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Martin Hollis, a philosopher with an unshakeable belief in the power of reason, was Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990. He contributed logical puzzles to the New Scientist, and his most important books included Models of Man and The Cunning of Reason. Obituary by Steven Lukes FBA and Quentin Skinner FBA.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” So claimed Ernest Rutherford, the British physicist who discovered the atomic nucleus in 1910, touting the explanatory power of physics over the busywork of classifying elements or planets or animals. One hundred years later, the endless variety of matter postulated by physics—within the nucleus and throughout the universe—has far surpassed the inventories of the periodic table and solar system, leading particle physicists to refer to their domain as a bestiary and one textbook to be aptly titled A Tour of the Subatomic Zoo. There are electrons and protons and neutrons, as well as quarks and positrons and neutrinos. There are also gluons and muons—the unexpected discovery of which, in 1936, led the physicist Isidor Rabi to quip, “Who ordered that?”—and potentially axions and saxions and saxinos. In this menagerie it’s not easy for a new particle, especially a hypothetical one, to get attention. The unparticle, first proposed by American physicist Howard Georgi in 2007, is therefore remarkable for garnering worldwide media attention and spurring more than a hundred scholarly papers, especially considering that there’s no experimental evidence for it, nor is it called for mathematically by any prior theory. What an unparticle is, exactly, remains vague. The strange form of matter first arose on paper when Georgi asked himself what properties a “scale-invariant” particle might have and how it might interact with the observable universe. Scale invariance is a quality of fractals, such as snowflakes and fern leaves, that makes them look essentially the same at any magnification. Georgi’s analogous idea was to imagine particles that would interact with the same force regardless of the distance between them. What he found was that such particles would have no definite mass, which would, for example, exempt them from obeying special relativity. “It’s very difficult to even find the words to describe what unparticles are,” Georgi confessed to the magazine New Scientist in 2008, “because they are so unlike what we are familiar with.” For those unprepared to follow his mathematics, the name evokes their essential foreignness.

In geological time, the human life span is almost immeasurably brief. The seventeenth-century archbishop James Ussher famously calculated from biblical events that Earth was formed in 4004 BCE; scientists now estimate that the planet is 4.6 billion years old, and that the six millennia since the apocryphal Creation have probably contributed less than 10 millimeters of sediment to the geological record. Geological eras are unfathomable by ordinarily temporal measurements, such as the daily spin of the planet or its annual orbit, leading some scientists to adopt the galactic year—the 250 million terrestrial years it takes our solar system to rotate around the center of the galaxy—as a standard time unit. On that scale, Homo sapiens has been around for less than a week. Yet as the technology to study the planet has improved, so too has the technology to alter it. Earth increasingly disproportionately bears our imprint, as if geological time were being accelerated to the beat of our biological clock, with the consequence that the planet seems increasingly mortal, its legacy and ours entangled. In geological terms we are in the Holocene epoch—a designation formulated from Greek roots meaning “wholly recent,” officially adopted at the 1885 International Geological Congress—and have been in the Holocene for the past ten thousand years. The question, given all that we’ve done to the planet, is whether the label remains valid, or whether we’ve now buried the stratum of our Neolithic ancestors beneath our own rubbish. The atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was the first to effectively challenge the conventional geological thinking. In a 2003 interview with New Scientist he recollected the circumstances: “This happened at a meeting three years ago. Someone said something about the Holocene, the geological era covering the period since the end of the last ice age. I suddenly thought this was wrong. In the past 200 years, humans have become a major geological force on the planet. So I said, no, we are not in the Holocene any more: we are in the Anthropocene. I just made up the word on the spur of the moment.

In 1974 and 1975 two books (The Ultra Secret and Bodyguard of Lies) were published. These books alerted the general public for the first time to some of the secrets of Bletchley Park’s wartime activities, and caused a great sensation. These developments provided me with an excuse to enquire again about the possibility of persuading the British government to declassify the Colossus project. This second account describes how, following a partial such declassification, I received official permission in July 1975 to undertake and publish the results of a detailed investigation into the work of the project. As a consequence, at the 1976 Los Alamos Conference on the History of Computing I was able to describe in some detail, for the first time, how Tommy Flowers led the work at the Post Office Dollis Hill Research Station on the construction of a series of special-purpose electronic computers for Bletchley Park, and to discuss how these fitted into the overall history of the development of the modern electronic computer. The present chapter describes the course of this further investigation. In the spring of 1974 the official ban on any reference to Ultra, a code name for information obtained at Bletchley Park from decrypted German message traffic, was relaxed somewhat, and Frederick Winterbotham’s book The Ultra Secret was published. Described as the ‘story of how, during World War II, the highest form of intelligence, obtained from the “breaking” of the supposedly “unbreakable” German machine cyphers, was “processed” and distributed with complete security to President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and all the principal Chiefs of Staff and commanders in the field throughout the war’, this book caused a sensation, and brought Bletchley Park, the Enigma cipher machine, and the impact on the war of the breaking of wartime Enigma traffic, to the general public’s attention in a big way. The book’s single reference to computers came in the statement:… It is no longer a secret that the backroom boys of Bletchley used the new science of electronics to help them . . . I am not of the computer age nor do I attempt to understand them, but early in 1940 I was ushered with great solemnity into the shrine where stood a bronze coloured face, like some Eastern Goddess who was destined to become the oracle of Bletchley.

In 1974 and 1975 two books (The Ultra Secret and Bodyguard of Lies) were published. These books alerted the general public for the first time to some of the secrets of Bletchley Park’s wartime activities, and caused a great sensation. These developments provided me with an excuse to enquire again about the possibility of persuading the British government to declassify the Colossus project. This second account describes how, following a partial such declassification, I received official permission in July 1975 to undertake and publish the results of a detailed investigation into the work of the project. As a consequence, at the 1976 Los Alamos Conference on the History of Computing I was able to describe in some detail, for the first time, how Tommy Flowers led the work at the Post Office Dollis Hill Research Station on the construction of a series of special-purpose electronic computers for Bletchley Park, and to discuss how these fitted into the overall history of the development of the modern electronic computer. The present chapter describes the course of this further investigation. In the spring of 1974 the official ban on any reference to Ultra, a code name for information obtained at Bletchley Park from decrypted German message traffic, was relaxed somewhat, and Frederick Winterbotham’s book The Ultra Secret was published. Described as the ‘story of how, during World War II, the highest form of intelligence, obtained from the “breaking” of the supposedly “unbreakable” German machine cyphers, was “processed” and distributed with complete security to President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and all the principal Chiefs of Staff and commanders in the field throughout the war’, this book caused a sensation, and brought Bletchley Park, the Enigma cipher machine, and the impact on the war of the breaking of wartime Enigma traffic, to the general public’s attention in a big way. The book’s single reference to computers came in the statement:… It is no longer a secret that the backroom boys of Bletchley used the new science of electronics to help them … I am not of the computer age nor do I attempt to understand them, but early in 1940 I was ushered with great solemnity into the shrine where stood a bronze coloured face, like some Eastern Goddess who was destined to become the oracle of Bletchley.