I’ve always been interested in biology, physics and chemistry and had a bit of a grasp on it even at a young age. I remember my first pre-teen physics class with the teacher rattling around ping pong balls in a tray, telling us these were atoms and that what we were seeing was heat. When a number of the balls spilled on the floor I pointed out that they were a gas. He looked quite surprised. Reading masses of science fiction does actually tech you a lot.
In my first biology class we did some kind of experiment adding various liquids to a large number of dimples in a tray. I can’t even remember what the experiment was, but I do remember getting it right (and not being particularly popular as a result). Here my interests were having their effect, not least because they had been noted at home and birthday and Christmas presents were a chemistry set (complemented with chemicals from the college where my dad lectured applied mathematics), a microscope, a small terrarium for growing stuff and other things besides. I raised caterpillars to moths in the terrarium, or tank. I also filled it with water and creatures from a local stream at one point, while making copious notes and drawing pictures of the things.
But such being our crappy comprehensive school system, later on I could not choose to study all these subjects. You see, the state must produce ‘well-rounded people’. You had columns of subjects from which you could select one out of each. In this instance that meant I I was only able to study one science subject, which turned out to be physics. To be the ‘well-rounded person’ the state required, meant in other columns I got shit like French, Religious Studies (which was in fact an early indoctrination class in correct political thought), Economics that I had no interest in then but do now, and History, which might have been interesting if it hadn’t been all about the Industrial Revolution with more of the above mentioned ‘correct thought’ thrown in. The conditions in the cotton mills were terrible! Well no shit, Sherlock – people got more money there and worked shorter hours than when they were slaving on farms. That’s why they came into the cities from the countryside.
In the end, if I had been able to study the sciences as I wanted to, I suspect my career would have been a very different thing from what it is today. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing I leave you to decide.
But how far have we come? Well, as a kid with all these interests, I liked playing with electronics. While out on my perambulations, I found a bunch of equipment dumped in a ditch. I took this home and began taking it apart and checking it out. Obviously I did this with skills learned from my extensive Mechano set along with all its additions. I became immediately aware that I did not know enough and this was when I started reading books on electronics. Through this I learned about thermionic valves and how they work, and even fired a few of them up. I learned too how they were being supplanted by transistors. In retrospect I reckon the equipment was dumped because in using thermionic valves it was very dated.
Multiple interests continued into my teens, with me buying stuff with my pocket money from electronics shops. Fun fact: during this time I got a digital watch as a present – one of those with red characters you that to turn on with a press of a button. I dreamed vividly about that watch showing me all sorts of graphs and other interesting information. Hilarious now. Hilarious too that the watch is now also a collectors’ item. During that time the electronics shops began selling these funny looking things like squat, black Cubist centipedes. These ‘integrated circuits’ had many uses, but with my interests spread wide I didn’t have enough focus on them to do much that was useful. They kinda went on the shelf as I turned to learning how to paint skies, making a model of a dragon using a rabbit vertebra as the head, polishing stones and making a frame so I could weave copper wire over them, or whatever else happened to grab my interest at the time.
As I entered the working world my projects all slowed down what with 40+ hours a week in factories, and as I discovered the delights of smoking, beer, pool and darts, chasing and not catching girls. Then in my early to mid twenties I began starting to turn away from multiple interests and focus on one, which was writing. I had understood that you can be a ‘Jack of all trades and master of none’, while my crappy comprehensive education wouldn’t allow me to master those that had first mainly interested me.
By this time integrated circuits were thoroughly penetrating society and home computers had become a thing – starting with Amstrad. The home computer revolution ensued, which I only joined in my thirties when a brother of mine retrained for IT and supplied me with a one. Prior to this I had gone through fountain pen on paper to manual typewriter, and an electric typewriter rescued from a skip and repaired. I thought the green-screen Wordstar, one meg hard disc and 5.25 inch floppies were wonderful at the time.
But now where are we? I’m reading articles about molecular circuits, functional (marginally) quantum computing. I abandoned my reference books a quarter of a century ago for search engines and now I’m finding out the things I want to know from AI. I spend a lot of time on an Ipad – a thing with the computing that puts that old saw about the computing to put a man on the moon to shame. Within my lifetime we’ve gone from thermionic valves in a ditch to stuff old science fiction dreamed about, but could never correctly visualise.
The future is coming at us fast, and hard.
