The Scientist's Tale

This text is accompanied by 16 images assembled by Phil, which can be accessed here. To change them, simply click on the image.

SLIDE 1

Like many scientists of my generation I can pinpoint the start of my interest in the subject to the time of the Apollo moon landings. But although I had a passion for rockets, shown by dowsing my Joe 90 car in burning lighter fuel and running around the garden singing "Fanfare for the Common Man", space also seemed a bit abstract. It all took place on grainy footage from far away places.

SLIDE 2

My only direct contact with the space race was the daily ritual of listening to my mother complaining that the non-stick frying pan burnt the bacon.
So when NASA announced in 1975 that the encapsulating moment of a forthcoming space mission would occur over Britain, I began to get excited.

SLIDE 3

The mission was the Apollo-Soyuz project and the encapsulating moment occurred just after the two orbiting spacecraft docked, a soviet Cosmonaut and an American Astronaut pushed their arms through their respective airlocks and joined hands to form a symbolic bridge across the iron curtain.

SLIDE 4

Whilst the adult world sniggered that the great pressing of the flesh would occur above Bognor Regis and then laughed out loud when it actually occurred above the French town of Metz, I kept quiet, I guess I wanted to live under the flight path of rockets. As I grew up, Bognor retained its hold on my imagination, mainly because it became symbolic of my initial inspiration to become a scientist.
I'm still a scientist, I work as a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, where my main interest lies in understanding large geological structures which exist beneath the vast Antarctic ice sheet. Last year I finally completed a weighty manuscript describing one of these structures. I say finally because the paper was really the culmination of 5 years work. This included 4 months camping on the frozen wastes of the Antarctic.

SLIDE 5

Here's me at the South Pole. I was confident that it was a good piece of work, so I sent it to the leading journal and eagerly awaited the referees' comments.

Whilst waiting for the manuscript to be returned, I started to think about testing a mathematical method for looking at similarities between two arbitrary sets of data. The standard way of testing such methods is to apply them to two seemingly disparate data sets and see how well they match. I was thinking about this as I enjoyed my normal Saturday night multimedia experience of watching Match of the Day, whilst listening to blaring pop music.

SLIDE 6

T-Rex was on the stereo and an injured Southampton player was on the box, so I came up with the idea of comparing the recording career of Marc Bolan with the number of admissions to south coast hospitals.

The next week, I borrowed the Guinness Book of Hit Singles and contacted the Department of Health. Soon after starting to collate the hospital data I produced this histogram.

SLIDE 7

It shows the number of admissions to the War Memorial Hospital here in Bognor during the summer of 1975. The striking characteristic of this graph is the large number of admissions around the middle of July. This anomaly started to intrigue me, but before I could follow it up, the comments on the scientific paper I'd submitted arrived in the post.

To say that the referees didn't like it was an understatement.

SLIDE 8

" The text is wilfully obscure and opaque, whilst the interpretation is weakly founded and based on a narrow view of the processes" was one of their kinder statements. What a disaster, not only did it seem that five years work had gone up in smoke, but this paper was to be my future, my calling card when I went for lucrative jobs at research institutes in California. I was so depressed I even started to think about taking up a career in accountancy.
To stop myself looking at recruitment adverts, I went back to thinking about those Bognor hospital admissions. I quickly remembered that it was during July 1975 that the joint American-Soviet space mission took place. But surely being in the flight path of rockets shouldn't make a town accident prone. I needed more data, so I contacted the local newspaper, The Bognor Regis Observer.

In the meantime I struggled to reconcile some of the inconsistencies in my Antarctic data sets that the referees had so kindly pointed out. To give you a flavour of my mood at this time, I'll read an entry from my workbook. " April 3rd, couldn't sleep, started thinking about glacier erosion, suddenly realised post glacial rebound could be the key, now too excited to sleep, so got 6.40 train, but after looking at the data for an hour, realised new theory didn't work either". Distraught I wandered to my pigeon hole and there I found a fat envelope of clippings from the Bognor Observer. I thought I'd have a quick scan of the photocopies, but a brief article from the paper dated the 18th July caught my eye.

SLIDE 9

Doorman arrested after night-club brawl.
Police report that an incident occurred last night outside the Empire Night-club, in Bognor Regis. Eye witnesses say that the fight broke out after one of the doormen suddenly approached his colleague and repeatedly kissed him on both cheeks in what can only be described as a continental style embrace.
So this story accounted for two of the admissions, but on page 2 of the same newspaper I hit the jackpot.

