far as the tabloids
are concerned, it is quite straightforward: the ideal piece contains references
to money, sex, the church, violence and royalty, not necessarily altogether
or in that order.

As for the heavies, readers are supposed to be most affected by news
items dealing with politics or, the ultimate introspection, things to do
with the Media itself. ‘Thatcher clashes with Kinnock’ is meant to quicken
the pulse, as is Peregrine Worsthorne’s opinion on the appropriateness of
Andrew Neil’s girl friend. In the main though, politics is all: science
and technology come very low in the scheme of things.

Personally, I find many of the political items predictable and tedious,
but can I justify my claim that decaying plywood is more exciting? First,
some background information: wood is a natural, polymeric, cellular-fibre
composite requiring less energy in its production than any other material
used in construction. It is also the most environmentally friendly product;
if the trees are specially grown they can even ameliorate the greenhouse
effect.

But it’s the decay, the rotting, which is really interesting, especially
its scientific, philosophical and religious connotations. Of course, given
a suitable environment or pretreatment, wood doesn’t have to rot – wooden
artefacts remain in excellent condition after several millennia in Egyptian
tombs, and oak beams in Elizabethan houses have survived centuries of exposure
to the wet British climate. Where rotting has occurred, it is usually as
a result of mistakes having been made – a failure to protect against the
rapacity of wood-destroying fungi, dry and wet rot. No one can claim that
the durability of construction materials is unimportant. Many of the building
‘disasters’ of the 1950s and 60s, so fiercely castigated by Prince Charles,
have been a result of the rotting and corrosion and discolouring and spalling
of the materials, rather than being due to mistakes in design by the hapless
architects.

Shouldn’t we be more philosophical about decay? After all it is happening
to us all, all the time. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, newspaper columnist
– all must one day die. According to Flaubert: ‘As soon as we are born,
bits start to fall off.’ With his dying words the Buddha warned us: ‘All
compound things are subject to decay.’ And 500 years later, in the Sermon
on the Mount, Christ managed to compress biological depredation, chemical
attack and human intervention into a single line when He told his flock
not to store up treasures on Earth, ‘where moth and rust doth corrupt, and
where thieves break through and steal’.

It’s all the fault of entropy, another word for despair according to
W. H. Auden. On the other hand, if things didn’t rot, and there were no
other manifestations of the second law of thermodynamics, yesterday would
be like today, and today would be as tomorrow. The arrow of time might even
be reversed, and think how confusing that would be. It is because things
rot and entropy increases that we know that the Universe must have an end,
and that it cannot have existed for ever; that is, the Universe has both
a beginning and an end. If it has a beginning, does this mean it had a creator?
I really don’t know, but it’s a question worth asking. One is reminded of
the words of the well-known hymn: ‘Change and decay in all around I see,
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.’ If you still think decay is boring,
then I am truly sorry.

As I write, I have just come across a headline in The Guardian: ‘Thatcher
will be ditched, says Kinnock.’ Should this come about, apparently, she
might be replaced by Sir Geoffrey Howe. Imagine how exciting that would
be.

Jack Harris is a metallurgist in the West Country.

Of course, had Mrs T continued her chemistry studies, instead of confusing
her mind with all that dreary law and politics, she would have realised
that the chemistry of the environment is anything but ‘humdrum’. In fact,
the really important event in the South Atlantic during 1982, the ‘crisis’
as far as the future of mankind is concerned, was not the Falklands war,
but something that took place even further south – the identification, by
British scientists, of the hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic.

The thesis I am developing is that, in the long term, discoveries in
science are of far greater significance than much-trumpeted military or
political events. We are, for example, about to commemorate the 50th anniversary
of the start of the Second World War, yet an infinitely more important occurrence,
which also took place in 1939, goes largely unnoticed. I refer to the publication
by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman of the results of their experiments which
demonstrated that uranium is fissionable. As a result of this, in a little
over half a decade, atomic bombs were developed and dropped on Japan, thereby
ending hostilities and starting the nuclear arms race.

