Was Hippasus pushed? If you are even mildly interested in the history of mathematics, it is likely that you will have heard something like the following story. The Pythagoreans (who were also into music in a big way) worshipped numbers, and believed them to be the basis of everything. If one were to do a modern caricature of this, it might go:

  Do you believe in Rock ’n’ Roll?
  Can mathematics save your soul?

By numbers, they meant whole numbers or positive integers. Whether this included ‘one’ is a moot point, because later Greek mathematicians regarded ‘one’ as the ‘generator of numbers’. One day, a man called Hippasus discovered that the square root of 2 was irrational. This went so much against the Pythagorean world view that they took him out to sea and threw him overboard. It didn’t stop there, though.

FLEMING DOES NOT RULE OK! These could be what Physics World calls Lateral Thoughts, because I originally wrote this horizontally with my leg in plaster. Here follow some snapshots of my journey through Physics, which is not a straightforward one like that of Marco Polo, but a meandering one like that of the 14th century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta. But this is no random selection, but a selected album entitled “Electromagnetism.” The prologue to this tale finds me as a pre-teenager in the mid 1950’s, poring over my Pictorial Encyclopaedia. I eagerly drink in the graphical information along with the textual, and today I still recall the story of our Earth being pulled out of our Sun, along with the other planets, by a passing star. My chief custard pie, though, is reserved for the illustrator who depicted the arteries and ventricles of the heart, on both sides, as blue, and similarly the veins and auricles in red.

Recently some people have disputed the existence of the NEUTRON, which if this had any sound basis would cast doubt on some of my recent activities. Maybe this is because the neutron has not had much of an impact in popular culture. The only item that I remember is a song Yes to the Neutron Bomb (1981) by the Liverpool Group “Moderates”. I first went a-neutron scattering about three years ago. I arrived at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, and went to the ISIS facility. After getting my badge and doing the safety test, I walked through the experimental hall (picture) and found myself entering a room entitled “LOQ CABIN”, although it did not look at all as if Abraham Lincoln had been born there. But what is the point of scattering neutrons?