I don't think the latter is quite right. A bit like City of Death (1979), part of the brilliance of Blink is how it plays with expectations and clichés, and the usual form of Doctor Who. If we know Doctor Who, it's more rewarding. That's why it helps that it's some way into the run - it wouldn't work earlier on in Season 3; it wouldn't work in Season 1.
(Much better, I think, for a novice to begin with season opener Smith and Jones, but surely a novice ought to start from Rose.)
The wheeze is to show what happens when the Doctor isn't around to stop the monsters - an idea used again to great effect in the following year's Turn Left. Instead, here it's up to two ordinary people - Sally and Larry - to work their way through the clues.
Since they're not familiar with the format of Doctor Who like we are, we're often a few steps ahead of them. We know to be worried as they walk into danger. We know to shout at the screen. Our own knowledge of the series makes the episode more scary.
But, on first viewing, even we are lost in the intricacies of the plot. A story like this depends on a sort of contract between writer and viewer. We agree to accept the strange, confusing world we've been landed in on the promise that it will be explained. In fact, we're given all the clues we need to solve the mystery - we just don't realise it yet.
The best example of that is right at the end, when it seems the Doctor has abandoned Sally and Larry, the TARDIS dematerialising round them, leaving them to the mercy of the Angels. It's heart-stopping stuff, the Doctor seemingly callous, Sally and Larry with no chance of escape...
But, once the solution is presented, it seems to desperately, wretchedly simple. We realise it's clearly been signposted all the way through the episode. Of course that's how to get out it.
My chum James Goss once described the six episodes (including Blink) that Steven Moffat wrote for Russell T Davies as,
"perfect puzzle boxes, full of heart and drama but also where every single bit of the mystery is in place like clockwork."
That "heart and drama" is exactly right. The Doctor and Martha appear in just three scenes of Blink but we get a great sense of their relationship. I can readily imagine a whole episode - or series - of them stranded in the 1960s, an exasperated Martha forced to take a day-job to support his building contraptions that might help them get home.
Best of all is how concisely the complex plot is spelled out in simple terms. So much of Doctor Who is exposition, building worlds and politics and problems from little more than words. There are tricks to getting through it - the Doctor says it at great speed, or peppers it with odd asides full of jokes and weird mental images, or the companion shares some of the burden.
Blink does a trick with exposition that still utterly thrills me. It's so simple, so quick, so what a real person would say. The Doctor holds up an all-important gadget, vital to him solving the problem at the heart of the episode. And explains:
First broadcast 7 pm, Saturday 26 March 2005 << back to 2004
Rose enters the TARDIS for the first time
It's a brilliant scene. Rose and her new friend the Doctor are being chased by a monster. They're stuck in a back yard and the gates are locked. But the Doctor doesn't seem worried, he just strides into a tall blue box. Rose, baffled, follows him into the police box and stops short - just inside the doors. We don't see what she's seen. Then she runs back out again, and runs around the outside of the police box, checking it's not a trick. She runs back inside and the camera pulls back, the music swells, and we see the vast interior, the new TARDIS control room.
It's a brilliant scene but totally ruined by the trailers and publicity pictures released the week before broadcast showing the new TARDIS set.
Publicity is tricky: how much do you show to grab an audience but not spoil the surprises? As Gary Gillatt said of Day of the Doctor this weekend:
Perhaps that could only work a show that's already established a popular following, and Rose needed all the attention it could get. That original trailer for the return of Doctor Who is amazing, too. But how much better would the experience of watching Rose for the first time have been if we'd not known what the TARDIS interior looked like until Rose did?
I know the answer to that, because I first watched Rose more than two weeks before it was broadcast, before the TARDIS set had been seen. An early cut of the episode had found its way on to the internet, which I had manfully not downloaded (partly due to it being wrong, mostly due to be not knowing how). But then an evil friend I won't name handed me a copy burned onto a disc, and I was too weak to resist. On Wednesday 9 March, the Dr and I watched it together. Here's what I wrote at the time...
"I just loved it ... [The Dr] watched it too (though she was more excited by the prospect of new episodes of 24, and she's keener on Casanova than she is on Droo). She said she'd not hesitate to dump her boyfriend for the bloke with the time machine, so she could go see the Parthenon ...
The TARDIS looks great; a nice mix of stuff. There's a certain Jules Verne-ness to it, but also various Dr Who elements. The time rotor is from the TV movie, the interior doors from the Cushing films, etc. I love the inclusiveness of that. It's all Dr Who....
In fact, the TV movie has several influences: the rollicking TARDIS-in-vortex shots, the swirl of air when the TARDIS dematerialises... More importantly, that sense of the 'epic'. Old Dr Who was often up-close and intimate, with the Radiophonic Workshop famously speaking of 'inner turmoil'. The TV movie was much more 'Da daaa!' and orchestral. The use of human voices is part of that, but there's also the stings as scenes change. Does that make sense?
Talking to [another friend who'd seen it] last night, we agreed the direction is a bit flat. I loved the Doctor shouting 'leg it' to Rose, but when they're racing from the Autons in that first scene together, or across Dalek Bridge in Westminster, you don't really get a sense of urgency. They're running, yes, but not for their lives. Peter Davison is still best at Urgent Running. Also, as has been said, that spotting-the-transmitter needed one less frame...
[In the broadcast episode, there was indeed one less shot of the Doctor's bafflement before recognising the London Eye.]
But there are some nicely iconic moments: the wedding-dressed Autons, Mickey's head coming off, even the wheelie bin. I think it's a really funny idea, a wheelie bin eating someone. And is Billie's line about breast implants a nod to SynthespiansTM? I hope so.
I like the silliness. I really like the silliness. I will not repeat my views on the difference between stupidity and silliness ...
Rose getting into the car with Mickey and not knowing he's an Auton is cool. We know something is up, even though she doesn't. That's suspense. But it also means we believe in the Doctor before she does.
We get a staggering amount on information: the war, the Nestenes, the TARDIS (the disguise!), the Doctor, the sonic screwdriver, time travel, aliens, diplomacy... And Rose has got family and a life! Bloody hell, she's really got a life back home that matters. It means something. It's still boggling just how much of a departure that is.
Shame that Clive's stash of Who stuff didn't include pictures of Other Doctors - even in a spot-them-if-you-can-in-the-background way. I assumed, too, that all those pictures of the Doctor in the past are from his future. (I like the idea, for example, that he and Rose can visit Krakatoa now, and she'll know he washes up on Sumatra.)
