ADVENTURES OF A MAVERICK In the Beginning--School and

war My father was a scientist--an astronomer--being the first director of the University of London Observatory. So I was brought up with optical instruments and also with the importance of making observations. My father measured the distances of the nearer stars for most of his life-using parallax from camera-positions separated by the 186,000,000 miles diameter of the Earthís orbit around the Sun. These measurements are crucial for scaling the universe. Is it an accident that years later I tried to scale and explain distortions of visual space? At school I learned simple electronics in our Radio Club, as we built our own short wave receivers, and then more in the RAF at Number One Signal School at Cranwell. Cranwell had excellent teaching, and was highly civilised, with its drama and music societies. I should have been posted to the Gold Coast, but a telegram recalling me from Christmas leave did not arrive in time so I was posted to Training Command in Canada. This was a year flying around the Bay of Fundy and St Johns, sometimes testing radio communications and radar; then six months with the Fleet Air Arm at Kingston, Ontario, where I had my own boat and sailed among the Thousand Islands. During almost six years in the RAF I had time to read and think on physics and biology, and wrote a science column in a local RAF magazine. I also read C.G. Jung (developing a permanent allergy) and William James (who remains a hero.) No doubt I absorbed some useful concepts from the technologies of radio and radar. After the German war was over, and the Japanese war near its end, the RAF offered me an unusual and useful experience. I was posted (mysteriously) directly by the Air Ministry, to explain radar and communication systems to the public. This was at the John Lewis bomb site in Oxford Street, with an ambitious exhibition: the first jet plane (I actually saw its first flight, at Cranwell) and secrets were revealed. We explained how things worked, to all manner of people, especially factory workers who made bits and pieces throughout the war without for secrecy reasons knowing what they were for. We had four million visitors in six months. Is this a record? The experience was invaluable and great fun. Perhaps it led, thirty years later, to the founding of the Exploratory, the

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