Lateral Thinking

A few weeks ago I mentioned the incident during the Great Train Robbery of 1963 when the need to alter a green signal to red was achieved by covering up the green signal and placing a red lamp nearby. In the darkness of a Buckinghamshire night the deception was undetectable. To my mind this is one of the great real life examples of lateral thinking.

First publicised in 1967, by Edward de Bono, lateral thinking implies solving a problem by not tackling it head on, or “vertically”, but coming at it sideways as it were, perhaps by adding in some new and unexpected feature, some kind of turbulence, going via an “impossible” middle situation, or applying an unusual thinking strategy. De Bono produced several books on the subject, with examples guaranteed to make one feel stupid. The examples that regularly get cited provide infuriating puzzles for parties or job interviews but, I suspect, are not of great practical significance. These days they get subsumed under the cliché of “thinking out of the box”. Some jokes work on the same principle. Rowan Atkinson, in some of his “Mr. Bean” films, applies inappropriate but workable solutions to domestic situations, releasing humour and using much the same kind of thinking.

Though, as we have seen, lateral thinking does turn up from time to time in real life, the popular examples can appear artificial and contrived. For instance, the question of whether a monk, struggling up a steep mountain slope to a sacred site at the top, is ever at exactly the same place as when he returns down the slope, albeit more easily and at a higher speed. This conundrum is solved by superimposing mental images of the monk, or indeed two monks, ascending and descending the mountain simultaneously. If you like, you can picture the situation as a kind of graph. However irregular the path, at some point it is clear that they must meet, and are thus at the same point at the same time. Another favourite is of the man who lives on the eleventh floor of a block of flats but when taking the lift always presses the button for the seventh floor, gets out there and continues via the stairs. There are two (at least) possible answers as to why he does this: (1) that he is trying to keep fit and (2), the “lateral thinking” answer, that he is of short stature and cannot reach beyond the seventh floor button. 

Back to real life. Well, kind of. In the last few weeks we have heard that Boris is supposed to send a particular letter to Brussels with respect to the Brexit negotiations. He doesn’t want to do this, and he’s said he isn’t going to, but the law demands it. If he fails to send it there will be consequences. I don’t know what the evidence is for this, but it has been suggested – in a true example of lateral thinking – that he will send the letter, and then send a second letter asking for the first letter to be ignored. Disingenuous or what? This is actually not quite as original a strategy as it might seem. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev exchanged several letters. One of them, with potentially fearful consequences, JFK ignored, and replied instead to the next letter from the Soviet leader. Disaster was averted and the world could breathe again. The principle is much the same as with Boris’s alleged proposed subterfuge.

As Sherlock Holmes said, fictionally, when you are having difficulty solving a problem, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Last night, getting out of bed in the wee wee hours to go to the bathroom, I was aware of treading on some strange, crinkly material on the bedroom floor. Nothing had fallen off the bed, there was nothing wrong with the carpet, and when I investigated further there was absolutely nothing there. It took me a little while to reach a conclusion, but eventually the answer was obvious and unavoidable, though admittedly unexpected. Part of my foot had fallen off.

Not quite as dramatic as it sounds. Some two months ago I had gone for a long walk in an unwise pair of shoes. There was some irregularity in the right shoe and after a couple of miles I developed a blood blister under my right heel. It hurt slightly for a few days but the whole of the base of the heel turned black and looked completely horrible. What happened last night was that, having forgotten all about it (for obvious reasons it was difficult to observe) the skin underneath my heel had died and dried up and was starting to crack and fall off, although for the time being was still attached to my foot. However improbable, that was the truth. That was the crinkly stuff I trod on. Thankfully, no illustrations this time.

The Universal U-Bahn

Emerge from the darkness, erupt into life. Parallel platforms, parallel lives. Busy people. Bright yellow trains come and go. The roundel, the bullseye on the platform wall, donated by London Transport, red white and blue, tells you that you are at Wittenbergplatz, one of the busiest interchanges on the Berlin U-Bahn, but at the same time reminding you of the commonality, the generality, of the Underground / Subway / Metro / Chikatetsu / U-Bahn experience. Berlin, London, wherever – people and their travel habits are much the same. The same corny metaphor – darkness, light, darkness – for mortality itself.  You may even hear “Mind the gap” announced in English, though there may be something subtle missing from the intonation, compared with the original.

All human life is here, and this is arguably the centre of Europe. Even the centre of Western civilisation in this era of hesitant Americans, especially now that the tragic  Brits are (perhaps) walking away (how could they after everything that’s happened here ?) and the gilets jaunes are doing nothing to make their own capital city attractive. 