The Doctor looking in the mirror is definitely for the first time - he doesn't know what he looks like, and the 'ears' gag (perfect for Eccles) is a steal from Robot. So, is this his regeneration story, but we've just come in mid-way through?
Not too worried about the 'vanillaness' of the episode [a complaint others had made]. It's pretty straightforward a beginning, but with plenty of room to move afterwards. I think J Morris once said that the TV movie didn't feel like a new beginning, but [in my opinion] Rose does. I want desperately to see more."
It really is bigger on the inside... Thirty Years in the TARDIS (1993)
What a joy Thirty Years in the TARDIS was - a celebration of Doctor Who that concentrated not on its worthiness but how it made us feel watching. At the time, it didn't look as if Doctor Who would ever return to our screens. It had been off the air for four years, a special anniversary story had stopped production almost as soon as it started, and Children in Need's Doctor Who / EastEnders crossover didn't exactly convince a mass audience that the show deserved resurrecting.
I love Dimensions in Time, but Thirty Years was something to be proud of as a fan. Director Kevin Davies worked wonders to achieve so much more than just a series of clips and contributors: it's full of monsters and special effects, and a sense of Doctor Who not just as something from the past but a series that could still deliver real thrills.
Best of all is a shot towards the end where a small boy enters the TARDIS. Despite what I've said before about Doctor Who no longer being for children, here's one discovering the main wheeze of the series in exactly the way that the audience did in the very first episode. But this time we follow behind him, moving from the police box exterior into the control room all in one single shot.
That magical effect had never been done on Doctor Who before, and wouldn't be done again (or at all in the series proper) until last year's Christmas special:
I think that's extraordinary: the very idea that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside is at the very heart of the show. It's so wildly ridiculous; yet in this trick shot it's there before our eyes.
I remember being amazed in 1996 that the television movie, with its massive budget, failed to include that effect with the other expensive set pieces. I looked out for it in the 2005 series - and then read in Doctor Who Magazine that Russell T Davies had hoped to feature it. There are good reasons why not: it's a relatively simple trick requiring a pair of locked-off cameras, but it requires a lot of setting up. The time it would eat up in a recording day simply made it impractical. (Last year's Christmas special did the legwork in CGI.)
It occurred to me, reading Russell's explanation, that it would be a simple enough trick to do in an audio. All I needed was enough dialogue in the scene to cover them walking from the door to the console, as the sound effects changed. So, entirely for my own self-indulgence, I wrote it into the play I was writing at the time: The Settling, delivered in October 2005.
The scene is Drogheda in 1649, some time after Oliver Cromwell has massacred the town:
MARY: All names have meanings. I’ll probably choose something loyal to the king. Charles the second, I mean.
DOCTOR WHO: Here we are.
HE FISHES FOR THE TARDIS KEY.
MARY: You keep supplies in this? For our journey?
ACE: Yeah, sort of. So what names would mean loyalty?
AS DOCTOR WHO SPEAKS, HE OPENS THE DOOR AND – ALL IN THE SAME SCENE – THE WOMEN FOLLOW HIM INTO THE TARDIS. NB: THIS IS THE ‘MCGANN” TARIS INTERIOR FX.
DOCTOR WHO: "Charles", obviously, for a boy. For a girl… "Elizabeth" would say "monarchy". Though it’s also a favourite of the Puritans. Cromwell’s mother, his wife and his favourite daughter are all called Elizabeth.
DOCTOR WHO WORKS THE CONSOLE.
ACE: That’d be diplomatic, then. [BEAT] Oh yeah. Mary, should’ve warned you about – [this place.]
DOCTOR WHO: (KINDLY) It’s all right. You’re safe in here.
ACE: Yeah, but mind the mess. We’ve been redecorating.
MARY: (AWED) I can feel it! I can feel it all at peace! It’s like... like a church. You worship here?
DOCTOR WHO: Not exactly. It’s our home. Ace, this is going to be tricky. I could do with your help…
PRESSING BUTTONS ETC.
ACE: Right.
PRESSING BUTTONS ETC.
Releasing the handbrake…
THE TARDIS DEMATERIALISES.
Doctor Who: How the Doctor Changed my Life
cover by Alex Mallinson
(Director/producer Gary Russell suggested it should be the vast TARDIS interior from the TV movie, this being the point when the Doctor redecorates. I wish I'd thought of it first.)
That shot from Thirty Years was also in my mind when I commissioned Alex Mallinson for the cover of a book of stories by first-time authors: How the Doctor Changed my Life.
Why does that effect so get to me? There's a particular thrill when a companion takes their first step into the TARDIS, and finds that an ordinary-looking police box contains a whole impossible world.
In that trick shot, just once in all 50 years of the series, we get to take that step with them.
When we first meet space thief Jean le Flambeur he's in prison, forced to play endless versions of the prisoner's dilemma against a fellow prisoner who turns out to be himself. Each time he fails to co-operate, the prison rewrites a bit of his memory and makes him play again, trying to force-evolve him into a more sociable citizen. It's a strange and brilliant idea, and just the start of the story.
The Quantum Thief (2010) creates an extraordinary future, at the heart of which is the wheeze that, thanks to technological advances, memories live on after bodies die. Bodies die exactly on schedule according to a person's allotted duration (sort of like in Logan's Run). The 'dead' souls are then transferred to other, less human bodies, to work as slaves for an allotted time, before returning to life. As a result, time is currency; you pay bills in seconds.
Hannu Rajaniemi constructs a rich and complex future. In fact, I sometimes found myself a bit lost. Science fiction often requires us to plunge into an environment we don't understand on the promise that we'll make more sense of it as the story goes on. We pick up clues and learn how things work, which can be very satisfying. But it can also be hard work.
Rajaniemi has a PhD in mathematical physics and this is unabashedly 'hard' sci-fi. There's lots on quantum states and encryption, and at times I couldn't quite keep up with the story. For this poor arts graduate, 'hard' sf might as well mean 'heavy-going', with the same kind of fascination for technology and hardware you get in war fiction, where it's all statistics of weapons and vehicles.
That's a shame because the story is, at heart, a classic heist - Jean using deft tricks and sleights of hand to keep one step ahead of the detective on his trail. But, like the detective, I often found myself baffled by what was going on, only realising later what Jean had managed to achieve. The effect was to distance me from the action; I didn't feel for the characters.
