On a bitter November day, Arthur and Maggie arrived back in Gateshead on what should have been Norman's fourth birthday. They went to stay with Maggie's parents having no money, nowhere to live and no child to brighten their days. On the journey home they had instinctively looked for Norman, expecting to see him come running. Habitually they would turn to see what he was up to; look up in response to another child's cry, or reach down for his hand that was no longer held out to them. Then remembrance and grief would sweep over them. Over the following months they wished over and over again that they had left Burma at the same time as Stanley Hunter. Had they done so their son would still be alive. But Holmes had taken his role as manager very seriously and had tried hard to obtain the wages owed to Yomah Oil's employees. He had hung on as long as he could. Too long. Now they both bottled up their grief; Arthur in particular was unable to speak to anyone of Norman's death, not even his oldest friend Bob Lawson.

By the time he had left Burma Holmes himself was owed nearly a whole year's salary, which he tried to salvage through solicitors in London, but LCT, by then on the verge of bankruptcy, had gone into hiding.

The Earth is very old – present estimates put it at 4.54 billion years, ±45 million. Most of the rocks we see today have been recycled many, many times. They have been down to the bottom of the deepest oceans, buried kilometres below the surface of the Earth, before being uplifted once again to form the very highest peaks of the Himalayas, the Andes, the Rockies or the Alps, where erosion starts them on their weary way again, back down to the sea. The cycle goes on unceasingly. It has done so for billions of years in the past and will continue for billions of years to the future. At the same time the continents have moved around the globe, effortlessly, like so many birds on migration – once buried under glaciers at the poles they soon find themselves passing the equator en route to another destination.

Given all this mobility, it is hardly surprising that initially Holmes did not find very ancient rocks on Earth. Most of the evidence has disappeared long ago – but not all. In 1915 he predicted ‘It was in zircon that the hope of the future lay, for that mineral was widespread in time and place, and stable and resistant to external forces.’ Indeed, he was right; crystals of the mineral zircon have been found in Western Australia that, at more than four billion years old, are only a few hundred million years younger than the age of the Earth.

Back in 1913 Arthur Holmes, then a young man of twenty-three, had just published his first book on The Age of the Earth. While writing it he had come across a theory with regard to formation of the Earth recently put forward by an American geologist, Thomas Chamberlin, who considered that the Earth had been created by the accumulation of cold solid particles which Chamberlin called ‘planetesimals’. In Holmes' mind the most important feature of the Planetesimal Hypothesis was that Chamberlin rejected the assumption shared by Kelvin and other scientists that the Earth had begun as a molten globe. Instead, Chamberlin proposed that although heat would initially be generated by planetesimals falling into the Earth as it consolidated, during the later stages that heat would be dissipated into space leaving the Earth a cold and solid body. The particular attraction of this theory for Holmes was that it discredited Kelvin's arguments in favour of a cooling globe and a very restricted geological time scale.

Thrilled that someone else shared his views of an ancient Earth, Holmes wrote to Chamberlin in 1912 to tell him ‘how much your work on cosmogenic geology and causal processes has inspired me in my geological work. You have done more probably than any other living geologist to clothe the dry bones of geological fact with the fascination of co-ordinating theories’.

By the end of the war Holmes was still at Imperial College, still only a demonstrator and still on a salary of £150 a year, despite having published three books and gained a significant reputation for his work on radiometric dating. His finances were permanently under pressure such that when Maggie gave birth to their son Norman within two weeks of Armistice Day in 1918, they became critical. He had tried to get other jobs but despite being awarded the doctorate dreamt about in his letters from Mozambique, somehow no job had materialised either before, during or after the war. Watts had tried to get him a position as lecturer in petrology at Oxford ‘but naturally failed!’; he had testimonials from many eminent geologists for his application to Cardiff; but in 1919 he could not even get a teaching job at Aberystwyth. He wrote to Dr Prior:

I am glad to tell you that Aberystwyth failed to appreciate my qualifications for the geology post and appointed a student (Welsh!) instead. The department is very small and crowded and its chief objective appears to be to train girls to pass examinations to be teachers. So I am well out of it!

