Andrew Charlesworth talks to physicist turned entrepreneur about his vision of a world made better by email.
What have airships, the widespread use of email and CERN, the particle physics research institute in Geneva, got in common?
Give up yet?
If you know your WWW history, then you will have probably made a connection between email and CERN. Tim Berners-Lee of CERN is credited with inventing the Web in 1989 so that the institute's geographically dispersed physicists could share their results more easily. But it's the airships that are throwing you, isn't it?
The answer is Simon Grice, who you probably haven't heard of yet. A few years ago he solved the important cosmological question of what to do with a first in physics from Surrey University and a three-year stint at CERN, working with Berners-Lee. Well, it was an important question for him, anyway. The solution was to start his own Internet company, Business Connections, which has mutated from designing Websites into providing email services like ISP-independent addresses, mail forwarding, pickup, storage, automated reply and electronic business cards, under the banner Personal Email.
So where do the airships come into this? Ah, that would be giving the game away too early. First you need to understand more about Grice and Personal Email.
In 1993 Grice set off on a world tour, the kind of year's respite from academia that many a post-graduate embarks on. He got further than Branson's balloon, but his global circumnavigation faltered in India, where he spent seven months.
Now you might be forgiven for thinking that physicists are materialists by nature, people who consider counting the number of gluons in a quark the worthy occupation of a lifetime. But if you know anything about modern physics (even reading the first few chapters of Hawkins' A Brief History of Time counts), then you will know that there's as much philosophy in physics as maths.
"India was fascinating," says Grice. "It taught me two things - one, there is an awful lot of people in the world and, two, you can do almost anything if you put your mind to it."