A Brief History of Science with Levity

by Mike Bennett

  Nick was very interested in a compound known as Red Mercury at the time. There were rumours that this material had such a high detonation velocity that it could be used to compress a deuterium and tritium core to initiate a nuclear fusion explosion without the need to have a conventional atomic device as the trigger. It was believed that this material needed to be irradiated in a nuclear reactor in order to achieve the desired properties.

  Nick knew that during the course of running my business in Aberdeen, I had used both commercial and research nuclear reactors in order to alter the physical properties of the materials that we needed to produce. I needed to manufacture materials such as Silver 110m, a metastable gamma-emitting isotope of silver that we used in shaped explosive charges in order to be able to verify the success of perforating operations for the North Sea oil and gas industry. We also needed to produce Cobalt 60, which emits high-energy (hard) gamma radiation, in order to support pipeline repair and maintenance operations.

  When these materials were needed on the UK continental shelf, I produced them in a trigger reactor in East Kilbride, close to Glasgow. The facility there was run by the Scottish Universities Research and Reactor Centre (SURRC). Their reactor could produce thermal neutron flux densities of around 10 to the power 13 neutrons per square centimetre per second. This meant that we did not need to cook the various materials for too long, therefore saving costs.

  At that time we also had a considerable amount of work on the Norwegian continental shelf. Due to the difficulty and paperwork involved in transporting radioactive materials across national borders, I produced the isotopes that were required for this work at a facility within Norway. Norway only has two nuclear reactors, both located at Kjeller just outside Oslo, and operated by the Institute for Energy Technique (IFE). I signed a cooperation agreement with the IFE in order to share other technologies with them in return for them irradiating my products for use within Norway.

  Unfortunately I had no experience in the use of Red Mercury, and certainly no knowledge of how the properties of this material would be altered by neutron bombardment, so I was not a lot of help to Nick in this particular area.

  Later during our meeting, we discussed how business is conducted in many UK cities, and nepotism in the UK in general. It was interesting to hear his perspective on this subject, as my own experiences were gained mainly from my work in Aberdeen.

  Aberdeen is considered to be particularly prone to corruption and nepotism due to the city being the oil capital of Europe, and the large sums of money that are changing hands. London is said to be in the same league as Aberdeen because of its position as the financial capital of Europe and the seat of the UK government.

  When I started my own business in Aberdeen, I already had my first potential customer lined up. Prior to starting the business I worked for the Schlumberger group, and spent a large proportion of my time visiting their clients and listening to their current technical challenges in order to try to propose solutions. On several occasions, I had to inform clients that we did not have any equipment capable of helping them, but I knew that I could develop equipment to do so.

  After starting the company, I initially spent my time on the technical development of the equipment necessary in order to assist my first potential client. Once this equipment was developed, we obtained our first contract with an oil company operating in the North Sea. Following this, I spent the majority of my time either visiting potential new clients, or in developing new equipment to increase the company’s portfolio of services.

  However I soon learned that a lot of business in Aberdeen is not awarded for technical competence. One of my friends owned a machine shop, and made his money by machining new threads and surfaces on damaged oil field equipment. One day he told me how he had won his latest contract.

  He spent his time networking and golfing with the major business players in Aberdeen. He discovered that one oil company had a major consignment of casing in storage, which is very expensive large-diameter tubing that is inserted into wells after a section has been drilled. Some of the threads on this casing had been damaged and needed to be re-machined.

  He persuaded one of his golfing buddies, who was the materials manager at the oil company in question, to downgrade the entire consignment to scrap, even though the vast majority of the consignment was undamaged. All of this casing was then shipped to his machine shop, and after less than one week he resold the entire consignment to another oil company. In the process he made more profit than my company initially made in six months. This is just one example, but this type of behaviour goes on all the time due to the amount of money that can be made by unscrupulous local companies and some senior staff in major oil companies operating in the area.

  Nepotism is also rife in Aberdeen. One must be careful of the backgrounds of middle-ranking staff that you encounter in many companies, as their fathers are quite often very senior staff or directors in the same company, and may have quite possibly put pressure on the HR departments during the job selection process.

  The reputation of Aberdeen recently became so widespread that the city council erected a large new road sign between the airport and the city centre. The sign read Welcome to Aberdeen, a fair trade city. Why would the city council feel the need to put this on the main road sign when entering the city, as I have not seen this in other cities that I have visited?

  Now let us move to London. I remember two classic cases of alleged nepotism involving senior appointments made by UK government ministers and/or their civil servants. The first case became public after the detention of the director of the British Council’s St. Petersburg office by the Russian FSB (formerly the KGB) in 2008. This incident was widely reported in the press at the time. The Director of the British Council was a gentleman named Stephen Kinnock, and it transpired that he was in fact the son of the former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.

