Godfrey Hounsfield

The periods between my 11th and 18th years remain the most vivid in my memory because this was the time of my first attempts at experimentation, which might never have been made had I lived in the city. I made hazardous investigations of the principles of flight, launching myself from the tops of haystacks with a homemade glider.

Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.

The thing about dancing - what it taught me all those years - is it gives you an amazing sense of discipline in forcing yourself to do things that you know are good for you but you don't really want to do.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.