It doesn't help that the book is so humourless. And I'm not sure it quite delivers on its early promise. The plot ultimately hangs on some sci-fi horcruxes, and the last big battle falls rather flatly. In a world where few people ever really die, it's difficult to feel any great fear for people involved. Rajaniemi's future is constructed so robustly I didn't feel enough was at stake.
I have written a review of Elysium for the Lancet, examining the claim that the film depicts some kind of "Obamacare in space", and comparing it to what must surely be a principal influence: Don Davis' extraordinary paintings of the proposed Stanford torus space station.
(I have previously posted about this on my Tumblr blog, as well.)
The 1986 season of Doctor Who began with a thrilling special effects sequence: the camera panning across a vast spaceship as it catches the TARDIS in a beam of light. This model shot was some of the first visual effects work on the series by Mike Tucker – who is still working on Doctor Who today. (I hope to speak to Mike on this subject another time.)
The 1987 series of Doctor Who also began with a thrilling special effects sequence as the TARDIS tumbles out of control. But this was not a model shot: it was entirely computer-generated by Oliver Elmes and CAL Video – the same team that created the show's new CGI title sequence. Part 1 of Time and the Rani sees the Seventh Doctor's debut but it's also the first time the TARDIS appears as CGI.
I've been thinking a lot about the role of CGI recently, prompted by a comment made by writer Philip Reeve at the Phonicon convention earlier this year. Explaining how he came up with his extraordinary Mortal Engines, he spoke of trying to achieve “the Clangers aesthetic mixed up with an action movie”, and of how much he admired the “hand-made” feel of old children's telly.
What sort of hand-made children's telly were you thinking of?
I grew up in the 70s so I'm thinking back to The Clangers, Noggin the Nog and things like that – quite simple children's television – and also Doctor Who in those days. In fact, if you look back at pretty much all television drama of that era, like Poldark or The Onedin Line, it's not trying to compete with film in the way that TV drama does now. It's theatre: filmed theatre. The scenes outside the windows are painted and it's very obvious that people are not sitting in real rooms but sets. That requires the audience to bring a certain amount of imagination to it, which is something that has gone from television now. It just tries to look real.
Is that the appeal of hand-made TV – that the audience is more active in watching it?
Hmm... Yeah, I think partly so. Of course, with children's stuff particularly there's an element of toys coming to life. Children do that all the time anyway with their toys, moving objects around and animating them in their own minds. So I think there's always an appeal to children of little things moving about as if by magic. They very quickly get across that barrier of thinking “This is made of plasticine but I accept it”. That is entirely good, using the imagination children have anyway.
So does CGI take away from that?
Lots of CGI stuff is great: the CGI animation is very good in something like Monsters Inc or whatever – as good as cell or stop-motion animation. It's just a different look. But I am tired of CGI stuff in science-fiction movies. Avatar, for all it's script problems, was extremely beautiful and the first CGI movie which actually convinced me. I just don't see where you go from there; I don't think there's much point pursuing that sort of pseudo-realism. Watching Pacific Rim made me think that I would much rather watch someone in a big monster suit trample nice models than see it being done in pixels.
Have you seen Moon, directed by Duncan Jones?
Yes, that's one of the few sci-fi movies of recent years that actually stands out – because he uses miniatures, I think. It's got this certain feel... When you look at the movies of my era – I'm thinking of Alien, Bladerunner and things like that – when the spaceships or whatever go by you know there's something there. You know it's a miniature but at least it's a real thing.
There's a tactile quality to it.
Yes, a quality of something actually being real. Of course, nobody watching the film thinks “Oh, that's really a spaceship going by”. You assume that some sort of trickery is employed. I just think that it makes it so much more visually interesting. Things like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies had a mixture of miniatures and CGI. I'm not entirely sure what they did but that explains why there's a certain grandeur to the cities and so on, a feeling of these being real things in front of you.
You talked about children animating things anyway, so how much did the tactile quality of old TV encourage you to write and draw stories yourself?
(Long pause) I don't know. It's hard to say, really, because you grow up surrounded by that stuff so I don't know how much it came from within and how much it came from inspiration. Certainly, if I rewatch something like The Goodies or Doctor Who I can see exactly why I thought I could go out and make movies on my dad's super-8 camera because they're very doable. There's a kind of feasibility about them. They haven't got casts of thousands or vast effects. I'm not talking about the special effects so much as the ordinary outdoor scenes of people doing stuff. It was all very achievable – or looked so to me at the age of nine or whatever. I was a movie-maker by the time I was 10 or 11 and I'm sure that was completely inspired by watching things on telly and thinking “Oh yeah, I could do that”. I couldn't – but I almost could.
So how much was your recent Doctor Who e-book, The Roots of Evil, written to have a hand-made feel?
I don't know. As a writer you simply describe things and you're never really sure what pictures will emerge in readers' imaginations. It's kind of a collaboration. I put down the raw materials and it's up to the reader to make it up in their mind. I'm not sure how good their special effects budget is. But in my mind, when I was writing it, I treated it as a nostalgia exercise. I tried to make it feel like the kind of story I would have expected to see in 1978. I tried to go for the achievable sets and effects of that era. I imagined it done with three old tree branches and not much else. But I don't know if that comes across and, to be honest, I don't think it matters. It's aimed at the children of today and I imagine they are brought up on far more sophisticated effects so have a far more impressive picture in their minds than I had in mine when I was writing it. (Laughs) That's fine.
Philip Reeve, thank you very much.
Next episode: 1988
I was four when Logopolis was first on TV, five when it was repeated. I didn't see it again for a decade and yet this story, in which Tom Baker's Doctor dies, haunted me for years.
Watching it again, I'm struck by how complicated it is. Logopolis is all about the heat-death of the universe being held back by pure mathematics - numbers so powerful that they warp reality and can't be processed in a computer. It's about as high concept as you get, and I'm still not entirely sure how much it makes sense (I struggle with physics at the best of times).
But that never bothered me as a child. I never expected to understand Doctor Who anyway. It was a grown-up show, watched by my elder brother and sister (who seemed part of that grown-up world though they weren't yet in their teens) that I was allowed to sit in on so long as I didn't speak. If it presented a strange and dangerous universe, governed by unfathomable rules, that was how the world seemed to a child anyway.
