.. Thom nowadays and they tend not to mix in my ever-decreasing circles. I first read about it in an audio magazine article written by the late, great Richard C Heyser of JPL one of the pioneers of in-depth loudspeaker laboratory analysis, and developer of Time Delay Spectrometry, who was using Catastrophe Theory to describe the failure of a piece of electronics.
Catastrophe theory addresses the sudden transitions that a system can make when it moves from one stable fixed point to another. Related to Chaos theory it shows how changes in small parameters can lead to a large “jump” in the final position of a system. In relation to Heyser’s amplifier a small number of components had been slowly degrading unnoticed (as capacitors will) until it all got too much and there was silence. Accompanied by the choice smell of fried electronics.
In popular accounts, Thom's esoteric geometry was explained to the general public using a fairly simple diagram. Seemingly erratic processes could be graphed onto a "catastrophe surface" -- which looked something like a slightly creased napkin.
Potentially, catastrophe theory could apply to any situation in which small causes led to large and unpredictable effects though whether my social academic and religious circumstances could have been seen to be unpredictable is debatable. But the outcome – the church would say the smell of burning in hell to come – was the same.
But what I never lost my almost usually uncritical affection for was the hymns that we used to sing. Amazing relics of Britannic majesty and colonial obligation that were set in the 19th Century to sturdy and memorable tunes. This remains the only pleasurable memory of so many hours spent on uncomfortable wooden pews amongst an often unwilling congregation – given that attendance was compulsory until I left school. Chapel five days a week and church on Sundays.
Now it is easy to look back with less than rabid enthusiasm for the mind-set exemplified in those hymnals but in those days the words tended to vaguely rhyming noises that we seldom read. And when we did the thought bubble above the school-boy haircut was filled with the then equivalent of ‘WTF?’ For essentially what we were singing was permission to go and lay waste to the beliefs of those parts of the globe coloured red, or soon to be coloured red, for the Empire. And religion, the Church of England Militant, was the underlying excuse for liberating those parts of the globe that would be better for being British and trading with the country they would soon call ‘Mother’.
Now it is obvious that geopolitical license is being taken in the following lyrics in that Greenland is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark but what is also somewhat astounding is the claim that the apparently benighted inhabitants of far-off climes were asking to be liberated from the chains of ignorance that they didn’t know that they possessed. Though of course the British did. And so they would have to swap their idols of woods and stone for the quite bizarre statues of people hanging from crosses, draped barbecue-style over flames or perforated with a hundred arrows. AN obvious improvement.
From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;
Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle;
Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile?
In vain with lavish kindness the gifts of God are strown;
The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.

The line “Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile?” is so universally transportable – and should be printed on every tourist brochure.
Or take Charles Wesley’s propaganda for childhood obedience and idiocy which, even at the time, I thought was at best patronising and at worst plain deceitful. It is actually saying that you the child are a moron and should just lie back and surrender your mind. The church I knew asserted its dominance through actual or threatened physical violence – worse still sarcasm and litotes – rather than gentleness or appeals to the intellect. Gentleness, meekness and mildness were not common in the followers of the Lord.
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee.

Lamb of God, I look to Thee;
Thou shalt my Example be;
Thou art gentle, meek, and mild;
Thou wast once a little child.

Or such martial triumphs as this - with rousing music by Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame.
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
with the cross of Jesus going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
forward into battle see his banners go!

Eventually the dichotomy between reality and the church became too much. It was quite apparent that the world had not been made better by Christianity or any other religion; that the people who professed a religion were acting in common, everyday, denial of what they claimed to believe. The internal logical contradictions were untenable and the concept of faith in the face of evil a bridge too far.
The one thing about science you eventually grasp is it never provides definitive answers, or even proof. In the 2010 book, ‘Merchants of Doubt’ you can read; "History shows us clearly that science does not provide certainty. It does not provide proof. It only provides the consensus of experts, based on the organized accumulation and scrutiny of evidence."
And that evidence is open-ended. Even with that scrutiny, there are always the outliers, the things that don't fit, that are brushed aside. We like systematic over-simplification as Karl Popper once described science but at least it is generally self-correcting over time. It is one world view at one time.
The trouble with religious beliefs is that they cast a bright light over a self-contained, self-referential world that claims to answer everything for all time. All is else is the darkness.
There is the old, old story of the drunk looking for his keys under a street lamp. A passer-by joins in the search, and after a fruitless few minutes, asks where the drunk has dropped them. "Over in the bushes," answers the drunk, "but it's too dark to look there."
Most of the world insists on looking in the wrong place. It will be the end of us.
With thanks to John Atkinson and Richard C Heyser – polymaths both - for quotations included in Atkinson’s Heyser Memorial Lecture for the Audio Engineering Society 2012

*Some amongst you would have also seen the tangential relationship to societal’ tipping points’, that viral contagion of ideas or fads that spread apparently randomly across the globe. See the book of the same name. Also the sociological construct of the ‘Broken Window Theory’ that has determined a lot of anti-crime strategies.