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Biography:
We classify writers as expressing opinions more or less acceptable to ourselves, Yet, even as a schoolboy (1944-57) 1 noted that all were exposed to the same reality, and I concluded that opinions were mixtures of belief and subjectively selected knowledge; that science was objective, ever-expanding and internally consistent knowledge; that languages were comparatively static; and that everything else was opinion, though in those days teachers were dismissed for expressing political opinions. Thus, while I preferred knowledge to recycled opinions, and while I sought to analyse the latter into their knowledge and belief contents, I had not yet differentiated the one from the other with sufficient clarity for such general use.
Thus, while pursuing knowledge at the University of Glasgow through a 15t class honours B.Sc. in chemistry with subsidiary maths, physics, and microbiology and a Ph.D. in catalytic mechanism, followed by a post¬doctoral appointment in oceanography and marine geochemistry in the USA, I continued my quest for knowledge belief differentiation by comparing the presence of direct observation and experimentation in the physicochemical earth sciences, astronomy, cosmology and cellular biology with their absence in the beliefs of pseudo-science. Meanwhile, I continued to analyse the undifferentiated mixtures of belief and knowledge which constitute history, literature, philosophy, religion and the so-called social-sciences.
Subsequently, I joined the UK Scientific Civil Service to experience belief-based socio-political policy at its interface with chemical engineering, catalysis and computerised process control, mineral processing and metal extraction, and the mechanical handling of viscous fluids, pastes, powders and phase separations; and with air pollution abatement and atmospheric monitoring, marine pollution prevention and response, materials recycling, contaminated land reclamation and waste disposal. On this experience from the levels of senior scientific officer to director/chief executive (Grade 3) including a knowledge-implementation posting to the Department's Marine Division HQ, I converted Warren Spring Laboratory to the DTI's Environmental Laboratory Agency in response to the Department's proposal to close the industrial support side of the Laboratory. Nonetheless, despite my subsequent profit-revealing annual reports having attracted venture capital interest in a management buyout, the Department closed the Agency in an apparently unconscious preference for reality-rejecting belief over knowledge.
Again, having encountered this same preference while acting as a private consultant, I have now written The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge to differentiate knowledge from belief, science from pseudo-science and commonsense from nonsense; to exemplify the necessity for such differentiation; and to commend Change from belief- to knowledge-based socio-political policies as incontestably preferable to continual change from one set of arbitrary beliefs to another in a continuing rejection of reality