I have always been a collector. I blame my parents. As very small children my sisters and I would be taken on warm sunny afternoons to the beach we overlooked from our house in Devon. Hours would be spent sifting through the sand and debris hunting for shells, the prize of which was the cowry. Rare and elusive, not much bigger than my thumb nail, the exotic, whitelipped and pink-backed shell, sometimes dotted with brown spots and sometimes not, was the greatest treasure on the beach. Somewhere in the attic a boxful of cowries awaits my retirement when I shall use them to make shell pictures and decorate little wooden boxes. These I shall give to my grandchildren for Christmas who will give me a kiss then hide them in a cupboard with embarrassment: ‘Oh, it was just something Granny made.’

From then on I was addicted. I walked around with my eyes on the ground just in case I missed some treasure – an unusual stone, a rare wild flower, a pretty feather, a sixpenny bit; nothing was overlooked and I collected it all. Aged eight and we were living in Iraq. We went for walks on the edge of the desert and one day I picked up a crimson stone.

Looking forward and looking back

We have followed several episodes of science as they have unfolded. We have described not only the work of the most revered scientists, the Einsteins, Newtons and Pasteurs, but also work which it appears will not be acclaimed: Joseph Weber's high fluxes of gravity waves and Ungar and McConnell's memory transfer. In some of the cases examined-the solar-neutrino problem and the sexual behaviour of the whiptail lizard-the jury is still out. Will they make it into the scientific canon or will they be scientific cannon fodder? It remains to be seen, but don't expect to find the answer in the experiments and theories alone.

It is no accident that we have chosen to look at high science and low science together. We have tried to level out the scientific mountain range which rises up as a result of the forces of celebratory history. Look back whence we came in science and there are what seem to be unconquerable peaks – Mount Newton, Mount Pasteur, Mount Einstein – a mountain range of truth. But look forward and the terrain is flat. A few new foothills wrench themselves from the plain every time we glance backwards. What are those new peaks? Were they there yesterday? To understand how science works we must examine how we cause these foothills and mountains to emerge. To do this we must understand science which fails as well as science which succeeds.

Introduction

David Crews, a professor of zoology and psychology at the University of Texas, might be thought of as a sexual voyeur. This is because he spends much of his time observing the bizarre sex lives of reptiles such as lizards and snakes. His work is of great interest to biologists. It is sometimes controversial. Our focus in this chapter is on one particular set of observations which Crews made of the mating behaviour of a particular species of whiptail lizard. However, by way of introduction to the sexual world of reptiles which Crews studies, we will first look at his less controversial work on the red-sided garter snake.

The Arctic environment of western Canada provides perhaps the harshest conditions encountered by any vertebrate on the planet. It is here that the red-sided garter snake lives. In order to survive the long Arctic winter, snakes have learnt the trick of cryopreservation. Their blood becomes extremely thick, and crucial bodily organs stop functioning almost completely, exhibiting barely detectable levels of activity. However, when Spring arrives, they undergo rapid transformation in preparation for mating.

Mating occurs over a short, intense period. The males emerge first from their long winter deep-freeze and spend from three days to three weeks basking in the sun near the entrance to the den. When the females emerge, either alone or in small groups, the males are attracted by a pherome (a messenger substance) on their backs.

Primrose Hill in Gateshead was a modest street of single-bay Victorian brick houses, terraced in tiers down the steep hill of Low Fell. If you stood in the middle of the road the view below was of green fields and a large sky, despite the town's location in the industrial heartland of northern England, but the houses were sideways on to this view and austerely faced each other across the road, their front doors guarded from the street by three feet, the occasional hydrangea, and an iron railing. In January 1900, in the wintry dawn of a new century, Arthur Holmes was ten years old and living at number nineteen, the only child of staunchly Methodist parents. His father was a cabinet maker and worked as an assistant in an ironmonger's shop. Consequently they were of modest means.

