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to the floor in a shower of broken glass. Perhaps it is as well that Gordon did
not continue in medicine.” Pask's partner in that ill-fated anatomy lab was
Harry Moore, who later worked with Pask at System Research on many of
the projects discussed below (Moore 2001). Among Pask's many behavioral
quirks and conceits, one friend “marvelled at his perfect cones of cigarette
and pipe ash that he appeared to preserve in every available ash-tray” (Price
2001, 819).
6
Richard Gregory (2001, 685), again, recalls that Pask “was for-
ever taking pills (his brother was an anaesthetist so he had an infinite supply)
for real or imagined ailments. These he carried in a vast briefcase wherever
he went, and they rattled.” Pask apparently felt that he understood medicine
better than qualified doctors, which might have had something to do with the
decline of his health in the 1990s. Other stories suggest that some of these
pills were amphetamines, which might have had something to do with Pask's
strange sleeping habits and legendary energy.
Musicolour
Pask's engagement with cybernetics began when he was an undergraduate at
Cambridge in the early 1950s. Many people declared themselves cyberneti-
cians after reading Wiener's 1948
Cybernetics
topic, but Pask took his inspira-
tion from the man himself (E. Pask n.d.):
The epiphany of his Cambridge life came when he was invited by Professor
John Braithwaite, Professor of Moral Philosophy, to look after Professor Nor-
bert Wiener, who was visiting Cambridge [and lecturing there on cybernetics].
Gordon who had been struggling for some years to define what he wanted to
do, found that Wiener was describing the very science he had longed to work
on, but had not known what to call. He had known for some time that what
he wanted to do was to simulate how learning took place, using electronics
to represent the nervous system . . . [and] in order to study how an adaptive
machine could learn. Gordon decided to use his expertise in theatrical lighting
to demonstrate the process.
This connection to the theater and the arts is one of the themes that we can
pursue in several sections of this chapter. Pask had fallen in love with this
world in his schooldays, largely through a friend who ran a traveling cinema
in North Wales. At Cambridge, Pask “joined the Footlights club and became
a prolific lyric writer for the smoker's concerts where numbers and sketches
were tried out. [He also contributed] strange, surreal set design and inventive