Then again, what do you actually need to know to follow the story? That the Master is a baddie and up to something bad, and the Doctor is trying to stop him. Everything else, all the natter about block transfer computation and the properties of bubble memory, were - to this child, anyway - so much hand-waving between the running around.
Yet it was still compelling. Doctor Who rarely addresses the TARDIS itself in any great detail, and Logopolis makes the experience deeply unsettling. It is full of extraordinary moments that linger long in the memory: the TARDIS landing inside itself, with the police box prop stood inside the control room; the ivy-shrouded cloister room where the Doctor can brood; the TARDIS shrinking with the Doctor trapped inside; the radio telescope looming over an alien town. The TARDIS's cloister bell, warning of disaster, works so well it's still used in the series today.
My chum Matthew Michael has written intelligent things about Logopolis and points out the best of cliffhangers is a striking visual moment: the Doctor shaking hands with the Master. The Doctor siding with his mortal enemy is all the more disturbing because the Master here is a monster, not the softly spoken charmer as played by Roger Delgado. His monstrousness is underlined by him killing close relatives of two companions (Nyssa's dad Tremas and Tegan's auntie Vanessa). He chuckles to himself as the Doctor falls to his death.
There are oddly silly bits, too, like the plan to open the doors of the TARDIS while it's under water, or Tegan's getting lost in the ship being played for laughs. But the general tone is muted, and that's largely down to Tom Baker. For all the apparent hard science in the script, the story packs a punch because of how it feels. The Doctor's weary resignation as events unfold is so out of character, it feels so wrong, that it utterly enthralled this small boy.
I've been reading BF Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), which argues for a "technology of behaviour" or "cultural engineering". That sounds like the sort of thing that might feature in a sci-fi dystopia - which is chiefly why I've been reading it.
In some ways, Skinner's book reads as a chillingly impersonal manifesto for more control by the state or scientific elite over how we're brought up, arguing that much of our behaviour is simply a response to the conditions around us. In the nature/nurture debate, such a hot topic at the time, it's firmly on the side of the nurture.
Yet it's less about what should actually be done than it is how we think about improving behaviour. If we can only get beyond outdated ideas such as "free will" and autonomy, Skinner argues, we might finally progress.
I've found it by turns fascinating and frustrating, and it's often hard to tell when Skinner's examples are the results of scientifically rigorous experiment or just things he thinks to be true. But every so often there's a passage that stands out, such as this on the conflict between dignity and freedom.
"From time to time, advances in physical and biological technology have seemed to threaten worth or dignity when Medical science has reduced the need to suffer in silence and the chance to be admired for doing so. Fireproof buildings leave no room for brave firemen, or safe ships for brave sailors, or safe airplanes for brave pilots. The modern dairy barn has no place for a Hercules. When exhausting and dangerous work is no longer required, those who are hard-working and brave seem merely foolish.
The literature of dignity conflicts here with the literature of freedom, which favors a reduction in aversive features of daily life, as by making behavior less arduous, dangerous, or painful, but a concern for personal worth sometimes triumphs over freedom from aversive stimulation - for example, when, quite apart from medicinal issues, painless childbirth is not as readily accepted as painless dentistry. A military expert, J.F.C. Fuller, has written: 'The highest military rewards are given for bravery and not for intelligence, and the introduction of any novel weapon which detracts from individual prowess is met with opposition'."
BF Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), p. 56.
(Fuller is apparently from "an article on 'Tactics', Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th edn.")
I find myself instinctively wanting to counter this thesis. Yet surely that last point is at the heart of discussions about the morality of using the atomic bomb at the end of World World Two (see my post on Codename Downfall - The Secret Plan to Invade Japan). It might also help explain why the use of remote drones seems so particularly wrong. The argument is often used against them that they kill civilian women and children as much as they do enemy combatants, but that can also be true of using soldiers. Is the problem more that drones, by reducing risk to our soldiers, make it too distastefully easy?
I'm not convinced but I find myself puzzling over that when I should be building my dystopia. As so often, I post it here to clear it out of my head.
A few years ago, I worked for William Potter on the esteemed journal SpongeBob SquarePants' Krusty Kards Collection and a Shrek sticker book. I have also bounced around to his band, CUD, more than once. But more recently, we've worked on some comics.
The 100% Awesomes was produced for the Autism Education Trust as part of a teaching pack to "promote awareness of difference and autism" among school children in years five to seven. Here is the first page:
The 100% Awesomes, page 1 Art by William Potter
William and I then worked on a pitch for an original series, Wind-Up Wilbur, about a robot boy (sadly, the strip wasn't picked up). Here's the first page of that:
These are the old milk churns in which were found rolls and rolls of film of ordinary people larking about, shot by Mitchell and Kenyon a century ago. The churns stand to one side in the reception of the BFI archive at Berkhamsted, which opened its doors to a select clutch of visitors yesterday, including yours truly.
It's a treasure-trove of fascinating things. Next to the milk-churns was the blood-red costume worn by Ingrid Bergman as Paula in Gaslight (1944) - looking in good nick for its 70 years. Facing that was a costume worn by Greta Garbo. As we made our way round the building, we saw continuity photos from Star Wars, the Academy Award won by Cecil Beaton for Gigi, an invitation to Peter Sellers' first birthday and Derek Jarman's scrapbook from filming Jubilee.
Having nosed round and worked in a number of archives, and nattered to curators and experts in a variety of fields in a variety of pubs, what struck me more than the splendid artefacts was how well organised the tour was, with a good range of material covered and engaging people to talk to us. They answered our questions and kept to time, while sharing their expertise in a way I could understand. That is no mean feat.
As well as the special collections of props and paperwork, the tour covered the BFI's efforts to preserve old film and TV. We saw a two-inch tape machine, like the ones on which programmes such as Doctor Who were once recorded. The tapes, at £400 in the early 60s, cost more than the cast were paid for a week, so the tapes were reused and episodes were wiped... We saw the wet-gate process and how it vanishes the cracks and damage on old film. We even got to handle film strips and poke our noses round the vast stacks of film cans with alluring titles...
Most fascinating to me (chiefly because I already knew a fair bit about telly preservation) was the discussion of silver nitrate film stock. It's not just highly flammable; as it burns it creates oxygen so can't be put out. Our guide told us of a safety demonstration where burning film had been placed in a bucket of water and then, when it was removed, had reignited. The burning film also releases noxious gases such as cyanide.
