Isomorphisms of expectation

Resolutely stuck in the 1960s as I am, I recently watched yet another programme about the Great Train Robbery of August 1963. Concerned mostly with the identity of an alleged gang member who was never caught, the programme also discussed how the raid was carried out. One of the crucial requirements for the robbery to succeed was that the mail train needed to be halted at the precise point where the ambush was to take place, in rural Buckinghamshire. The gang lacked the technical knowledge to tinker with the railway signalling system. How then to stop the train? The solution, accredited to gang member Roger Cordrey, was to stuff a leather glove over the green signal, and rig up a battery-powered red lamp nearby. The train driver, speeding along in the dark, would see the red light and apply the brakes. He would assume that the red light was the signal; he had no reason to think otherwise. A signal, green or red, was what he was expecting to see. I’ve always considered this a clever, albeit criminal, illustration of lateral thinking.

Also recently, I’ve been attempting to watch the second series of “Hold the Sunset”, about which the only good things are the theme tune (“Have I The Right ?” by the Honeycombs) and fragments of pleasant Thames-side scenery around Richmond and Twickenham. This dire series has progressed from being merely negatively amusing to positively annoying. It’s so sad to see the long and illustrious career of John Cleese being tarnished by association with this dismal offering. However, thinking of Cleese in his former glory, and  in particular thinking of “Python”, for no very good reason I today recalled an episode first shown in December 1969, in other words almost half a century ago. Actually not featuring Cleese at all, this sketch concerns a psychopathic blood-crazed barber (Michael Palin) with his customer (Terry Jones). Wrestling with his own homicidal tendencies and with his customer settled in the chair, the Michael Palin character switches on a reel-to-reel tape recorder which plays typical barber shop conversations – about the weather, the football, etc – with suitable gaps for his customer to respond, and also the sound of scissors snipping away. Apart from the total absurdity of the situation the customer has no reason to suspect that the sounds he is hearing aren’t those of him having his hair cut. His expectations are anticipated … and fooled. An early outing in the direction of virtual reality, I suppose.

That is, until he susses the situation, and Palin famously confesses, “I didn’t want to be a barber anyway. I wanted to be a lumberjack”. And we know what comes next.

Detecting analogies, finding structural similarities, patterns, isomorphisms across apparently dissimilar situations can be a route to creativity, it can be a symptom of hypomania or schizophrenia, and it can be extremely tiresome. But I wonder: the fake railway signal, the fake barbering sounds. There’s some sort of deep level similarity going on, but whether it’s worth anything, well, who knows. Are there other parallels to be unearthed in other walks of life, in other created works? I really don’t know. I never wanted to be a blogger anyway. I wanted to be a logger, leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia … The giant redwood, the larch … 

And that’s probably quite enough for one very warm Bank Holiday Monday.

Heavy naming

For those lucky enough to become parents, the naming of offspring – though seemingly a joy and privilege - must be one of the hardest, and most pressing, creative choices they have to make. The infant so far has few personality characteristics of its own, no reputation for good or ill, is completely unfamiliar to everyone - but whatever it gets called has to last for a very long time, and must be right ! So far, the puling neonate doesn’t look or act like a Darren or a Kevin, a Piers or a Rupert, an Amanda or a Tracey, but in time it might do. Naming has unexpected implications and consequences. The existing names of relatives, currently popular first names, the names of infamous characters in public life, and a need to avoid unfortunate phonetic clashes or conjunctions of initials will help in determining choice, but otherwise the new parents are out there on their own: it’s a huge responsibility. Back in my day, males of my acquaintance were reliably named Richard, Michael, David or Christopher, with John as a default middle name, while females could expect Margaret or Elizabeth, Gillian or Christine or Susan, with a middle Anne. It’s harder now. Back then there was no temptation to name the newborn Mango Chutney, Headcase, EasyJet, or even Accrington Stanley. It was that kind of era, Middle England in mid-twentieth century. Unimaginative but safe.

