Chance and Design: Reminiscences of Science in Peace and WarCambridge University Press, 1994 M01 28 - 412 pages Alan Hodgkin believes that - contrary to popular conviction - chance plays quite as large a role as design in scientific discovery. This engaging autobiography charts the balance of the two in his own life. Beginning starts with an account of his childhood in an extended Quaker family. Not a great success at school, he nevertheless won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and he writes informatively of the climate of university opinion in the thirties when he was an undergraduate and came to abandon the pacifist ideals of his upbringing. A chance observation on frog nerve led to a Trinity Fellowship and a year at the Rockefeller Institute in New York (where he met his future wife), to the Nobel Prize in 1963, and ultimately to the Presidency of the Royal Society. His experiments on nerve conduction seemed almost at the point of success when everything had to be abandoned on the outbreak of war in 1939, and for six years Hodgkin worked on the concept and design of airborne radar, described in the central section of the book as Flight Trials and Tribulations. The account of his return to civilian life and the resumption of experimentation includes two chapters of solid detail of Starting Again - for this is a book for any reader interested in the origin and development of a dedicated scientist. |
Contents
Childhood My fathers death in 1918 | 3 |
Staying with relations | 13 |
Mainly schools 192332 | 24 |
Summer 1932 Oxford Frankfurt and Scotland | 34 |
Cambridge 19325 | 45 |
Cambridge 19347 starting research | 63 |
Cambridge 19327 mainly politics | 79 |
New York 19378 The Rockefeller Institute | 89 |
Life at Christchurch Swanage and Malvern | 211 |
Antisubmarine and townfinding applications | 217 |
An attempt to defend nightbombers AGLT | 225 |
A wartime visit to America | 233 |
The last year of the war | 240 |
STARTING AGAIN | 245 |
Malvern and Cambridge 19445 | 247 |
Research and teaching Cambridge Plymouth 19457 | 261 |
Spring 1938 St Louis Mexico | 104 |
Summer 1938 New York and Woods Hole | 113 |
Cambridge and Plymouth 19389 | 123 |
FLIGHT TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS | 137 |
193940 Cambridge Farnborough and St Athan | 139 |
The move to Swanage breakup of Bowens group | 153 |
An early visit to the Christchurch aerodrome | 157 |
Centimetre work at Swanage in 1940 | 161 |
Another move | 168 |
Preparations for the first flight trials | 173 |
Initial flight trials of 9 cm AI | 181 |
Preparations for AI Marks VII and VIII | 187 |
Alternative scanning systems Window | 196 |
Operational performance of centimetre AI | 201 |
New York and Chicago spring 1948 | 278 |
The electrical activity of muscle Cambridge 1948 | 284 |
Excitation and conduction in nerve | 288 |
Everyday life holidays conferences 194653 | 307 |
The Rockefeller and Nuffield Units 194656 | 326 |
Research 195163 | 336 |
Moving house holidays travel conferences 195362 | 352 |
Stockholm 1963 | 361 |
Postscript | 370 |
NOTES | 391 |
395 | |
403 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
A. V. Hill action potential activity Adrian aerial aeroplane airborne aircraft Andrew Huxley arginine asked Beaufighter beautiful became Cambridge cathode ray tube centimetre radar Chapter Christchurch Cole early effect electrical electrode equipment exciting experiments fighter Figure flight trials friends German giant axon giant nerve fibres going Hodgkin holiday impulse interesting ionic Katz Keynes laboratory later letter lived looked Lovell magnetron Malvern Mark VII Marni membrane potential miles months mother move muscle myelinated Nash & Thompson nerve fibre nice night night-fighter Oxford partly Patrick Blackett permeability perspex Physiol Physiology Plymouth potassium ions range remember resting potential result Richard Keynes Rockefeller Royal Society scan scanner scientific scientists seemed sodium ions soon spent squid St Athan stay summer Swanage tests things thought took Trevelyan Trinity week Woods Hole wrote York