So there's a reason there are so few Art Deco cinemas survive - they burned down. Now you need a specific licence to run silver nitrate film in a projector. The BFI have the two licences, and also the largest collection of nitrate films as most other archives have transferred their stock to safety film (which has its own problems with mould and vinegar syndrome) and destroyed the dangerous stuff. We got to nose round the chilly, concrete bunker where rooms of the dangerous nitrate are stored.
There are those who argue that silver nitrate is better than subsequent formats, though one of our guides suggested this was because it tended to be struck from the original negative, rather than being a later-generation copy. Nitrate also used to be cheap: its use was as much about cost as its quality.
It was a grand day out, and thanks to my chum K for letting me tag along after her.
The main problem with science documentaries (having made a short one, “Entropy Explained”, that, despite a well-qualified and engaging presenter, I think doesn't quite work) is how to illustrate the argument without distracting from it. A personal bugbear is documentaries that show pretty pictures of space or CGI that aren't even connected to what's being said. At the same time, just having a talking head addressing the viewer can get dull very quickly – telly is all about moving pictures.
That's why Brian Cox gets sent all round the world, spelling out the science in a way that's visually appealing – and related to what he's saying (if also riffing off this). In the 1970s, Jacob Bronowski was commissioned to link science to art, which makes for better visuals in the amazing The Ascent of Man (1973). Later, Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) dramatised lots of moments from history – and at great expense – while Carl himself hosted the show from the inside of spaceship (I can't help thinking it looks like the inside of the Pinky Ponk from In the Night Garden...).
But James Burke is quite the master at thrilling, engaging and boggling ways to put across his ideas. He cut his teeth presenting Tomorrow's World and the Apollo Moon landings. You can see a little of this early work at the BBC Archive's Tomorrow's World collection, while the excellent Apollo 11: A Night to Remember DVD features clips of Burke putting a spacesuit through its paces or testing the rocket escape system. All this shows his flair for simple and direct ways of talking technology in a way that we'll remember.
But Connections is something altogether more impressive: a 10-hour thesis on the history of and our dependence on technology.
The first episode reminds me, in terms of strategy, a little of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That film consists of four separate but related stories: early man making a discovery; something happening on the Moon; something happening in a spaceship; a journey into the unknown. Each sequence is visually and aurally stunning, and each sequence ends with a startling, gosh-wow revelation that takes us somewhere new. As a whole, it aims to simply and vividly boggle our sense of where we come from, how we got here, and where we're going next.
Connections' first sequence is remarkably simple. Burke addresses us directly:
“Would you do me a favour? I'd like to stop talking for a minute and when I do, take a look at the room you're in and above all at the man-made objects in that room that surround you – the television set, the lights, the phone and so on – and ask yourself what those objects do to your life just because they're there. Go ahead.”
Watching it now, it's striking how much more dependent we are on clever telephonic and electronic devices since the series was made, so it makes the point even harder: we don't know how these things work and yet we're in their thrall.
To make that case, Burke then spells out what happened in the New York City power blackout in 1965, dramatising scenes and speaking to witnesses. It's as fascinating for its depiction of human behaviour – passengers on a tube train sharing birthday cake and wine as they waited in a dark tunnel – as for the explanation of how a single protective relay caused chaos.
Burke shows us the offending relay before telling us what is, inviting us to guess. It's a very effective way of drawing us in. The point is that we are reliant on gadgets and networks we barely understand.
Next, he spells out a nightmare scenario of how long we'd survive in a world where technology stopped working, making the brutal choices horribly vivid – we'd need food and shelter, but would we be prepared to kill someone to take their house, or protect our own? Again, he gets in our heads, and plays to 70s concerns about how far we removed ourselves from the means of production and essential skills, played out earlier in Terry Nation's Survivors (1975-7).
But this is all merely a prelude. Burke is then in Egypt to trace the origin of our dependence on technology. I gather from my in-house expert that what follows is based on the work of the archaeologist Flinders Petrie.
About 10,000 BC, at a result of climate change, mankind's behaviour radically altered. Around this time, the glaciers receded and the temperature rose, and water became scarcer. The hunting nomads had to come down from the high grasslands in search of food, and did so, says Burke, in northern India, central America, Syria and Egypt (and possibly also Peru). In Egypt, where Burke bases his argument, they found a lucky accident of nature. A yearly flood of the river Nile created a very fertile ribbon of land stretching some 750 miles, in the midst of what was otherwise scrubland and desert. This fertile land supported plants the nomads could eat. About 5000 BC they settled permanently in the area. They dug and sowed crops, irrigating them by hand and perhaps with basic tools for nearly 1,000 years, and then an odd-shaped bit of wood transformed everything ever after.
Burke's explanation of what happened as a result of the invention of the plough is quite long but well worth following. It's a brilliant, eye-popping series of consequences, just as gosh-wow as 2001.
“Initially the surplus [food] produced by irrigation and ploughing permitted non-foodproducers to operate within a community, and in the beginning these may have been the men who dug and maintained the irrigation systems, and those who organized them. These administrators would have derived their authority from their knowledge of astronomy which gave them alone the magic ability to say when the flood would come, when to sow on the land wet from the receding waters, and when to harvest. The grain needed storage room out of the weather, and dried clay daubed on woven reed baskets gradually gave way to more permanent containers as the demand for them increased with the crop. Fire-hardened clay pots, made from spiralling loops of wet earth, came to be used, and the first evidence of solid burning is of piles of these pots heaped together to form a form of central granary. The need to identify the ownership and amount of grain contained in a pot or a granary led to the development of writing. The first picture-words came from before 3000 B.C and comprise lists of objects and totals of figures contained in pots and chests. The surplus grain paid for craftsmen: carpenters, potters, weavers, bakers, musicians, leather-workers, metal-workers, and those whose task it was to record everything – the scribes. The need to ensure regularity of harvest in order to support those members of the community demanded a taxation system, and so that it should be operated fairly skills were developed to assess each man's due. Initially this may have started with the measurement of field boundaries destroyed each year by the flood, but as time passed and the irrigation systems grew more complex, the process demanded greater sophistication, calling for mathematics to handle the measurement of distance, area and cubic amount.
