Thomas Conlon (b. 1949)

I was born in Keady, Co. Armagh of teacher parents and was a student at St. Patrick’s College, Armagh. I took the A Levels - Physics, Chemistry, Pure and Applied Maths – that were then fairly rigidly prescribed for scientifically minded boys and went on to study Mathematics as an undergraduate at Queens University Belfast. Following Queens, I did an MSc. in mathematical logic at the University of Leeds and then a Ph.D in Proof Theory, a branch of mathematical logic, at the University of Bristol. Finally I spent a post-doctoral year in Heidelberg.

I married Theresa in 1977 and we have three sons Joseph, Thomas and Peter. I spent the next 26 years working in various capacities in the software industry. In the earlier years of this period I worked on commercial sytems, particularly accounting systems for the travel industry. In the middle years I worked on networks integrating voice and data communications, used by fairly large organisations such as the Army and Police forces. The final years were spent working on mobile communications networks, in particular on the Lucent Radio Network Controller, a device which controls groups of Base Stations.

I left the software industry in 2003 and since then have combined the pursuit of a range of personal scholarly projects with teaching Maths, Physics and Latin up to A Level at Chavagnes International College in France. I worked full time for four years at the College, during two of which I was responsible for the internal life of the school. Otherwise I have been involved with the College on a part-time basis. During these years, as well as teaching, I helped organise oracy activities such as debates and declamations and directed a total of six plays.

Shortly after I left software, I took A Levels in Latin and German and in subsequent years added French and Classical Greek to the roster of my A Levels. My first substantial personal project was the writing of a biography – Thinking about Nothing – of the renowned German scientist Otto von Guericke, famous for the Magdeburg hemispheres experiments which used to feature in A Level physics syllabuses. My interest in von Guericke arose through the serendipitous purchase of a facsimile copy of his opus magnum – Experimenta Nova Magdeburgica - as a souvenir of a visit to Magdeburg. He is one of the most important scientists of the generation before Newton. In addition to his pioneering work on the vacuum he was also the first clearly to demonstrate electrostatic repulsion, a fundamental feature of a fundamental force of nature. Nevertheless he appeared to be ignored by English scientific historians and did not even merit an index entry in Herbert Butterfield’s magisterial The Origins of Modern Science. The important sources for the life and work of von Guericke are in Latin and German and a reasonable facility in reading these languages was indispensable to the writing of my book Thinking about Nothing.

The cordiality between scientists of different denominations in the mid 17th centurey was to me a striking feature of continental Europe at a time when England had not ceased excuting Catholic priests. Although von Guericke’s own book was not published until 1672, details of his experiments on the vacuum had been published from the mid 1650s by the prolific and industrious German Jesuit, Caspar Schott [1608-1666] a professor of mathematics at the University of Wurzburg. My next project was a collaboration with a successor of Schott at Wurzburg, Em. Professor Hans-Joachim Vollrath, a professor of mathematical education. Again serendipity played a major role. I had come across a remark by Professor Sir Noel Malcolm that a number of letters from Schott to Philip Vegelin existed in the archive of the University of Leuven. On contacting Professor Vollrath, whom I knew to be interested and knowledgable about Schott, it transpired that he had not been aware of this trove of correspondence. We embarked on a joint project to transcribe and translate all the extant correspondence of Schott. It turned out there were in all some 180 letters of which about a third were manuscripts held in a number of European archives and the rest were letters fully or partially printed in contemporary books. Our transcripts and translations have been incorporated into the Caspar Schott catalogue, compiled by Dr. Iva Lelkova, of the Early Modern Letters Onine database maintained by the Faculty of History of the University of Oxford.

I had a similar but much smaller collaboration with Philip Neal, whose primary interest is in the Voynich manuscript, on the approximately twenty letters written by Godefridus Kinner to the eminent Jesuit scholar Athanasus Kircher [1602 – 1680]. Kinner was quite a typical member of the Republic of Letters, holding an official position as tutor to the young Archduke Karl Joseph of Austria [1649 – 1665] while maintaining an active interest in the mathematical and scientific developments of the day. Our transcriptions and translations form part of the EMLO Kircher catalogue.

My next substantial project also arose from a chance encouunter. I was pointing out some features of the night sky to a small group of students at Chavagnes when one of them asked me if I was familiar with the Skyview app, of whch, at that time I had no inkling. When I had come to appreciate what the app offered, it occurred to me that, although it had originally taken more than two millennia - from the time of Thales to that of Kepler – to elucidate the structure of the solar system, now, the path from the most naive intuition about the Earth and sky to the elliptical orbits of Kepler and Newton could be retraced in a matter of months by any A Level maths or physics student equipped with a calculator and supplied with observational data from Skyview or a simular app. My book Astronomy from your Smartphone App. begins with the considerations and calculations that lead one to believe that Earth is a sphere of radius c. 6300 km. and concludes with the Newtonian denouement of this great episode in scientific history – the calculation of elliptical orbits from the inverse square law of gravitation.

As a result of teaching Latin to a range of students from beginners to A Level candidates I developed two convictions. The first is that the teaching of the elements of Latin should be an unabashed exercise in linguistic nuts and bolts engineering and that an infantile, mother tongue learning approach, which may be appropriate for modern language learning, is not right for Latin. The students should delight in their fluent command of how the moving parts of the language – the 5 declensions, the 4 conjugations, the 3 moods, the 2 voices, the 6 tenses, the 6 cases etc. – all fit together and work in harmony to produce the language that allowed European civilisation to develop and flourish for two millennia. The second conviction is that students of Latin should never be allowed to forget that the most influential book ever written in Latin is Newton’s Principia. Their study of Latin should not just acquaint them with the literature of ancient Rome but should also at least inform them about influential authors from the whole of the almost two millennia during which Latin was the language of educated Europe. To give concrete expression to these views I am writing a book entitled An Introduction to Two Millennia of Latin which should be completed by the summer of this year.

My father was interested in the history of his family and pursued it as best he could despite an ambiance of discouragement and reproach for “living in the past”. He recorded not just his own recollections of growing up at the turn of the 20th century but also what older relatives told him about events, such as births before 1864, for which there is no other source. In a sprit of pietas I have continued to pursue this interest and with a relative have set up and maintain on Googledrive a hierarchical family history tree where each person has his own folder containing whatever relevant documents and photographs it has been possible to discover. Access to the Google drive is limited to an interest group of about 40 members, almost all of whom are extended family members. One of my relatives – Peter J Conlon [1869 -1931] – was a prominent figure in the American Labour movement during the early decades of the 20th century. A lot is known both about his life as a labour activist and his personal and family life. On the basis of this I, in collaboration with other members of the family history group, have begun a biography of him to be entitled Peter J Conlon and the Struggle for Workplace Justice.

In addition to the above I try to maintain an interest in Greek – particularly in New Testament Greek. In other collaborations with friends, I have read the Gospels of John and Mark comparing it closely with the Vulgate. Contrary to what I have seen claimed by correspondents of the Tablet advocating ”dynamic equivalence”, Jerome was a translator of extreme fidelity to the actual words of the Greek originals. A modern translator considers his task to be the elucidation of the intended meaning of the original and the conveying of this meaning in whatever words and sentences seeem most natural and appropriate. That is not Jerome’ s view. His commitment as a translator is to stay as close as Latin allows to the words and word order of the Greek and he does not offer any clarifications of the intended meaning. If a passage is obscure in the Greek it will be equally obscure in the Vulgate.