A hero of the circuit
QUESTION Further to the earlier question about disabled athletes competing in professional sport, wasn’t there a disabled British Formula 1 driver?
Yes, there was. Arguably one of the great heroes of the early days of Formula 1 was scotland’s Archie scott-Brown.
Born in Paisley in 1927, his mother contracted German measles while she was pregnant. As a baby, he had 22 operations to repair and restore as much function as possible to his partially formed right arm, as well as both legs and feet.
Never growing over 5ft, he started club racing in 1950 in an MG TD, and he made his mark in 1954 when he formed a partnership with Brian Lister, racing Lister’s eponymous Bristol engine sports cars. He won five national and club races along with coming second eight times.
In 1955, he took 13 sports car wins, beating future British F1 winner Peter Collins at snetterton and Oulton Park and Roy salvadori at Crystal Palace.
Archie made his Formula 1 debut in 1956. signed by the Connaught team, he made his non- championship debut at Goodwood in the 32- lap Richmond Trophy. Qualifying behind stirling Moss, he led after the half-distance before his crankshaft broke.
A second place behind Moss at the following month’s International Trophy meeting at silverstone gave him confidence, and in his first, and only, Grand Prix — again at silverstone — two months later, he qualified tenth out of 28 drivers and was in seventh place when he lost a wheel after 16 laps.
A planned race at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza was denied when the organisers refused his entry due to his disability, a rejection that Archie received time and again on the Continent.
He ended the season winning the BRsCC meeting at Brands Hatch.
In 1957, he was approached by BRM to race in that year’s British Grand Prix, but after brake and throttle problems while testing, colleagues persuaded him to decline the offer. Instead he focused on his Lister sports car. Now with a Jaguar engine, Archie beat the works Aston Martins almost as he pleased.
At season’s end, 11 wins out of 14 showed the potency of the new car as well as his handling skills. The legendary Juan Manuel Fangio remarked that Archie’s car control was ‘phenomenal’.
Frustrated with european race organisers refusal to grant him a licence, he was accepted to race in New Zealand in 1957/58 in Formula Libre (free) races with his Lister against sports cars and F1 machines.
In his seven races he won twice, along with two seconds and a sixth. Back in england, his final two non-championship F1 races were again for the now struggling Connaught Team, finishing sixth at Goodwood and ninth at Aintree in April.
One month later, Archie was, unusually, granted an international licence to race in spa-Francorchamps.
However, while dicing with the equally combative American Masten Gregory, he lost control of his Lister on a wet part of the circuit. His car crashed into a field and burst into flames.
Archie died the next day, less than a week after his 31st birthday. The sad irony was that he died while achieving what he always wanted: to be accepted on the same terms as his fellow racers.
Paul Reynolds, Ruislip, Middlesex.
QUESTION Does Maxwell’s Demon, a physics problem, have a solution?
THe scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) posed a problem that apparently confounds the second law of thermodynamics.
He proposed the following thought experiment: a demon sits on a box of gas all at the same temperature. A panel separates the gas into two equal sections, A and B. In this panel is a small trapdoor with negligible friction. The demon watches the gas molecules in section B, and when it sees an energetic one approaching the trapdoor, it lets it through into A.
It does the same for low- energy molecules in A passing into B. Thus the gas in A gets hotter and the gas in B gets colder without any work being done.
This, apparently, contravenes the second law of thermodynamics — and here we are talking about physics, not magic; the demon is just a device sensitive enough to watch molecules.
There the problem lay for years, troubling generations of physicists.
enter modern physicists with a deeper understanding of the physical world. The modern take on this problem recognises the demon is part of the physical system, and so it must have a finite information and energy capacity in its brain.
Thus its ability to manipulate the system, including its information, must be finite.
And also manipulating its information will expend more and more energy (the human brain converts a lot of energy into heat). Thus the entropy of the demon and of the whole system will increase and the second law of thermodynamics reigns supreme.
(entropy is a measure of the disorder of a physical system and always increases; we become more disordered, we grow old and die. While the gas becomes more ordered, the demon becomes even more disordered as its information capacity is approached.) Dr Ron Barnes, King’s Lynn, Norfolk.
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