These early forms of arithmetic and geometry grew from the demands of canal building: how long, how wide and how deep? It may have been the need for tools to do the job which spurred interest in the copper deposits across the Red Sea in Sinai, and this in turn would have stimulated the use of metal for weapons. Weapons were needed by those whose task it was to protect the land and crops from invasion, as the surplus food and the goods financed by its production began to be used as barter with neighbouring communities, some of which looked with envy on the riches of Egypt. Metal tools gave the Egyptians the ability to work stone, initially, perhaps, in blocks for strengthening the irrigation ditches. The Nile is bordered for 500 miles south from Cairo by limestone cliffs, and it is from this stone that the first pyramid was constructed.
A mere hundred and fifty years after the first use of stone for the construction of buildings, the massive step pyramid of King Djoser was erected. It rises out of the desert as Saqqara, south of Cairo. Built by the king's chief minister, Imhotep, it is the oldest extant stone structure in the world, dating from around 2800 B.C. It was constructed using the tools and the theoretical knowledge developed by the canal builders, and it shows a high degree of precision in the use of both. By the time Djoser was being laid in his pyramid, Egyptian society had developed a form that is little changed today. At the top came the Head of State, served by his cabinet of advisers; these were aided by a civil service which organized every aspect of life in the state, gathering taxes from craftsmen and farmers to support themselves and the army. The regulation of the state's business was effected through the application of laws, which rested for their observance on the availability of an annual calendar, by now divided into twelve months or thirty days each. By 2500 B.C. the Egyptians (and their neighbours the Mesopotamians) had a developed and sophisticated society operating with a handful of essential tools: civil engineering, astronomical measurement, water-lifting machinery, writing and mathematics, primitive metallurgy, and the wheel. With these tools the Egyptians administered am empire whose power and influence was unparalleled in the ancient world, based on an agricultural output made possible by the plough. Its use had ensured the continued survival and expansion of the community and set in motion the changes that resulted from that expansion.
The first man-made harvest freed mankind from total and passive dependence of the vagaries of nature, and at the same time tied him for ever to the very tools that set him free. The modern world in which we live is the product of that original achievement, because just as the plough served to trigger change in the community in which it appeared, each change that followed led to further change in a continuing sequence of connected events.”
James Burke, Connections (Macmillan London Limited: 1978), pp. 10-12.
The final sequence in this first episode sees Burke in Kuwait, showing how oil transformed the country in a single generation, so that people whose parents were nomads (as people were in Egypt before the invention of the plough) are now millionaires, racing through the desert in the latest Rolls-Royce. It's an awe-inspiring thesis, that a single invention or discovery can so transform our lives, and in ways the inventor or discoverer could never have predicted.
In each of the next eight episodes, Burke traces the discoveries that led to a key invention that he says define modern life – such as nuclear weapons, the space rocket and television. It's a shrewd and often very funny series drawing together myriad threads. Burke has a dry wit and love for historical irony. We learn, for example, that in the hunt for the cause of malaria (literally “bad air”), Napoleon ordered a bad smell map of Egypt.
I expect Douglas Adams was watching that first episode the night it was broadcast on 17 October 1978. He'd soon be working on a Doctor Who story about an alien who forced the progress of mankind. An episode first broadcast on 13 October 1979 – a little less than a year later – includes this from the alien:
SCARLIONI:
Achievement? You talk to me of achievement because I steal the Mona Lisa? Can you imagine how a man might feel who has caused the pyramids to be built, the heavens to be mapped, invented the first wheel, shown the true use of fire, brought up a whole race from nothing to save his own race?
“David Agnew” (David Fisher, Douglas Adams and Graham Williams), Doctor Who: “City of Death”, part three (1979)
Connections is certainly of its time. Burke not unreasonably assumes the viewer remembers the launch of Apollo 11 and the stirring of emotions that went with it. There's the irony, for a series about technology, that he could never have predicted how this show would be watched or by who all these decades later. And in some ways it feels prehistoric.
Burke addresses himself to a straight male audience, and makes a whole load of other assumptions, too. At one point he asks us not to be distracted by a pretty girl in shot. Later, he asks us to recall his argument, “the next time your wife asks you to change a plug”. I imagine a few chums would find the patrician tone too condescending and arrogant, but that's a shame because there's so much to enjoy. For example, in discussing the Apollo programme and the criticism that it cost too much, he says, “in the same period, American women spent the same amount on cosmetics”.
But there are other things that seem from another age. For all this talk of technology feeding into our lives, computers are things that only affect us in the workplace. Yet when he talks about the relatively new-fangled credit card and how it will change “future” transactions, it seems prophetic. He explains in episode 8, that the credit card is more than just a substitute for cash. The magnetic strip on the back is a moral judgment on you, your life and your credit worthiness. The powers that make these judgments are secret and immutable, based on patented algorithms and business practices. More than that, they drive you to behave in certain ways which were, until recently, thought wholly immoral: encouraging you to live outside your means. As he says, chillingly, at the end of this sequence,
“What will happen when being in debt all the time is the normal way to live?”
Burke is also good at looking for connections between the different stories and episodes, to understand what aids progress and what stands in its way.
In episode 3, he argues that many inventions key to industrial development in the West – gunpowder, paper, magnets – had existed commonly in China for hundreds or even thousands of years. What made the West different, he says, is that China was a Taoist state, and believed that everything and everyone had their rightful place. In Europe, however, there was more social mobility and competition, so people were constantly looking for any advantage that might make them rich and lift them up the social order.
It's interesting to join that up with the BBC's other seminal, authored series of the time. Kenneth Clark in Civilisation (1969) argued the essential element for civilisation was the courtesy to discuss new ideas without fear of reprisals or death. Jacob Bronowski in The Ascent of Man made the case for knowledge over certainty – good evidence is key not just to science but law and history, too. To this, Burke adds opportunity which allows and encourages experiment and play, so that those who make discoveries or find new ways to apply them can fully reap the rewards. Effectively, without social mobility progress grinds to a halt.
Finally, in episode 10, Burke tries to sum up all we've seen: the surges of communications technology through letters, a postal system, telegraphy, satellite phones. He concludes that,
“The faster you can communicate, the faster change happens.”
He predicts – and more accurately than he could ever have imagined – that the near future would depend on,
“Information... what you do with the facts”.
He argues that the defining question in the technological arms race will be,
“How easy is it for knowledge to spread?”
He also says that lack of access to this information will equal powerlessness, just as if someone were deaf and dumb and blind. Watching it now, that all feels chillingly right.
