ON DAEDALUS
In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a cunning craftsman who occasionally outsmarted himself. The labyrinth he designed to contain the bovine Minotaur was so disorienting that even Daedalus got lost. He fashioned waxed wings that enabled him and his son, Icarus, to flee Crete, but Icarus drowned when the wax melted as he defiantly overreached and soared too close to the blazing sun.
In modern times, Daedalus was the inventor created by David EH Jones, a cheeky professional chemist and college professor who conceptualised – and sometimes built – loony contraptions to tweak laymen and scientists alike into questioning conventional wisdom and common sense.
Jones wrote hundreds of irreverent columns about Daedalus for two sacrosanct journals: New Scientist, in a column named for Ariadne, the mistress of the labyrinth, and Nature, in a column called Daedalus.
He also wrote books of fiction. In these, the character Daedalus – from Dreadco (Daedalus Research Evaluation and Development Corp.) – would slyly propose outlandish applications of seemingly sound scientific principles.
Jones’ ideas for a nuclearpowered pogo stick and a black-hole garbage disposal appliance probably struck most of his readers as farfetched. But he actually produced several incarnations of physics-defying perpetual motion machines that baffled scientists. Moreover, some of the early innovations he proposed proved prescient.
In 1966, for example, he suggested scientists could stimulate the lattice-like bonds of carbon atoms in graphite to form hollow balls. In 1985, scientists actually synthesised something like them as buckminsterfullerene molecules (a name inspired by the architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes). Their work earned them the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
In the 1960s, Jones envisioned a chemically powered laser that two decades later would become a crucial component of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.
Ever curious, Jones also performed an X-ray analysis that led to the conclusion that arsenic discovered in Napoleon Bonaparte’s hair was not the residue of a deliberate poisoning while he was imprisoned on St Helena in 1821.
Rather, it appeared to have been absorbed from fumes given off by the arsenic-based green pigment in the wallpaper of his bedroom.
Jones also experimented with whether plantlike forms could grow without gravity, putting them in a liquid solution of metal salt crystals and sodium silicate, known as a chemical garden. A prototype of it was rocketed into outer space, and complex forms did in fact develop.
“Daedalus never flagrantly posits impossibilities,” Jones was quoted as saying in The Telegraph. “Ideally, his fancies are ingenious, novel and even crazy, but they mustn’t break natural laws.
“On the other hand,” he added, “somewhere along the line, they do run off the rails.”
Still, he wrote in The Aha! Moment: A Scientist’s Take on Creativity (2011), “Despite my best endeavours, these mad Daedalian schemes kept coming true on me.”
Jonesestimatedthatasmany as 20 per cent of his “fancies” turned out to be valid, “one way or the other”.
The musings of his alter ego could be tantalising. Why, Daedalus wondered, are the world’s cities bestrewed with graffiti even though scientists, years ago, had perfected the porcelain enamel surfaces that make self-cleaning ovens possible? And could breakthroughs in molecular biology not be applied to artificially accelerate the aging process of incarcerated convicts, shortening their mandated sentences and saving money on prisons?
Jones gamely explored the less tangible spiritual world, too. He suggested that a tranquilising and non-doctrinal “Theological Prozac” might be formulated by analysing brain scans conducted on monks and nuns during prayer.
Getting goosebumps from chilling spectral apparitions could be explained by the spirit world being colder than the material one – the latter having been warmed by cosmic radiation from the Big Bang. Therefore, he posited, rambunctious ghosts could be thermodynamically exorcised by simply exposing them to an open microwave oven.
David Edward Hugh Jones was born on 20 April 1938 in the London borough of Southwark. His father, Philip, was an advertising copywriter. His mother was the former Dorothea Sitters.
“While other boys were doing sensible things like playing football and chasing girls, I built rockets and steam engines and drew animated cartoon strips and played with amateur chemistry,” he recalled in The Aha! Moment. “My poor parents showed great heroism. They put up with my highly deviant and often destructive behaviour. So did the neighbours, who often had to respond to pleas of ‘can I have my rocket back?’ ”
He received both a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate in organic chemistry from Imperial College in London.
Besides writing his columns, Jones made television appearances in Britain and Germany, worked as a spectroscopist for Imperial Chemical Industries and became a research fellow and professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
His only immediate survivor is his brother, Peter Vaughan Jones, who said Jones died from prostate cancer. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service
“Ideally his fancies are ingenious, novel and even crazy, but they mustn’t break natural laws”