Part of the problem with new names is that whatever is named probably doesn’t “look like anything” yet. Certainly it doesn’t look like what it’s “supposed” to look like.  Winston Churchill claimed that all babies looked like him, yet relatively few were named after him, and then not for reasons of facial or gluteal morphology. The problem of naming is maybe even more difficult with objects or places. What shall we call this, er, thingummy, this whatsit? Velcro? A Segway ? You must be joking. Newly discovered or conquered lands, lacking obvious features, may soon acquire settlements called New Amsterdam or Boston after old world departure points suddenly nostalged over, yet have little in common with them. Even in existing communities  a degree of self-conscious crudity starts to creep in once expansion happens and labels are required: Kingsbury begets Queensbury, while Surbiton and Norbiton can mock each other despite their claimed ancient roots. Head to other worlds entirely, and naming asteroids after the Beatles seems mildly absurd. Once you’ve used up the Sea of Tranquillity and the Lunar Alps you’ll soon be running out of the best ideas. Having the Brecon Beacons on Mars or Salisbury Plain on Uranus isn’t entirely plausible. Mind you, I’m old enough to remember a time when the name  Ringo was itself newsworthy.

In the end, it’s what you’re used to, and when it’s completely new, you aren’t used to it, and so it sounds daft or inappropriate. I’ve been reading Kit Chapman’s “Superheavy” (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2019), which describes how the elements at the heavy end of the periodic table came (in most cases transiently) into existence. These include the actinoids (or transuranic) elements, and the superheavies (or transfermium elements) that currently extend to element 118, oganesson. Considerable sections of this most enjoyable book – it’s, er, quite light reading - are devoted to discussions about naming, ultimately decided by the chemical officiating body IUPAC, but reflecting the locations of the experimental work (for a long time primarily in the US and the Soviet Union, and then Germany too, and increasingly elsewhere), claims and counter-claims about what was actually produced (many of these substances have been manufactured only in the tiniest of quantities, and with ultra-brief half-lives), as well as assumptions such as that they should not be named after living persons (seaborgium, element 106, named after prolific discoverer Glenn T. Seaborg, broke this rule).

Familiarity breeds not only contempt, but also acceptance. Through long familiarity we have no problem in recognising that, from the closing days of WW2, uranium was followed by neptunium and then plutonium (a slightly naff planetary analogy), while americium and californium were euphonious and obvious acknowledgements of their place of origin, the rather clumsier berkelium likewise. Curium, einsteinium and nobelium were named after scientists everyone had heard of. Fermium and mendelevium were less digestible to the man in the street, though every bit as valid to the historian of science.

Some quite odd elemental names crop up in everyday news and conversation – molybdenum, manganese, zirconium, barium, selenium, for instance – without causing too much excitement, but one suspects – or hopes - that when people begin to study chemistry properly they sit up and take notice of truly linguistic oddities such as krypton and xenon, dysprosium and ytterbium, protactinium and praseodymium. There will be a blur between the commonplace and the truly strange, but exposure has the effect of normalising what was once peculiar and difficult. As with any other news story, we soon learn to assimilate the initially exotic. What could be more natural and sensible than to have a British prime minister called Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson ? A man, clearly, with a chemistry of his own. But I digress.

I suppose technetium and astatine are always going to sound slightly fake, francium too, though not germanium. It’s what you know. But it’s only when one encounters the newish superheavies that an overwhelming sense of peculiarity strikes, especially, as in my case, if one has taken one’s eye off the ball for a decade or three. Oganesson, already mentioned, in the same group as the rare or inert gases (hence the –on ending), named after Yuri Oganessian, of Armenian descent, and tennessine, element 117, named after the state of Tennessee and with the “-ine” ending characteristic of the halogens (bromine, chlorine etc), don’t sound quite right. Not yet. Nor do the awkward-of-pronunciation darmstadtium (110) and roentgenium (111). Livermorium, element 116, symbol Lv, and named for Livermore near San Francisco, sounds improbable and rather unpleasant, while moscovium (for Moscow, 115) and nihonium (for Japan, 113) sound a tad too slick. But give us time and they’ll roll off the tongue as readily as neon or neodymium. 

If the fabled “island of stability” is reached, with superheavy elements that are long-lasting, able to be produced in significant quantities, and useful in the real world, then the initially profoundly odd may become part of daily life and common language. “Superheavy” suggests that eventually a total of more than 170 elements may be possible, or even that there is no upper limit, in which case we are in for plenty of novelties, with novelty names to get used to.

Nomenclature, itself an uncomfortable word, is crucial to the unambiguous nature of chemical science, and – for those of even the slightest poetical inclinations – part of its endless fascination. In the nature of things, it continues. It merely gets heavier.