SLIDE 10

Forty Injured at Bognor Pop Concert
Last night over forty people were taken to hospital suffering from cuts caused by flying glass after a rock concert given by the Knuckleheads ended in violence. Nick Knucklehead, the brother of the lead singer, told The Observer that the trouble started when the band began to play a cover version of the Joan Baez song, 'We shall Overcome'. "I couldn't believe it, what was our kid thinking of, playing that hippie rubbish. But things really started getting nasty, during the second verse of Cum-By-Yar". I remember at the time thinking there was some underlying connection between these two stories, but before I could put my finger on it, I noticed this warning.

SLIDE 11

Doctors today issued a statement urging women in the area not to wear paper underpants after a number of female patients were treated for abrasions to the upper thigh. Professor Wilkes appealed to readers of the Observer " Ladies please, throw away these disposable knickers. Astronauts may find them comfortable in the weightlessness of space, but when you ladies are busy running around ironing your husband's shirts, the material tends to chafe" Well these three stories could probably account for the peak in hospital admissions during July, but like my Antarctic data sets they prompted more questions than answers. Certainly the injuries seemed to be caused by a collective behaviour which seemed slightly odd. But in the meantime I was starting to panic about my Antarctic manuscript. After weeks of getting nowhere, I had started to question the veracity of the data itself, so I'd decided to reprocess the raw measurements. Whilst waiting for the computer programs to run, I was drawn back to the clippings. Now I had my eye in, bizarre stories were cropping up everywhere including these two in the announcements column.

SLIDE 12

Bognor Regis WI wish to announce a change in their program. The talk "Making friends with Macrame" due to be given on July 17th has been cancelled. However, in it's place, Mrs Silvia Spandex has kindly agreed to give a demonstration entitled " Spinning the paddle, the sure-fire way to success at Pong".
And the second announcement:
The Bognor Regis Historical Society wishes to announce that at it's annual general meeting held on the 18th July, a motion calling for the disbandment of the society due to "a general lack of interest in the past" was passed unanimously. Henceforth the club will be known as The Bognor Regis Society for the Promotion of Wood Look Concrete.
I also noticed an advert for a week of concerts given by Val Doonican at Butlins . So I thought I'd look for references to Bognor in Val's autobiography "Rubbing Elbow Pads with the Rich and Famous".

SLIDE 13

Luckily this marvellously bitchy show biz memoir has been lovingly scanned onto the web by Mr Doonican's biggest fan, Mrs E. Z. Listening of Cardigan Oklahoma, and on page 163, Val wrote " Throughout that week in Bognor this tune from the Hit Parade kept coming into my head. When Tony Hatch, the immensely talented theme tune composer came to see the show, I whistled a couple of bars to him and he immediately recognised it as being by the young German group Kraftwerk. He kindly worked on an arrangement, which featured a lovely Irish Harp solo. The next night 'Fun, Fun, Fun on the Autobahn' went down a storm. "
These three articles confirmed that Bognor had been under the influence of a mild collective phycosis during that week in 1975. But why. I started to look over all the articles again and two patterns appeared.

SLIDE 14

The first two articles seemed to report spontaneous gestures of peace and reconciliation. But looking at the perpetrators, a night-club bouncer and a skinhead band, these acts could only have been symbolic.

SLIDE 15

The other articles seemed to show that the resort had been gripped by an unshakeable believe in the spirit and technology of the future. In an attempt to find the connection between these two patterns of behaviour, I drew a Venn diagram. As I pushed the two circles together, inspiration struck.

SLIDE 16

The link had to be the Apollo-Soyuz Space Mission, as the spaceships passed overhead the spirit of the mission had permeated through the atmosphere and engulfed the town.

To celebrate solving one problem I decided to finally make that pilgrimage. I was siting at Victoria Station waiting for a train to Bognor, when I decided to take out the Venn diagrams and began to replay that moment of inspiration. As I pushed the circles together, a theory which explained the Antarctic data sets suddenly came to me. The obvious facets of the data indicated that the area had been stretched. But overprinted on this were subtle evidence that the tectonic plates in the region had previously collided. That was it, that was it. I abandoned the trip and rushed off to work. By the end of the weekend I had an amended manuscript. On the Monday morning, I was posting the Antarctic paper, when I noticed two letters in my in-tray. One was from the Department of Health, regretfully informing me that they couldn't supply the data I required, since computerised records only went back to 1980. The second was from the Bognor Regis Observer and contained a fat wadge of newspaper clippings from July 1975, only the name of the paper seemed to be The Bognor Post. The covering letter explained that the local paper in Bognor was called the post until it was taken-over in the early 1980's.

As a postscript, only one of the referees has so far commented on the revised Antarctic manuscript, but her statement, " This is a clear and concise description of an important piece of geophysical research" gives me great hope.
Thank-you Bognor.