When I was very young I discovered our loft. Mother was at the shops. It was raining. And I was bored. In the corner was the biggest tank I had ever seen. Every English house has one of these and the bigger the house the bigger the tank. Somewhere in Cambridge there must be a mansion of such enormous dimensions as to boggle the Western Imagination. The tank was removed from its loft and bolted onto a concrete floor floated onto the Cambridge Fens.

As time went by a building grew up around the tank. High above where once there had been sky and clouds a delicate lattice of steel held aloft a roof.

One summer men arrived and by the autumn a road was rushing by. Then people started arriving. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Never the same faces from one year to the next. They were young. All of them. And there was not a woman among them. They all came to pay homage to the tank. They filled her up with water, pulled out her plug and then sat there quietly while her waters washed away back down into the Cambridge Fens. She wondered at their strange ways. But she kept her own counsel...and gurgled when it suited her.

To look into the great tank you climbed up a little step ladder. Chris Singleton was my Laboratory Partner. Chris and I devoted three days of our life to climbing up and down the step ladder. We got to know the Great Tank. And she got to know us. On the second day we introduced her to our bicycles. They rested contentedly against the cold cast iron sides of the Great Tank throughout the afternoon and well on into the evening.

Meanwhile we altered the rates of flow in and out of the Great Tank, attaching strange conical contraptions to the inlet and outlet, rigging up water heaters, wind generators and electric motors. We heated and cooled the water, cast storms upon the mighty lake, created whirlpools in its midst, battered its cliffs with waves, drove fast flowing rivers beneath its placid surface and swirled the waters away into the Cambridge Fens...first with this contraption in place and then with that channel replaced. Never had so much attention been showered upon the Great Tank.

On the afternoon of the third day the peace and serenity of the Cambridge Fens were shattered by the sound of angry voices. The uproar was coming from the Great Tank. A crowd had gathered round. In the middle stood a little man with glasses, a white coat and a clip-board, waving his arms, gesticulating wildly and yelling in an extremely agitated manner.

'You will do it all again. The whole experiment. And you will get the right result.' 'We will not', said Chris quietly. 'Those are our results. We have spent three days collecting them. And you will pass us on this course'.

With that, Chris turned away from the red-faced little man with the glasses, the white coat and the clip-board, gathered up his pencils and his notebooks and wheeled his bicycle out of the Cambridge Engineering Laboratories. My bike and I walked off into the sunset with him. This is one hard dude I said to myself. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. But it was a sad end to another. We never saw the Great Tank again...and never got to say goodbye.

In the Northern Hemisphere water runs out through a plughole anti-clockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere the opposite is the case. There is a theory to explain this. You need to do lots of trials and you need statistics to make a convincing case. But these have theories too. Eventually everybody finds this to be true. And eventually everybody passes the course and goes on to learn about Thermionic Valves and all the other things we can always use.

Our problem was that it wasn't true. We tried this height and that height. We even controlled the speed at which we pulled out the plug. We burnt a lot of midnight oil on the top floor of 67 Barton Road on the second night. 'It's no good,’ I said to Chris. 'It's random. There's no pattern to it. We'll wake Garnett up and tell him he's coming to the labs with us at eight.'

Robin had got the right result. 'Show us how you did it,' we said. He did. We thanked him…and sent him back to bed while we went across the road for some breakfast. 'That's what they're all doing,' I said.

Chris nodded. 'Yeah. They don't realise they're doing it. They're fiddling the results. Did you notice how Garnett always had a good explanation for what he'd done wrong when the water went the wrong way, but accepted the result when it went the right way.'

'Well I know one thing. If this course is about experimental method then we've learnt a thing or too. So OK. But I've got a party in Kensington tonight. I promised Johnny Watson. I've had enough of this tank. So what are we gong to do? Fiddle the figures like everybody else?' I had got use to that look by now.

'No way,' Chris said. 'You start writing up...you're good at that. I want to try those early trials again...the ones where everything is perfectly still. It should be quiet for an hour or so. But, yeah, I agree. We've done enough. That racing car constructor's course starts at Bromley Tech on Tuesday and we're not missing that. You're back Sunday night aren't you?' We were given a 'pass' on Experimental Design...our lab books approved without comment.

One day Economists will talk to Engineers. But such paradigm shifts take time. Old professors must die off or get discredited. Meanwhile a new kind of Systems Economics must be established and a very different kind of Economics Education developed. Younger economists are deeply disappointed in a field where abstract mathematics is considered more important than knowledge of the Real Economy. But only the most daring will break with their past.