Scotty, a true hero of D-Day
QUESTION Was Star Trek’s engineer Montgomery Scott a war hero?
JAMES DOOHAN joined the Royal Canadian Artillery as a gunner aged 19, in September 1939. After rising through the ranks, he was recommended for officer training.
On D-Day, Lieutenant Doohan led troops up Juno Beach as part of the initial wave of 3,000 men. After surviving the run up the beach, he established his command post in a shell hole just beyond the village of Graye-sur-Mer. But there were still pockets of German resistance around and, late that night, as he made his way back to his command post, Doohan was hit by several machine-gun bullets.
The middle finger of his right hand was smashed, and a medic in a shell-hole dug four bullets out of his left leg; another bullet would have killed him if he hadn’t had a silver cigarette case his brother had given him in his tunic pocket. He was taken to England, where surgeons amputated what was left of his finger, and he spent about six weeks recovering.
Once fit to return to duty, he retrained as an air observation pilot. Qualifying in early 1945, he was attached to the 1st Canadian Army in Holland with 666 Squadron, where he was remembered as ‘a good officer and an exceptional pilot’.
By the end of the war he had been promoted to captain.
Back in Canada, Doohan retrained as an actor, and 20 years later he landed the role that would make him a TV legend: Captain Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott, the Starship Enterprise’s chief engineer, in Star Trek.
Kaz Wood, Bognor Regis, West Sussex.
QUESTION What is David Hilbert’s ‘Infinite Hotel Paradox’?
GERMAN mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943) used the concept of a hotel with an infinite number of rooms to illustrate properties of one type of infinite set. Suppose the hotel has an infinite number of guests. It might appear to be fully occupied, but there is always room for another guest.
The problem is to decide which room to allocate to the new guest, since every room is currently occupied. The answer is to send a broadcast to all existing guests asking them all to move to the next room along, thus vacating Room 1 for the new guest. Thus infinity + 1 = infinity.
This scheme can accommodate any finite number of new guests, but what if an infinite number of new guests arrived?
A broadcast to all existing guests asking them to move to the room number that is double their current room number frees up an infinite number of oddnumbered rooms for the infinite new guests. Thus infinity + infinity = infinity.
Not all infinities are the same. The above illustrates the countable infinite set, where (given infinite time) it is in principle possible to count every member of the set.
This includes the set of all positive whole numbers, all positive and negative whole numbers, grid squares on an infinite plane, and so on, because it is possible to devise strategies that count each element in turn. There are many other types of infinity which do not fit this definition, such as the set of all real numbers.
Ken Wood, Newport, Gwent.
QUESTION Was the first synthetic dye in the world invented by a teenager?
YES, William Henry Perkin, the son of a carpenter in London, achieved this aged 18, in 1856.
He started work aged 15 at London’s Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College, where he was employed as an assistant to Professor August von Hofmann.
Part of his duties was to help the professor in his search for a way to synthesise quinine, which at the time was the only known cure for malaria.
Quinine could be obtained only from the bark of the cinchona tree, which grew in South America. With the British in India, demand for quinine exceeded supply, so the search was on for a substitute.
At Easter 1856, not having any success, the professor elected to go back to Germany for a holiday, leaving his assistant to his own devices. Working around the clock, Perkin decided to try substituting aniline for the potassium dichromate they had been experimenting with, and produced a flask with a layer of black sludge. This did not seem to be any better than the brown sludge their previous experiments had yielded.
Before going to bed, he tried to wash out the flask with alcohol as usual, and was astonished to find it – and everything it came in contact with – turned a vivid purple. He had accidentally made the first synthetic aniline dye. From this he made his fortune; the professor never forgave him.
Denis Sharp, Littlehampton, West Sussex.
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