  I thought that the journalist covering the story that I read was fairly weak. He asked Mr Kinnock Jnr no probing questions. I would have asked him, “Firstly, was the position that you now hold ever advertised prior to you being awarded the job, and if so where?” Secondly I would have asked how many other people applied for this position. Thirdly I would have asked him what particular qualities he thought he had that qualified him for this position above any other candidates. I suspect that the honest answers to these questions would be no, none and none.

  His father Neil Kinnock resigned as Labour Party leader after his party had four successive defeats in UK general elections, but was subsequently appointed as a European Commissioner. Soon thereafter his wife Glenys joined him with a position at the European Parliament. However she was soon caught up in an alleged expenses scandal.

  The second suspected case involves a gentleman called Chris Patten, aka Baron Patten of Barnes. Chris Patten was the Conservative MP for the small English constituency of Bath. He was thrown out by his constituency following a general election in 1992. He was a close friend and ally to Margaret Thatcher. He was then appointed to the position of Governor General and Commander in Chief of Hong Kong, where he remained until Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese in 1997.

  I was in Hong Kong when his appointment was announced, and I remember the headlines in the local press. They were asking why the British government considered that he had the skill set required to govern over four million people in Hong Kong, when the majority of voters in his small UK constituency did not entrust him to represent them.

  During my research carried out while compiling this book, I have spoken to many people working in the fields of industrial technology and military intelligence, as well as many authoritative journalists and publishers. However Nick Cook’s research and depth of knowledge in these areas is extremely comprehensive, and I probably learned more from speaking to him that day than I have from any other single source regarding these subjects.

  CHAPTER 19

  I was woken by my alarm clock. It was another day at university in
the 1970s. I was still hungover from the night before, as we had had a pool tournament with other student teams in the campus bar. I looked at my watch hoping that it was a Wednesday, but unfortunately today was a Tuesday. Tuesday for me was the toughest day in the week as we had two double maths lectures back-to-back in the morning.

  I graduated from the University of Manchester, and in my first year I stayed at the university halls of residence known as Oak House, which are around a twenty-minute walk from the university complex itself. On Tuesday mornings, we had to attend the same lectures as the pure mathematics undergraduates. In fact forty percent of our lectures in the first year were with the pure mathematics students: if you cannot do the maths, you cannot do the physics.

  Wednesdays were my favourite days, as we had geophysics lectures in the mornings. They involved the fundamentals of geoscience, and performing practical exercises such as carrying gravitational anomaly detection equipment up and down between different floors in the building. Even in the 1970s, these instruments were so sensitive that by stretching a quartz crystal within the instrument itself, you could detect the slightest change in the force of the Earth’s gravitational field just by going up a few floors within one of the university buildings. Also every Wednesday afternoon was free for sports, so you could relax your brain after lunch.

  The physics department itself, in which I attended most of my lectures as a student, had several buildings. The main lecture theatres were in what is known as the Rutherford building. Rutherford, as the reader may recall, was the first person to split the atom, which was one of the major achievements in 20th century physics. Following this he was headhunted by Cambridge University, but the main physics building in Manchester still bears his name.

  On Wednesday evenings, I was part of a team competing in quiz nights at one of our local pubs. Our team name was Norfolk & Chance, although we actually did quite well. Each team had four members. The other three in our team covered a broad spectrum of knowledge. The eldest was a local plumber in his thirties. He was a sports fanatic, and there was very little that he did not know in this area. The next was a lecturer in history from the university, who also knew a lot about classics and the arts. The final member was a flaky barmaid from the pub itself. Although no towering intellect, she knew pretty much everything about pop music and soap operas, and was a great help. So between us, we had most of the bases covered.

  I managed most of the science questions. Sometimes our team was the only one to answer certain questions correctly. On one occasion a question was “define the value of 3.877 raised to the power zero”. Sounds hard, but any number raised to the power zero has a value of one. Another question I remember was about imaginary numbers. These are numbers that do not exist, as when you square a negative imaginary number its value is still negative. It may sound stupid, but you need them to build equations to resolve some problems in science. If you have got the maths right, they should all cancel out in the end and you are back in the real world.

  As I was studying for joint honours degrees in physics and geology, I attended many lectures and practical sessions in the geology department on the complex. These were often quite amusing, as many female students took geology as part of a degree in something that they used to call general studies. This, in my opinion, is pretty much the same as a string of O-levels, and I did not understand why they would award a degree for this level of knowledge.

  I think it was probably because the students on this course had wealthy parents who did not want their children to stack the shelves at Tesco, so they sent them to university to study one of the few courses in which they were able to be enrolled. I believe that today this has been replaced by a course known as media studies.

