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“My dad was wonderful, he bought me chemicals,” exclaims Nott.
“I made rockets. It’s something you hear people my age say all the time.
The things we did when we were kids, making rockets!
The things that got
us into science, they are all illegal now!”
We talk over the din of a late-breakfast crowd at Jeannine’s in
Montecito on a recent Thanksgiving weekend. Nott is tall, mostly in
possession of his former eight-minute-miler’s body and has a soft face
framed by a generous helping of silver hair. Between bites of eggs-
and-bacon, he paints a picture of an ideal childhood for a scientifically
inclined boy growing up in the era of nuclear fission, Sputnik, Apollo,
Flash Gordon,
and
The Jetsons
.
The future was wide open and mostly utopian back then, and
science would lead the way. Nott had a chemistry set and his dad, who
moved the family to London from the English countryside when Nott
was four, rented a garage for his son to experiment in. Before long, Nott
says, he was taking apart and putting back together anything larger than
a wristwatch.
He was especially excited when he bought a 25-year-old Austin 6
automobile for three British pounds, took it apart, fixed it up, and sold it
for four pounds. “I thought I’d made a profit,” he laughs.
Nott eventually formalized his tinkering tendencies at Oxford
with his master’s degree, but he had a facility for mathematics (“The
queen of the sciences”) and might yet settle into a career as a well-paid
accountant with a wife and two kids to follow.
That he didn’t could be blamed as much on another insipid pop
song as it could on balloons and chemistry. This time it was Brenda
Lee’s version of “I Left My Heart In San Francisco”. A friend gave Nott
the single and upon playing it he remembers thinking, “You know, I can
actually go there.”
After graduating Oxford, he and his roommate did just that. “We
went around the United States on a Greyhound bus and it just changed
my perception of everything.”
EARLY COMPUTER MODELING
N
ott discovered America right around the time America was
discovering The Beatles. It wasn’t long after that, hot on the heels
of his failed attempt at wooing the industrialist’s daughter, that Nott
bought his first balloon.
winter
|
spr ing
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