And yet Burke's also under no illusions about how difficult it is to predict the future. After all, the inventions he's covered in the series led to things no one could have predicted. And he concludes by connecting up the eight inventions from the series to one that will (he thinks) dominate our future – the bomber carrying nuclear bombs. Luckily, he was wrong.
There's a Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch that parodies Burke, with him telling us something, then contradicting it and then contradicting that contradiction. That's unfair, and though he does something a little like that in this last episode it's to make a serious point. He says he can't predict what will happen, or what developments will dominate our lives. In effect, he's saying, “It's more complicated than that” - itself a paraphrasing of all of science.
And he leaves us with something more potent and compelling than a dodgy prediction. Because the last moments of the series are an even more effective gosh-wow. Again, he directly appeals to us, telling us to become discoverers ourselves. He tells us that new discovery depends on challenging authority, religion and ideology that keep us in our place. As he says, science is sometimes seen as hard and emotionless because it “removes the reassuring crutches”. But he's not calling for some kind of revolution or new dawn of atheism. Instead, he simply spells out that all we need for progress is to ask the right questions.
“Ask for explanations. And ask yourself if there's anything in your life you want changed.”
I know what I'd like changed. I'd like a souped-up Region 2 DVD or Blu-Ray of Connections, please.
M'colleague Web of Evil shared with me the wonder that is Vision On - A Book Of Nonsense With Some Sense In It, an annual tied in to the TV show Vision On, published by the BBC in 1970 and on sale for 12s 6d. (My edition, obviously, came from the wonder that is Abebooks.)
It's edited by the show's producer Patrick Dowling, with contributions from presenters Tony Hart and Pat Keysell. The first page explains that,
"This is a sort of alphabet book for anyone who likes painting or drawing".
But, just to be different, it's not in alphabetical order and starts with L (for lightning). Over 60 pages, it takes the precocious child reader through everything from photographic effects to sign language, with all sorts of things to experiment with rather than copy and a lot of terrible jokes. The black-and-white photo-strips of a tortoise called Humphrey being grumpy with a small girl called Susanne are chillingly surreal.
The book is a fascinating snapshot of another world, and there's loads to enjoy in its range and the effort that's clearly been put in to being both concise and extraordinary. The design is unsophisticated compared to modern kids' publishing, but they've struggled to make the most of the cut-and-paste layout and (mostly) two-colour printing.
I love the full page portrait of Winston Churchill made from Ms, Vs, 1s, &s and full stops.
"In fact this picture was made by computer ... The computer input scans a photograph deciding how grey each tiny area is, choosing a letter to match, and then the outline printer rattles it off."
How mad that the subject for this display of cutting-edge technology is the late and reactionary Prime Minister. But best of all is page 36, which encourages readers to experiment with bleach.
Thanks to lovely Abebooks, I'm now the proud owner of a battered paperback of Carl Sagan's Cosmos and a battered hardback (without dust jacket) of James Burke's Connections – and both for less than a fiver, including P&P. Bargain.
I've been working my way through the TV version of Connections on Youtube and will blog about it more when I get to the end (at my current rate, sometime towards the end of the century). But for a flavour of its style and confidence, you can't beat this extraordinary piece to camera:
I've not seen all the TV version of Cosmos but a lot of the material was covered in my astronomy GCSE, so reading the book has been a bit of a refresher course. It's a history of science, similar to The Ascent of Man, but focusing on our knowledge of astronomy.
It's striking how much has been learned and achieved in the 30 years since the book came out. Sagan details Voyager's exciting new discoveries about the Galilean moons but can only guess at the nature of Titan. He enthuses about the possibility of sending roving machines to explore Mars. He speculates on the causes of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (which wiped out the dinosaurs), but doesn't mention the possibility of a large meteorite hitting the Earth. That's especially odd given that elsewhere he talks about the probabilities of large meteorite impacts, such as in Tunguska in 1908.
Sagan packs in fascinating titbits and detail, such as Kepler's efforts to save his mum from being tried as a witch. Excitingly, it's got footnotes instead of endnotes (and an index – so top marks all round), which means plenty of extra nuggets of fact to explode your brain.
For example, Sagan talks at one point about the scale of the Solar System, reminding us that, in terms of our ability to traverse it, the Earth was once a much bigger place. And then he drops in another striking analogy:
“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.*
* Or, to make a different comparison, a fertilized egg takes as long to wander from the Fallopian tubes and implant itself in the uterus as Apollo 11 took to journey to the Moon; and as long to develop into a full-term infant as Viking took on its trip to Mars. The normal human lifetime is longer than Voyager will take to venture beyond the orbit of Pluto.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. 159.
Like James Burke, Sagan is good at making a connection between two apparently disparate things to create a sense of wonder. But I like how the last sentence of the following footnote so lightly declines to impose or invent a reason:
“The sixth century B.C. was a time of remarkable intellectual and spiritual ferment across the planet. Not only was it the time of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and others in Ionia, but also the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho who caused Africa to be circumnavigated, of Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Jewish prophets in Israel, Egypt and Babylon, and Gautama Buddha in India. It is hard to think these activities altogether unrelated.”
Ibid., p. 206.
And, again like Burke, Sagan is good at accounting for chance and circumstance in the slow, steady progress of science through the ages. He uses a Tlingit (Native American) account of meeting the French explorer Count of La Pérouse when he “discovered” Alaska in the 1780s to discuss what first contact with an alien culture might be like. But, explaining that La Pérouse and all but one of his crew died in the South Pacific in 1788, Sagan notes:
“When La Pérouse was mustering the ship's company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned down. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Pérouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found, Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have changed significantly.”
Ibid. p 334.
Three short asides, additional to the main narrative, and you could base a science-fiction novel on each of them.
Yet the thing that's stayed with me most since I finished the book earlier this week is his reference to the 1975 paper “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence” by James W Prescott:
“The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott has performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence ... Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived – during at least one or two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence – of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.”
Ibid., p. 360.
I'm fascinated by this, but can't help wondering if that conclusion isn't too much what we'd like to believe to be true. There's something chilling, too, in the lightness with which he seems to suggest that organised religion is a symptom of childhood neglect.
A spectacularly nerdy post, this. But of marginal interest to archaeologists of the future...
