David EH Jones

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David EH Jones

David Edward Hugh Jones (born April 20, 1938 in London - † July 19, 2017 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne ) was a British chemist , journalist and author . Under the pseudonym Daedalus , he published a weekly column in New Scientist magazine from 1964 to 1988 , which he then continued until 2002 in Nature and the Guardian . In his column, he presented fictional, mostly bizarre inventions, but these were described in such a scientifically sound manner that even a scientifically educated audience often couldn't tell at first glance whether they could actually work or not. Jones compiled two edited volumes of his columns, illustrated by himself, The Inventions of Daedalus (1982) and The Further Inventions of Daedalus (1999).

Life

Jones came as the son of the copywriter Philip Jones and his wife, the secretary and housewife Dorothea, geb. Sitters, was born in Southwark in South London and was an avid hobbyist and experimenter as a child. After attending Crofton Primary School in Orpington and Eltham College in London, he studied chemistry at Imperial College London from 1956 , where he obtained a doctorate ( Ph. D. ) in organic chemistry in 1962 . He then worked for a year at a laboratory supply company and then as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Imperial College, where he did research in the field of infrared spectroscopy . During this time he began to publish his column. From 1967 he taught for a year at the University of Strathclyde and then worked in the field of spectroscopy for Imperial Chemical Industries in Runcorn . In 1974 he became a Sir James Knott Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Newcastle University . He then went into business for himself as a scientific consultant and supplier of ideas. He lived in Newcastle until his death and continued to work as a visiting scholar at the university there.

In 1972 Jones married Jane Burgess; the marriage was divorced in 1973. He later had a longstanding relationship with artist Naomi Hunt . Jones had no children. He died of complications from prostate cancer .

plant

Jones, who described himself as a “court jester at the court of science”, pursued the goal of his popular science work to arouse interest in the natural sciences in an entertaining and playful way and to encourage deeper reflection on scientific questions. In his Daedalus columns, which have similarities with the pataphysics or the glosses of the historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson , he appeared as the fictional owner of the company DREADCO (Daedalus Research Evaluation and Development Corporation) and described apparently impossible and absurd "inventions" like a water hopping stick , Baby clothes, the color of which can change between pink and blue, a bus in which every passenger is given a steering wheel and the majority determine the direction of travel, or a machine with which corpses can be processed into grave sculptures. However, these imaginative designs always had a solid scientific basis; about 20% of his ideas later turned out to be feasible and were seriously suggested or even patented by others. His most important scientific achievement as "Daedalus" in 1966 was the description of "hollow" carbon molecules, which years later were realized in the form of fullerenes . His design for 3D printing with lasers was cited in a patent dispute in 1974.

Jones has been developing demonstration experiments for popular science television programs on British television since the mid-1970s. In Germany he was best known as a guest moderator and experimenter in the TV science quiz head to head , in which he participated for eight years.

Most influential of his scientific publications was an essay in Physics Today in which Jones gave an improved explanation of cycling stability . By attempts to build a "unfahrbares" bike, he could prove that less of the gyroscopic effect is responsible for the self-stabilization of the wheel, but rather the steering geometry. His evidence of arsenic in the wallpaper of Napoleon's living room on St. Helena was also known . After Napoleon's hair samples were found to have high concentrations of arsenic, the theory of arsenic poisoning as the cause of death emerged. Jones came into possession of a piece of the original wallpaper after a radio broadcast and was able to prove that it was colored with Scheele's green , an arsenic compound that emits toxic arsenic-containing gas ( arsine and / or trimethylarsine ) at high humidity . However, Jones concluded that the arsenic concentration was too low to result in death. His constructions apparently functioning as perpetual motion machines , in which a wheel rotates without a recognizable energy source, also caused a stir . These “scientific magic tricks”, the real functional principle of which Jones never revealed, he built in several versions since 1981; the last from 1999 is in the Technical Museum in Vienna . Martyn Poliakoff , who inherited the first Perpetua Mobilia built by Jones and who has a technical description of this device, explained that it is much more interesting to speculate about the function of the machine than to actually know how it works. After learning how it actually worked, he was "disappointed" with it (the technical simplicity) and felt "betrayed".

After suffering a stroke in 2000, Jones dropped the Daedalus columns but published two popular science books: In The Aha! At the moment he examined the phenomenon of scientific creativity using the example of his inventions and described the subconscious as a “random generator for ideas”; In his last book, Why Are We Conscious , he dealt with questions of consciousness based on the experience of his stroke .

In 2009 Adrin Neatrour shot the documentary Perpetual Motion Machine about Jones and his work .

Awards

Fonts (selection)

Books

Essays

  • The stability of the bicycle . In: Physics Today . tape 23 , no. 4 , 1970, pp. 34–40 , doi : 10.1063 / 1.3022064 (English, berkeley.edu [PDF; 9.2 MB ; accessed on October 14, 2017]).
  • (with Kenneth WD Ledingham): Arsenic in Napoleon's Wallpaper . In: Nature . tape 299 , October 14, 1982, pp. 626-627 , doi : 10.1038 / 299626a0 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d David Perutz: David Jones Obituary. In: The Guardian . August 18, 2017, accessed October 14, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Sam Roberts: David EH Jones, Scientist Whose Alter Ego Challenged Conventions, Dies at 79 , New York Times. July 30, 2017. 
  3. ↑ a b c d e f David Jones, British chemist and 'court jester in the palace of science,' dies at 79 . In: Washington Post . July 31, 2017.
  4. ↑ a b c Obituaries . In: The Times . August 7, 2017, p. 41.
  5. ^ A b Perpetual Motion Machine. Retrieved October 14, 2017 (English, website with trailer for the film and self-statements by Jones).
  6. ↑ David EH Jones: Hollow molecules . In: New Scientist . No. 32, 1966, p. 245.
  7. ↑ The Strange Story of Napoleon's Wallpaper. (No longer available online.) In: Grand Illusions. Archived from the original on October 16, 2017 ; Retrieved October 14, 2017 (English, with photo by David Jones). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.grand-illusions.com
  8. ↑ David "Daedalus" Jones: I, Fraudulous . In: New Scientist . No. 22/29 , December 1983, pp. 915–917 (English, google.de [accessed October 14, 2017]).
  9. ↑ LuiKast's YouTube video on Jones' apparent perpetual motion machine in the Technisches Museum Wien. Retrieved October 15, 2017 (3:24 pm).
  10. ↑ Periodic Table of Videos - Perpetual Motion Machine; Brady Haran's YouTube video about the David Jone machine inherited from Martyn Poliakoff. Retrieved June 10, 2018 (10:30 PM).
personal data
SURNAME Jones, David EH
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jones, David Edward Hugh (full name); Daedalus (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist, journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 19th July 2017
Place of death Newcastle-upon-Tyne