Brian Malpass was born in Stoke-on-Trent, but then so were R.J. (Spitfire) Mitchell, Arnold Bennett and Stanley Matthews and it never did them any harm. He now lives in Marlow.

After spending a large chunk of his childhood in an involuntary study of the tuberculosis bacillus, he wound up at Birmingham University with a First in Chemistry and a Doctorate. When asked what he wrote his thesis on, he replies truthfully, 'Fag packets mostly'.

The actual subject was the use of radio-tracers in the study of free-radical and anionic polymerisation of substituted acrylates and their interpretation in terms of polar effects, steric hindrance and resonance stabilisation. And after all these years he can still say that even with several glasses of his favourite claret taken.

He did in fact make a living as a polymer chemist before drifting into surface science and thence into the management of science and technology. After that, by a series of unplanned sideways and upward lurches, he staggered into finance and ultimately general management of a large public company.

He now seems to have embarked on yet another career as a writer, watched spellbound by his wife, a fellow lapsed chemist, and their two grown-up daughters - who have turned out remarkably well in the circumstances.

"Never again will you be silenced in the pub by the bore who knows all about Einstein. Instead you can enthrall dinner party guests by dropping into casual conversation stories that reveal your deep scientific knowledge. Like, for example, the fact that the standard unit of force, the Newton, is about the force required to life the average apple."
Bluffer's Guides is a series of snappy little books containing facts, jargon, and all you need to know for instant expertise.

Impossibility
If ever a truly eminent man of science over the age of fifty-five pronounces with great conviction that something is impossible, it is a safe bet that he will be proved wrong shortly.

Ad infinitum
Although it has not been conclusively proven, there are those who believe that quarks may not be points occupying no space, which would mean that they in turn were made up of even smaller particles. This would come as no surprise to the bluffer, who worships the dictum: 'Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite em, and little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum'.

White hot
It is ironic that among his legacies is Newton's Law of Cooling, for the man himself passed the greater part of his life in a state of self-stoked white-hot incandescence.

Twaddel
The only unit of measurement more oddly named than the slug-foot-second which is used in British aerodynamics, is the twaddel, a scale named after W. Twaddel which is used to measure the relative density of liquids. Frankly, it's wasted on that.

Kudos
Perhaps the ultimate sign that you have arrived in science is to have a unit of measurement named after you, although it can take 200 years for recognition to arrive, which lessens its value to the individual concerned. Examples include the coulomb, gauss, ohm, oersted, volt, newton and twaddel.