When I bought my flat in 2005, my parents decided it was probably time that I stopped using my old bedroom at their house as a store for my old sci-fi rubbish. One afternoon, my dad drove up with lots and lots of books and two bin bags full of videos. Ah, I can still remember the delighted look on the Dr's face...
(It was not a delighted look on the Doctor's face.)
For readers born after the Flood, video was a slower, chunkier versions of DVD, with a more gravelly image and no special features. (Well, some of the later ones and very brief ones, or came with a separate video providing a commentary track.)
My collection of videos sat in my attic, building up an impressive collection of dust and dead spiders, for the five years I lived in that flat. I gave some away when I could find someone who wanted them. But when we moved home last year, I still had a whole binbag of tapes and nothing to watch any of them on.
I'd looked into selling the tapes, or sending them to people who asked for them, but the hassle of actually packing the damn things kept meaning I never quite got round to it. Videos are heavy, so any kind of postage was going to be stupidly expensive.
But on Sunday, a nice man from the local RSPCA shop came round and took the lot. Having also posted back a tape I borrowed from Ian Potter an aeon ago (with no actual way of watching it), as of Monday - and for the first time since 1984 - I live in a home without videotape.
Yes, I know it's not exactly the most exciting watershed moment in all history, but once the tapes had been taken I must have looked suitably forlorn 'cos the Dr gave me a hug.
(If you want them, the videos will be in the new RSPCA shop opening next month at 267 Lower Addiscombe Road, Croydon, CR0 6RD.)
This is the Monument, built between 1671 and 1677 to commemorate the Great Fire of London.
Climb the 311 steps to the viewing platform – as I did on Tuesday – and as well as the nice views you get a certificate. But the Monument is more than just a memorial to the fire. It was built by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke – members of the Royal Society.
This is Hooke in a modern painting by Rita Greer. He deduced the wave theory of light and the law of elasticity – which is named after him. He was a pioneer of surveying and map-making. He wasn't a little guy in science. But it was to Hooke that Isaac Newton wrote his famous remark, “If I have seen further [than others] it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants”.
It's a back-handed compliment: Hooke had come close to deducing – before Newton – that gravity follows an inverse square law and that this explains the movement of the planets. Newton developed Hooke's ideas but – Hooke felt – didn't credit him sufficiently. So perhaps Newton's remark is rubbing Hooke's nose in it: the “giant” Newton was standing on had a stoop and may have been a hunchback.
The remark though, is often seen as a testament to scientific endeavour – scientists and mathematicians building on the work of their peers and predecessors. That's why it's engraved on £2 coins (though perhaps that's not the best example of engineering prowess - the coin also shows a a series of cogs in a circle, but there's an odd number so the machinery would not be able to turn as it would pull against itself). As Jacob Bronowski said in The Ascent of Man,
“Year by year, we devise more precise instruments with which to observe nature with more fineness.”
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (1973), p. 356.
This is Hooke's drawing of a flea from Micrographia, published in 1665. It was the Royal Society's first major book – and the first scientific bestseller.
Micrographia isn't just about looking at tiny things through a microscope. It includes drawings of distant objects, such as the Moon and the star cluster Pleiades (see below). Large and small, these observations changed our view of the universe and our place in it. Theories on gravity needed more and better data about the stars – that meant better telescopes.
In principle, the mathematics of improving a telescope are simple. A lens defracts the light so when you look through it things seem bigger. Look through two lenses at once and they're bigger still. The easiest way to do that is to place a lens at either end of a tube. Increase the distance between the two lenses and you increase the magnification. So to really study the stars, Hooke needed a really long tube...
The Monument was built as a zenith telescope – one that looks straight up. By looking at a fixed star, Hooke hoped to gain evidence that the Earth moved round the Sun. Maths provided the theory: now Hooke would prove it for certain.
The spiral staircase inside means there's a clear view all the way up to the top of the Monument, where a trapdoor would open to reveal the sky. To make the telescope even longer, Hooke worked down in the small cellar – you can see it through the grill in the floor as you begin your climb.
Sadly, though, the telescope didn't work. The vibration from London's traffic meant the readings were never accurate enough. The mathematics of lenses is simple, but the reality is more complicated.
The Monument was used for other experiments. The steps were designed to be used in pressure studies, and are all exactly six inches high.
Hooke continued to study the stars. He worked on the design of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the first purpose-built research facility in the country. And the more we've discovered since Hooke about space and the position of the stars, the more we come back to the problems that vexed him.
This is me at the 76-metre Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank. It's the third-largest steerable radio telescope in the world. But, like the Monument, size isn't everything. Just beside it is a 38-metre Mark II dish which turned out to be much more accurate and better at listening to higher frequencies.
There's also the accuracy of the observations we make. “Astronomical instruments have been improved,” says Jacob Bronowski.
“We look at the position of a star as it was determined then and now, and it seems to us that we are closer and closer to finding it precisely.
“But when we actually compare our individual observations today, we are astonished and chagrined to find them as scattered within themselves as ever. We had hoped that the human errors would disappear ... but it turns out that the errors cannot be taken out of the observations. And that is true of stars, of atoms, or just ... hearing the report of somebody's speech.”
Ibid., p. 358.
Bronowski called this,
“the crucial paradox of knowledge ... we seem to be running after a goal which lurches away from us to infinity.”
Ibid., p. 356.
Since Newton, we tend to assume that the laws of nature are regular, simple and mathematical, and that any deviation from that regularity in our measurements is likely to be our own error. Mathematics can help clarify our observations.
“When an observer looks at a star, he knows there is a multitude of causes for error. So he takes several readings, and he hopes, naturally, that the best estimate of the star's position is the average – the centre of the scatter.”
Ibid., p. 358.
Johann Gauss (1777 to 1855), sometimes known as the “Prince of Mathematicians”,
“pushed on to ask what the scatter of the errors tells us. He devised the Gaussian curve in which the scatter is summarised by the deviation, the spread, of the curve. And from this came a far-reaching idea: the scatter marks an area of uncertainty.
We are not sure that the true position is the centre. All we can say is that it lies in the area of uncertainty, and that the area is calculable from the observed scatter of the individual observations.”
Ibid.
The folly of the Monument is not that it didn't work as a telescope but that Hooke, looking up through it from his cellar, was looking for certainty, for proof of the mathematical theory. It's not that maths or physics are uncertain, but measurement is. Bronowski described measurement as "personal". Maths doesn't prove with certainty, but it can show the extent of what we don't know.
