From the Letters and Journals of Robert Murray-Smith

From the letters and journals of Robert Murray-Smith

© Tricia Holland and Robert Murray-Smith, 2019

Tricia Holland is the author of two family histories, many short stories and a series of books for teenagers with learning difficulties. She is currently working on a novel that combines her interest in historical fiction with her husband, Robert Murray-Smith’s, interest in science fiction fantasy.

Robert Murray-Smith is a research chemist and inventor, best known for his YouTube channel and the development of graphene-based conductive inks and carbon-based batteries and supercapacitors. He is the author of a number of books on bioplastics, natural dyes, inks, graphene and supercapacitors and co-author of three travel blogs with his wife.

Foreword

One day last spring, Rob was approached by someone who wanted to write his biography and wanted his cooperation to do it. Rob felt that a biography wasn’t really warranted and – in his typical style - that if one were to be written, he would write it himself and do it differently, more about what he has thought than about what he has done.

This book – a mixture of science, philosophy and life’s minutia - is the result. Rob, of course, did not have time to write it, so contributed his letters and journals and left the rest to his wife.

It was completed in the autumn of 2019, though the letters and journal entries go back as far as 2011. Rob did review the final draft – and is happy with 96-97% of it. It is, as always, his wife’s job to point out to him the 3-4% of the time that he is just plain wrong.

It is dedicated to our children who have lived through it all.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1:       Rising

From the Letters

From the Journals – Plant microbial fuel cell

Chapter 2:       On Living near the Sea _

From the Letters

From the Journals - Bioplastics from seaweeds

Chapter 3:       Clothes

From the Letters

From the Journals - Daisy solar motor

Chapter 4:       On the Arts

From the Letters

From the Journals - Arduino project

Chapter 5:       Travelling Shoes

From the Letters

From the Journals – Building a magnetic flux

Chapter 6:       On Teaching and Learning

From the Letters

From the Journals - In-house 2-day workshop/Live stream seminar

Chapter 7:       Clutter

From the Letters

From the Journals - Explosions, fuses and flash powders from graphene

Chapter 8:       On Videos and Computer Software

From the Letters

From the Journals - 3 Men in a Shed

Chapter 9:       On Science, Society and Truth

From the Letters

From the Journals - Conference paper on the future of the supercapacitor market

Chapter 10:     On Commercialisation

From the Letters

From the Journals - Metal air batteries

Chapter 11:     On Zeitgeist, Religion and British Culture

From the Letters

From the Journals – Ecofoam soap

Chapter 12:     On Politics

From the Letters

From the Journals - Training programme and supply of materials for small-scale production of supercapacitors and batteries in countries with developing economies

Chapter 13:     The Lab

From the Letters

From the Journals – Fuser

Chapter 14:     On Masculinity, Tools and Happiness

From the Letters

From the Journals - Induction heater/Wall radiator

Chapter 15:     On Music and Decadence

From the Letters

From the Journals – Speakers

Chapter 16:     Driving Home

From the Letters

From the Journals – Battery management system

Chapter 17:     Food

From the Letters

From the Journals - Grätzel solar cell

Chapter 18:     Dreaming

From the Letters

From the Journals – Conductive inks

Chapter 19:     On Time

From the Letters

From the Journals – Touch switch with Arduino

Chapter 1: Rising

The alarm gives out its electronic bleep at 5:55am, but Robert Murray-Smith doesn’t stir. He is awakened five minutes later by the gentle sound of a cup of coffee being placed on his bedside table. Rob – only Robert to his siblings and on his business cards - isn’t really an early morning person and, left on his own, would sleep at least until 10. This isn’t really surprising as he rarely goes to bed before 2am. His stated view that 4 hours’ sleep is enough for anyone is sometimes belied by the deepening of the lines of wisdom on his face and his struggle to arise at 6am.

In the light of summer mornings, Rob looks out the bedroom window at the sea as he begins his usual morning routine. The estuary with its windmills and ships is often grey, sometimes scattered with white, foamy caps, but just as often glassy, with golden pink rays of the early morning sun giving a glorious glow to the world. It’s a time of connection, but there is no time for contemplation yet. It’s the 20-minute drive to the lab that allows for contemplation – and even more connection to the world. Songbirds swoop over the fields and hedgerows; only lacking blue ribbons for the full Disney experience. In other places, rabbits chew slowly, keeping an eye on the few cars going by from the safety of the brush and, occasionally, a mother duck with her family of ducklings crosses the road to the yard of one of the ancient thatched farmhouses. In the darkness of winter, only sounds provide the connection: the waves against the cliffs, the wind - often blustery - through branches and foliage, and, perhaps, the screech of a lone gull with insomnia.