My next example relates to the French Revolution, the 200th anniversary
of which is putting all France into a tizzy. It was undeniably a significant
event, yet, in my book, completely eclipsing it in importance were the experiments
carried out around the same time on the other side of the Alps by an obscure
professor of anatomy, Luigi Galvani.

Galvani was attempting to find out if atmospheric electricity could
stimulate muscular contraction in the carcasses of frogs. The exact dates
of his discoveries are not known but my New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ diary confidently
states that it was in 1789 that he carried out the vital experiment and
observed that the frog’s legs twitched when an electric spark was discharged
near them.

These and later experiments, which Galvani interpreted incorrectly,
led his friend and rival, Alessandro Volta, to develop his ‘voltaic cell’
or ‘battery’. For the first time a steady source of electrical current became
available for experimentalists, making possible the great discoveries in
electrical science of the early part of the 19th century. This in turn led
to the start of the Great Electrical Age, through which we are still passing.
Should you question who has had more influence on our lives, Robespierre
or Galvani, then turn off all the electrical power to your home one winter’s
evening, and ask the question again.

In addition to all this, scientific discoveries are capable of being
repeated and verified: not so historic events, the accounts of which frequently
suffer from hyperbole. It is, for example, surprising to many that at the
time the Bastille was stormed in 1789 only seven prisoners were incarcerated
there, and two of those were lunatics who didn’t really want to be released.
To strip the chains from fellow men, who all the time were content to wear
them, is perhaps the fate of all revolutionaries.

And then there was the Boston Massacre which was one of the precipitating
events of the American Revolution a few years earlier. The word massacre
conjures up a vision of some hundreds of bodies scattered around the scene
of a holocaust. It is a shock to learn that hundreds were not involved,
nor even tens; in fact only three Bostonians were killed during the altercation
itself (though two more did die later). Such is the stuff that legends are
made of.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s in the 18th century moved more easily from science into politics
and back again. Prince among these was Benjamin Franklin who, when he was
not inventing and making great discoveries in electricity (he inspired Galvani),
was representing Pennsylvania in London and the Congress in Paris. While
in England, Franklin befriended another scientist, Joseph Priestley, and
encouraged his interest in international politics.

In 1774 Priestley travelled to France and met the third member of our
scientific trio – Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, who
appreciated more clearly than Priestley himself the full implications of
the Englishman’s experimental data. Both were affected by the French Revolution.
On the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, Priestley, because
of his support for the Revolution, had his house burned down. He fled to
America where he became a friend of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Lavoisier’s
remaining life was even more eventful.

In pre-revolutionary France Lavoisier had played a prominent part in
the Ferme Generale, the country’s main tax collecting agency, and this did
not endear him to the Revolutionary Government. He had also recommended
the construction of a high wall around Paris and he was later accused by
the leading revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat, of poisoning the air of the
city by preventing its circulation.

A chemist becoming immersed in politics, a tax reformer involved in
controversies over the composition of the atmosphere – it all has a certain
familiar ring about it. Could there be some lessons in all this for Britain’s
own chemist-turned-politician, tax-reformer and environmentalist? Perhaps
Margaret Thatcher should pause in her inexorable bustling progress towards,
say, introducing her hugely unpopular poll tax and recall the fate of poor
old Lavoisier. In late 18th-century France a ‘government guillotine motion’
had a rather more literal meaning than it has today, and a ‘government cut’
was much more painful. On the afternoon of 8 May 1794 Lavoisier suffered
the most unkindest cut of all: he had his head cut off.

Fortunately no similar fate is likely to befall Thatcher, though these
are emotional times, and didn’t ‘Taxation without Representation’ have something
to do with the American Revolution? Neither should she forget all that unpleasantness,
known as ‘The Peasants’ Revolt’, which followed the last attempt by a British
government to force a poll tax onto an unwilling populace. Caution is called
for; an end to recklessness.

Jack Harris is a metallurgist who lives in Gloucestershire.