  I think that the university system in England when I was a student was considerably better than the system today under which my children are being educated. In the 1970s, almost all freshmen were given places in university accommodation to help them find their feet and make friends. After this, you had to make your own arrangements for your accommodation for the remaining years.

  Although things were not easy when I was an undergraduate, I think that they are considerably more difficult today. When I started at university, provided that you achieved the grades stipulated for your initial enrolment, and passed all of your terminal exams at the end of each academic year, you automatically had your tuition fees paid, and received a grant from the local education authority to cover your basic living costs. I still have two children at university. Today in England, the students are required to pay their own tuition fees, in addition to finding the money to cover all of their accommodation and living costs.

  There are many young people I have known virtually all of their lives, from the time that they were bouncing around on the trampoline with my own children, right up to the time they finished high school. Many of these kids were very smart, but did not go to university simply because their parents could not pay for it, or because they would not take out a student loan and start their working lives many tens of thousands of pounds in debt.

  I think this is a great shame, as if the UK wants to compete with the Americans, Germans and Japanese etc., our young people must have a world-class education. Since leaving university, I have paid UK income tax which probably amounts to more than one hundred times the cost of my education to the British government, and I think that their current education policy is extremely short-sighted.

  After the first year, two friends and I found accommodation in a high-rise apartment complex close to the university in Moss Side. It was pretty grim in those days, but I have since been told that today if you are an unknown face and enter Moss Side you need to be carrying an Uzi. Following one traumatic year there, we moved to another district of Manchester called Levenshulme.

  I remember one winter’s evening when we didn’t have the cash to go out, we were all huddled around the electric heater watching TV. That evening, we were watching a programme called Whicker’s World. It was about the globetrotting journalist, Alan Whicker, who visited various destinations and reported on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The episode we were watching was a classic, and it made us formulate our holiday plans for the following summer.

  He was reporting on West Palm Beach, Florida. It transpired that there were many wealthy retired American couples living there, and the husbands often dropped dead from a heart attack or similar soon after the couple had retired. Their widows then often trawled the beach area in a Rolls Royce, in order to pick up handsome young men to escort them to social engagements. He reported that these young men were often given a Porsche or Ferrari for their efforts. A good deal, we thought. We could not take a car home as the Americans drive on the wrong side of the road, but hey, we could still sell one. Being a bunch of poor and naive students, we thought that this would work for us, and our holiday plans were hatched.

  One of the beauties about being a student is that, on our particular course, we had twenty-seven weeks of term time and twenty-five weeks of vacation. When the summer vacation started, we all worked for two months in order to earn as much money as possible, and then purchased the cheapest airline tickets possible to Florida. We all hung out in West Palm Beach for two weeks, but never even got a bite. God bless the young and naive.

  The main reason that I am reminiscing about my student years is that my youngest son is currently studying for an MSc in physics at the University of Aberdeen. It is quite astonishing that some of the things he is being taught today fundamentally contradict what I was taught at university thirty-five years ago.

  For example, I was taught that there were four fundamental forces in the universe. They were the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, gravity and electromagnetism. Today physics undergraduates are taught that there are probably only three. This is because physicists today believe that electromagnetism and gravity are connected, although the exact mechanism of this connection has yet to be proven.

  Since the 1970s, our knowledge
of science has continued to expand at an exponential rate. When I was at university I did question some of the concepts that we were taught. One of the most unsatisfactory was that there was no coherent explanation of the properties of light. Sometimes the behaviour of light could only be explained if it was a wave form, and sometimes its behaviour could only be explained if it was a photon (a particle with mass).

  In the 1920s, scientists knew that there would be a forthcoming total eclipse of the sun observable from Australia. Many scientific missions headed to Australia prior to this, to make recordings and observations of the eclipse. During the eclipse, many stars were visible which were known to be directly behind the sun. If the light was travelling in a straight line, as it is supposed to do in a vacuum, it would not be possible to observe the stars, but they could.

  This phenomenon was explained away as light being transmitted by photons, which were particles that had mass. As such they would bend as they travelled around the sun to the observer on Earth. This was called gravity lensing at the time, and was due to the photons being affected by the gravity of the sun and therefore having their paths through space bent.

  However it was difficult to reconcile this with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein stated that as a particle accelerates towards the speed of light its mass increases. In order to obtain the speed of light, a particle must be massless, as if not it would have an infinite mass at the speed of light, which is obviously impossible. If a photon is massless, how is it affected by a gravitational field?

  Another conundrum that I could not resolve at school and university in the 1970s was the diffraction pattern experiments that we studied. I am sure that most of you can recall the experiments we all did at school involving shining monochromatic light onto two slits, and observing the interference pattern on the far side of the slits. This at the time was explained in the same way as ripples on a pond resulting from two stones being thrown into the water simultaneously, and the waves combining to create a series of peaks and troughs.