The connection to nature and time for contemplation are important to Rob and have led to a number of his ideas for experiments: self-organising carbon structures based on leaves and flowers, seawater energy generation, and the plant fuel cell which stores and utilises energy from growing plants. He has done a lot of thinking about thinking and firmly believes that all learning is emergent behaviour – a process of mapping behaviour to navigate existence – and that there are applications of this in real world science.

From the letters of Robert Murray-Smith:

Interesting that you mentioned the importance of contemplation to your life. I've recently been thinking about thinking – and contemplating about contemplating. Pretty much here is my view. Thought is a property and extension of the body in space – both physical and metaphysical. That is to say thought and action – or ‘behaviour’ are not two special ‘substances’ as Descartes propounded, but two attributes of one and the same thing; not two special objects, capable of existing separately and quite independently of each other, but only two different and even opposite facets of one and the same thing - two different ‘modes’ of existence, if you like - and two forms of the manifestation of some third thing.

What is the third thing?  I am pretty sure that it is Nature – Nature in its largest sense – as in the Nature of the thing – dare I extend it to ‘soul’? It is Nature that extends into space and ‘thinks’ and acts. It seems to me that the difficulty of Cartesian metaphysics is that what distinguishes the ‘real world’ from the world as imagined or ‘thought of’ is considered to be a spatial extension – but the idea of that extension only exists in the imagination or ‘thought’ and therefore the space it occupies can only be thought of negatively, so empty - without any definite geometric shape. There is more to Nature than that – forces for example. Ascribing only spatial, geometric properties to Nature is, as Spinoza said, is to think of it in an imperfect way, i.e. to deny it in advance one of its perfections. And then it is asked how the perfection removed from Nature can be restored again.

I believe that the same argument can be applied to thought. Only the physical body has geometrically spatial attributes. Thought, then, is not a reality existing separately from, and independently of, bodies but only a mode of existence of Nature’s bodies. Thought and space do not really exist by themselves, but only as Nature’s bodies interlinked. I am struck here by the parallels to neo-Confucianism.

But if thinking is always an action performed by a Natural (and therefore spatially determined) body, then it is also an action that is expressed spatially, so there isn't necessarily a cause and effect relationship between thinking and bodily action which is what the Cartesians were looking for. They didn’t find it for the simple reason that no such relation exists in Nature, and it can’t exist anyway because thinking and the body are not two different things at all, but one and the same thing, interlinked and only expressed in two different ways.

What I mean is that there can be no cause and effect relationship between thought and action – or behaviour because they are just two expressions of the same thing. It is the same as the relationship between any other bodily organ and the mode of its own action. The thinking body cannot cause changes in thought, cannot act on thought, because its existence as ‘thinking’ is thought. If a thinking body does nothing, it is no longer a thinking body but simply a body. But when it does act, it does not in response to thought, because its very activity is thought.

Thought isn’t secreted from the body that performs it like sweat is secreted from sweat glands – it isn’t the product of an action but rather the action itself, considered at the moment that it happens. It is like walking, which could be considered the mode of action of the legs, the ‘product’ of which is the space that is walked.

So like walking then, the ‘product’ or result of thinking can be said to be spatially expressed - a change in some body or another or its position relative to other bodies in physical or metaphysical space. It is absurd then to say that the one gives rise to (or ‘causes’) the other. Thinking does not create a spatially expressed change in a body or perception but exists through it (or more accurately in it), and vice versa.

There is a bit more to it than this, of course. If we are to consider the event we call ‘thinking’, and to find how and why it occurs, we need to include its context – its environment -and the chain of events within which it happens. The origins and products of thought then are external, not located within the thinking body at all, but outside of it.

Describing perceived fact passing momentarily before our eye as the cause of thought doesn’t explain anything to my mind. The very same things – bodily actions - happen to a stone in a river current or buffeted by the wind but not as a result of anything that is generally described as ‘thinking’. So thought can only be the mode of action of a thinking body - that is, the capacity of a thinking body to mould its own action actively to the shape of any other body, to coordinate the shape of its movement in space with the shape and distribution of all other bodies or if you like to actively map the behaviour to contours of the environment in which it find itself. So, thought is defined and developed not only as a property of a thinking thing but also as a result of the thinking thing’s interaction with the complexities of the environment in which the thing finds itself. Not my words, that – but expressing nearly the same thing. I just think we have to be more careful in making judgements about what is a thinking thing. Perhaps the stone is after all thinking.

Anyway, if we are going to understand thought as the mode of action of thinking things in the world of all other things, we need to go beyond considering what goes on inside the thinking body, and look at the context, environment, both the geometrical and metaphysical space or ‘Nature’ in which thinking happens.

Perhaps it is useful