Not far away was Gateshead Higher Grade School where Mr John Bidgood, the school's visionary headmaster, teacher of biology, and world expert on tropical orchids, made sure that provisions for the teaching of science were not exceeded by any other municipal school in the country. It was, for example, the first of those schools to have science laboratories specifically designed and fitted for that purpose. In 1901, the year that Queen Victoria died, shy and retiring young Arthur Holmes joined this exhilarating school environment, and blossomed.

The route south that Holmes and Mr Barton followed had last been taken by Henry O'Neill in 1881, some thirty years previously. An adventurous British Consul, O'Neill was the first white man to penetrate beyond the coastal zone and although he lived on in the memory of some of the older natives, many of them, particularly the women, had never seen a white man before. Consequently Holmes and Barton were often followed by a shrieking mob for mile after mile. But this was the least of their difficulties. After a month of fruitless wanderings they stopped for a few days at Nacavalla where Holmes found time to write a letter to Bob explaining the problems:

The object of our expedition has been to find an old Arab Sultan, named Moravi, who, a quarter of a century ago was the ruler of the Makua over all the coastal district south of Mozambique. [The indigenous peoples of Mozambique are of Bantu origin, but by the tenth century the Arabs had established themselves on the coast.] This man was attacked by the Portuguese, but instead of blotting him out they were themselves defeated. This however, was an unstable state of affairs and presently Moravi had to fly inland. He surrounded himself with Makua chiefs on all sides and these have kept strangers from him all these years.

For scholarship students in London, college life was a permanent struggle against financial hardship. Sixty pounds a year was just not enough to survive on and Arthur Holmes' parents were not in a position to subsidise him financially. While he earned the occasional ten shillings reviewing books for The Times, the cost of living in London was a continual strain, and he was always on the lookout for ways of making money to fund himself and his studies. When halfway through the first year of his geology course Holmes saw an opening advertised for an ‘assistant of the second class in the Department of Minerals’ at the British Museum, he decided to apply and continue his studies part-time.

Appointments to permanent positions at the British Museum were then made by the three Principal Trustees of the Museum who were none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the speaker of the House of Commons. Holmes no doubt asked himself what on earth these somewhat inappropriate individuals knew about geology. A candidate had to be nominated by one of these Trustees, get on their ‘list’ – Holmes was on the Archbishop's list – and then

undergo before the Civil Service Commissioners an examination in the following subjects:

1. 1. English Composition

2. 2. Translation from 3 out of the 4 following languages: Latin, French, German and Greek

3. 3. […]

Detecting gravity waves

In 1969, Professor Joseph Weber, of the University of Maryland, claimed to have found evidence for the existence of large amounts of gravitational radiation coming from space. He used a new type of detector of his own design. The amount of radiation he saw was far greater than the theoretical predictions of astronomers and cosmologists. In the years that followed, scientists tried to test Weber's claims. No-one could confirm them. By 1975, few, if any, scientists believed that Weber's radiation existed in the quantities he said he had found. But, whatever it looks like now, theory and experiment alone did not settle the question of the existence of gravitational radiation.

Gravitational radiation can be thought of as the gravitational equivalent of electromagnetic radiation such as radio waves. Most scientists agree that Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that moving massive bodies will produce gravity waves. The trouble is that they are so weak that it is very difficult to detect them. For example, no-one has so far suggested a way of generating detectable amounts of gravitational radiation on Earth. Nevertheless, it is now accepted that some sensible proportion of the vast amounts of energy generated in the violent events in the universe should be dissipated in the form of gravitational radiation, and it is this that may be detectable on Earth.

