Interviewer: Changing career, you went back to Armidale.

That’s right. I applied to ANU for a senior lectureship that had been advertised, and came up for an interview. One of the people I had asked to be a referee was Jack Somerville, at the University of New England. (The university college had become a full-fledged university in 1954.) He wrote a reference but at the same time he sent me a job offer for a position which had been advertised but not yet filled. So I went up to Armidale in 1960 – nominally to be a senior lecturer in theoretical physics, but with a free hand in just what I would do. I haven’t ever regretted my decision to go there.

The university still had only about 300 or 400 internal students, but it had a very large number of external students doing Arts – though not Science – degrees by correspondence. It was the first university in Australia to have such a distance learning arrangement, which had been a condition of its establishment. A new physics building started being built soon after I got there, to replace a big science building that fortunately, perhaps, burnt down. It had been built just after the war with the Commonwealth reconstruction training scheme as a horrible corrugated fibro, two-storeys-and-a-basement thing, similar to one still being used at Sydney University.

I did a little bit for the arcs and sparks people but basically I wanted to follow up some things which I had found out about ice as a solid-state material but which I hadn’t really had time for at CSIRO. The ice research began to build up and after a year or two I put in for a grant from the US National Science Foundation. I had been interested in the surface of ice, which is funny – you can ski on it, you can skate on it, it’s sort of slippery, whereas you can’t ski and skate on sand, for example. Like Michael Faraday I thought ice surfaces had a liquid layer on them, and I worked out a theory for just why, from the molecular thermodynamics point of view, an ice crystal ought to have a liquid layer at a temperature below the freezing point. I worked out also how thick it ought to be: only 10 to 100 molecular layers, just enough to make a difference. Having thought of some ways that one could investigate that experimentally, I applied to the National Science Foundation as about the only place you might get money, and I got enough money to appoint a research fellow and have a PhD student working on the project.

When I got this grant, the local newspaper asked me what it was about, so I said, ‘Well, now, ice is a funny sort of substance: it’s slippery on the surface. I’m interested in investigating this slippery layer.’ The little thing that appeared in the local paper got picked up with a bigger slab in the Sydney papers, because it was unusual to get money from America in those days, and ‘slippery ice’ was kind of interesting. Then someone sent me a clipping from an American newspaper that had picked it up: ‘I see that the National Science Foundation have given some clown in Australia $10,000 to tell them why ice is slippery. For one quarter of that amount, I’m willing to tell them why water is wet.’ I learnt that you have to be a bit careful what you say to the media!

Interests and excitement in musical acoustics

You did most of your science at the University of New England, including work on the physics of music. Would you tell us about that?

In 1966, after quite a long time in Armidale working on solid-state physics I got a grant from the Australian Research Grants Committee (which later became the Australian Research Council) for more work on ice. Then I broadened that to ice and related materials, a reasonably big program in which I suppose half a dozen people did PhDs with me. That initial grant was made in the ARGC’s first year of operation, and I had either one or two grants from them throughout the whole of the time I was at New England, which was very nice of them.

ARGC/ARC will support anything if you can persuade them that it is worth doing, you are able to do it, and it is interesting and exciting. I managed to persuade them that there were some interesting and exciting things to do in musical acoustics, and that I was the right person to do them. So in 1972 I got a grant from ARGC to start doing some work in musical acoustics, particularly organ pipes. People had been building organs for maybe 2000 years – the Romans had things about like that – yet when you looked at it carefully you still didn’t know exactly how an organ pipe worked, just how it produced the sound. And if you really know how, say, an organ pipe works, that means if someone gives you the dimensions of it and tells you how hard you are blowing it, you ought to be able to calculate what it will sound like. If you can’t do that, you don’t really understand it. So the objective was to find out in detail how these things worked.

That expanded to organ pipes, flutes, other sorts of musical instruments, and again it turned out to be something that students were interested in. I had four students who did PhDs in musical acoustics. You might say, ‘What’s the use of a PhD in that field? There aren’t many jobs in that.’ And that’s true, but all these people have found jobs in which they have used the general sort of classical physics that you get in musical acoustics. Suszanne Thwaites is in charge of the acoustics section at National Measurement Laboratory; John Martin, in Queensland, is in charge of technology for the Education Department; and Kathy Legge is a senior lecturer in instrumentation at La Trobe University, in Bendigo. Only Richard Parncutt has kept on in the field, continuing his psycho-acoustics at an English university.

That is how I started doing musical acoustics, and I have gone on doing it. I have gone on doing some things about solid-state physics too, even some things about ice, keeping all these trails going a little bit, but for the last 10 or 15 years most of my interest has been in various aspects of acoustics. It had the slight advantage, when I left New England to go to CSIRO, that it was the sort of thing that I could do in such spare time as I had on the weekends, unlike something that involved a lot of lab work.

Focus questions

• In this extract, Fletcher relates a story about how his research was described in a newspaper article. Do you think that scientists have to be very careful about what they say to the press? Does this affect the 'popularising' of science?

• Fletcher makes the point that study of an 'impractical' subject like musical acoustics can lead to an interesting career in physics that may have little relation to the field of study. Why can this be true of the study of many branches of basic science?