As you bustle around the city’s underground passages or rumble across its snaking viaducts, while you may not encounter the sculptural extravagances of the T-Bana of Stockholm, the marble of Milan,  the lavish decor beneath Moscow or St Petersburg, or the choreographed frenzy of Tokyo, you may well be reminded of elsewhere. If you’re inclined to mystical ruminations you may feel that you’re on the universal U-Bahn. Travel out to Olympia Stadion on Line 2 and do a double-take that you’re not on a Charles Holden stretch of the Piccadilly Line; contemplate elevated Line 1 as it hovers above the Landwehrkanal and winds around Hallesches Tor and Kottbusser Tor and Schlesisches Tor and pinch yourself that you’re not in Paris (or more confusingly specific, Stalingrad, given the tendency of Parisian toponymy towards universalism and completism); travel on many parts of the system, including in the former East, (but perhaps best of all at Kurfürstendamm station), and convince yourself that you’re not in New York. West of Gleisdreieck, Line 1 emerges from a tunnel (within apartment buildings) at a startlingly high altitude to cross sports grounds where once ran the tracks from the Potsdamer and Anhalter termini; could this perhaps be an out-take from somewhere in Brooklyn ? Somewhere a little Smith and Ninth ? Is it a dream?

Because of its history – pre-war, post-war, divided, re-united, British, American, Soviet – Berlin is polycentric, and its urban rail networks have been distorted accordingly. The former centres of West Berlin (“City West” - around the Ku-damm and Wittenbergplatz) and of East Berlin, centred on Alexanderplatz, are still joined awkwardly below ground (OK, so the S-Bahn links them above ground), with annoying gaps in the system surviving to this day. Even short journeys can be complicated and dog-leggy. The massive multilevel Berlin Hauptbahnhof which opened a few years ago is poorly connected to the U-Bahn, and access to and from airports is less than brilliant. However, work continues to improve connectivity. Overall – functionally as well as architecturally and atmospherically - it’s a wonderful system in an amazing city. Where else, as you’re hurtling along beneath the streets, will a real time display tell you about the next bus to Spandau or Schöneberg? All right, nowhere else has those sort of places, but the thoughtfulness is impressive.

 
“I hate crowds”, a commonplace sentiment I often share, especially as I get older, seems particularly churlish among one’s thrusting fellow passengers at a station like Tempelhof where, just while changing trains between U6 and the S-Bahn ring line (S41/S42), one passes at least three mouth-watering bakery outlets. No, whatever your opinion of pretzels, the correct emotion is to enjoy the fact of human life in all its variety, to glory in the busyness, the complexity, the centrality, the sheer number of people. The fact that all those people exist and that it’s all going on. Zurück bleiben !

Divergent views

In Robert Frost’s 1916 poem “The Road Not Taken”, he wrote:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both”.

A dilemma that applies in cities as much as in forests, and metaphorically in life in general. The eternal “what ifs?”, the junctions and forking paths of decisions and fate. However, though one may not be able to journey along both routes, at least for the time being, there are occasions when it is possible to view both, taking a slightly boz-eyed  and divergent perspective to the scene. One of the most famous artistic renditions of this situation is surely “Paris Street: Rainy Day” painted in 1877 by the French Impressionist, Gustave Caillebotte, depicting a complex street intersection in the Quartier de l’Europe in the 8th arrondissement, and recently star of the show at a disappointingly meagre exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, whence the photo below:

Curiously, there’s a very similar work called “Rainy Day Boston”, painted in 1885 by the American artist Childe Hassam. Quite apart from both portraying a wet day in a city, these paintings share a surprisingly overall similarity in terms of structure and perspective, showing divergent streets with sharply angled buildings between them, in effect, offering to the eyes two focal points. Hassam was aware of Caillebotte’s work in general terms, although I don’t know if he had seen this particular painting, from eight years earlier, and there is no suggestion of plagiarism. 

And then there’s my own, done with full awareness of both of the above, but based on a photograph I took five years ago in the Place de Dublin, just a short distance up the rue de St Petersbourg from the Place de l’Europe:

Such works may sensitise us to one not uncommon theme of urban infrastructure and groundplan. Once we have seen these paintings, such arrangements are rendered more easily noticeable, and we become more aware of them. They are to be found at Times Square, for instance, at the Flatiron Building, and at other intersections where Broadway crosses north-south avenues in Manhattan, and they abound in Haussmannised Paris and, especially, in other rigidly planned cities and city districts. Anywhere that an orthogonal grid of streets admits an angled intruder you’ll find them: in Barcelona, Rome and Washington, DC, for instance, and even in Pimlico, SW1.

Once alerted, one starts looking for this pattern elsewhere, recognising how it features, for instance, in many of the photorealist paintings by Anthony Brunelli, in works such as “Court and Chenango” and “Main Street”, both from 1994. Diagonals, acute corners, divergent perspectives. This particular geometric feature lends itself to an odd species of energetic and visual excitement, for those so inclined, and often makes for an attractive fragment of cityscape. It doesn’t really have a name, it’s merely a minor subjectively geographical trope, just one component in the syntax of the streets which, when pointed out, can encourage our everyday perceptions to be organised a little differently, and perhaps made more enjoyable. One might even dream up a modern day equivalent of the “I Spy” or “Observer’s” book, probably an app that you could consult as you flâneured your way around – so you could declare to your companion, “oh look, it’s one of those”, and score yourself twenty five points.

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.