In the short time since The Golem was first published, it has received a number of reviews. This gives us the opportunity to clear up a source of misunderstanding. The Golem is not meant to be statistically representative of the ordinary science that is done every day in laboratories throughout the world. On the contrary, most science is uncontroversial. Thus, as an introduction to the day-to-day world of science for scientists, the book would be misleading; the average scientist would be lucky indeed (or unlucky!) to be personally involved in the kind of excitement represented here. In spite of this, as we suggest, citizens as citizens need understand only controversial science. One reviewer argues: ‘it is quite easy to think of political decisions with a scientific side to them where the science is non-controversial’ and offers as an example the effect on medical institutions of the development of a predictive test for Huntingdon's disease. But if the science is non-controversial, why do those running the medical institutions need to understand the deep nature of the science that gave rise to the results? If the test is uncontroversially valid they can make their decisions without understanding how agreement about the test was reached. Thus, while thanking our reviewers for the many generous comments about the importance, the informativeness, and they style of the book, we stand by our claim that ‘For citizens who want to take part in the democratic processes of a technological society, all the science they need to know about is controversial. ‘ For this purpose, The Golem represent s science properly.

Spontaneous generation

‘Spontaneous generation’ is the name given to the doctrine that, under the right circumstances, life can form from dead matter. In a sense, nearly all of us believe in spontaneous generation, because we believe that life grew out of the primeval chemical slime covering the newly formed earth. This, however, is taken to be something that happened slowly, by chance, and once only in the history of the earth; it ought never to be seen in our lifetimes.

The question of the origin of life is, of course, as old as thought but, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the debate raged within the scientific community. Could new life arise from sterile matter over and over again, in a few minutes or hours? When a flask of nutrients goes mouldy, is it because it has become contaminated with existing life forms which spread and multiply, or is it that life springs anew each time within the rich source of sustenance? It was a controversial issue, especially in nineteenth-century France because it touched upon deeply rooted religious and political sensibilities.

Our modern understanding of biochemistry, biology and the theory of evolution is founded on the idea that, aside from the peculiar conditions of pre-history, life can only arise from life. Like so many of our widespread scientific beliefs we tend to think that the modern view was formed rapidly and decisively; with a few brilliant experiments conducted in the 1860s, Louis Pasteur speedily defeated outright those who believed in spontaneous generation.

Half a lifetime had gone by since Arthur Holmes had lain in his tent in Mozambique, racked with fever, dreaming of developing a geological time scale and wondering how he could reconcile the age of the Earth as determined by radioactivity with that calculated by the old established methods of sedimentation rates. While progress on a geological time scale had been made over the following years, it had largely been in the physics arena: improved understanding about the atom; the discovery of isotopes; development of the mass spectrometer; and recognition of the four stable isotopes of lead. The geological side, however, lagged far behind. A rock assigned an age of 300 million years, for example, still could not be classified as ‘Carboniferous’ with any confidence because it was still not known how long, in geological time, the Carboniferous ranged. So, as we saw with the helium results from the Whin Sill, extreme errors could be accepted as reasonable values because no limits could be placed on the extent of the Carboniferous. Clearly, what was needed was a time scale that said ‘the Carboniferous starts here at this age and ends there at that age, therefore any age in between must be Carboniferous’. But that was still a long way off.

If gratitude could be measured on the geological time scale, then what I owe Hugh Torrens, historian of technology and Professor of Geology at Keele University, would stretch beyond the age of the dinosaurs and survive the Permian extinction, only to disappear down the black hole of the Archaean still feeling inadequate. Without the benefit of his invaluable advice this novice historian would have taken aeons to find all the relevant materials, and this book would probably still be sitting on a word processor.

Finding out about another person's life is like writing a detective story – except that you are in it. Arthur Holmes left few clues about his private life and the ‘garden shed mystery’ was never fully resolved. A shed at the bottom of Doris' garden in Hove was believed to contain all Holmes' papers, but quite what happened to its contents when she died is not clear. I found some, but certainly not all. Although Geoffrey Holmes, Arthur's son, sadly died before I had a chance to meet him, I was delighted when I finally tracked down Geoffrey's wife Karla, and their four children.