Was Star Trek's engineer Montgomery Scott a war hero? trends now
QUESTION Was Star Trek's engineer Montgomery Scott a war hero?
James Doohan joined the Royal Canadian Artillery as a gunner aged 19, in September 1939. After rising through the ranks, he was recommended for officer training.
On D-Day, Lieutenant Doohan led troops up Juno Beach as part of the initial wave of 3,000 men. After surviving the run up the beach, he established his command post in a shell hole just beyond the village of Graye-sur-Mer.
But there were still pockets of German resistance around and, late that night, as he made his way back to his command post, Doohan was hit by several machine-gun bullets.
The middle finger of his right hand was smashed; a medic in a shell-hole dug four bullets out of his left leg; and another bullet would have killed him if he hadn't had a silver cigarette case his brother had given him in his tunic pocket.
James Doohan as Lt. Commander Montgomery 'Scotty Scott' in Star Trek
James Doohan joined the Royal Canadian Artillery as a gunner aged 19, in September 1939
He was taken to England, where surgeons amputated what was left of his finger, and he spent about six weeks recovering.
Once fit to return to duty, he retrained as an air observation pilot. Qualifying in early 1945, he was attached to the 1st Canadian Army in Holland with 666 Squadron, where he was remembered as 'a good officer and an exceptional pilot'. By the end of the war he had been promoted to captain.
Back in Canada, James Doohan retrained as an actor, and 20 years later he landed the role that would make him a TV legend: Captain Montgomery 'Scotty' Scott, the Starship Enterprise's chief engineer, in Star Trek.
Kaz Wood, Bognor Regis, West Sussex.
QUESTION What is David Hilbert's 'Infinite Hotel Paradox'?
German mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943) used the concept of a hotel with an infinite number of rooms to illustrate properties of one type of infinite set.
