Great Scot December 2019 Great Scot 158_December_ONLINE | Page 6

PRINCIPAL
ALL THE
LIGHT WE
CANNOT
SEE
MR TOM BATTY
SCHOOL PRINCIPAL
OPPOSITE
PAGE:
SIR PAUL
MCCARTNEY
AUTOGRAPHS
A DRUM
DURING THE
SCOTCH PIPES
AND DRUMS’
PERFORMANCE
WITH SIR PAUL
6
On a gorgeous early spring morning out at Box Hill
athletics track beside the Scotch legions lining up to
melt the 100m track, I stopped by a sandpit to chat to
former Director of Admissions and leading chemistry
teacher, Dr Chris Commons. (Those interested in
athletics might know Chris is a double Olympian and
holds two Commonwealth Games silver medals in
long jump – not that he’d ever raise the matter as he
rakes the pit for aspiring jumpers.) Between Chris’s
timely reminders that it is indeed hop, step and jump
rather than hop, hop and jump, we entered discussion
regarding the many good things he continues to offer
Scotch chemists through his ongoing engagement
with Melbourne University, particularly his guiding
of boys in growing and analysing crystals, and, just
occasionally, discovering a previously unknown
structure they can then name.
In the course of our conversation, Chris mentioned
that a good friend of his had recently been taken sick
with Dengue fever. Taking opportunity to stir, I noted
that perhaps if he spent less time with his crystals
and more seeking antidotes, the world might be a
better place. With the wry smile of the learned and
the competitive edge of the athlete, Chris quickly put
me back in my box, noting that growing crystals was
exactly the sort of work that pharmaceutical scientists
use to inform their research for advances in such
medicines, it’s just that he would most likely never
know about it. Appropriately admonished, I slunk off
to the shot-put.
I like the idea that we might not know the end
point of our life’s work. It reminds that we are
connected beyond our immediate field of awareness,
that the web is dense and complex and that
extrapolation is fraught with danger. It pokes a finger
in the nerve of the ‘measure everything, because once
measured it can be controlled’ mantra.
It reminds that an awful lot of clever dedicated
people have brought the world to this point, and we are
Great Scot Issue 158 – December 2019
often ignorant of their work or take it for granted.
It compels consideration of the relationship between
the micro and macro in an ever increasingly connected
world.
But perhaps it most resonates because of the
reminder it serves that a school educates young people
for a life they cannot see as much as for one they can.
Other stories come readily to mind; my good
friend, Sir Chris Dobson (who, sadly, died recently)
explaining to me with characteristic humility that his
work with protein folding wasn’t really going anywhere
until he, seemingly by chance, ‘ran into’ contemporary
advances in treatment of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s
diseases; and the unknown generational impact of a
packet of cigarettes smuggled into the Auschwitz death
camp, as told by Denis Avey in his autobiographical
book, The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz.
Another involves a BBC podcast a few years ago
in which one of my early political heroes, the Rt
Hon Shirley Williams, was being interviewed about
her department’s handling of the refugee crisis from
Idi Armin’s Uganda, and subsequent work with her
contemporaries in India to form a solution. The
tenacious articulate interviewer suddenly became
silent before giving stuttering voice to her humbling
realisation that Mrs Williams’s government’s actions
had brought her own mother to the UK, and hence
been the source of all she had known including
her education. Providing dates and locations the
interviewer emotionally pressed, ‘So let’s get this
right. If you hadn’t acted as you did, I wouldn’t be
here interviewing you now?’ To which Mrs Williams
matter-of-factly replied, ‘Yes, that’s true’.
I touched on the vulnerability of modelling to
measurement in my third Great Scot article (April
2009) when considering Edward Norton Lorenz’s
attempts to model weather patterns only to ‘discover’
that in many complex relationships, sensitive
dependence of output to minor variance in input