Richard Gregory

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 40:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety three and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a scientist. He comes from a long line of academics. His father, an astronomer, recruited him to help build a home made aeroplane, but luckily the project was abandoned before its fatal design fault had been detected. His passion in life has been to try to make science popular. His books, including Eye and Brain and The Intelligent Eye, have been bestsellers. His lectures have been televised, and his famous foundation, The Exploratory, in Bristol, is visited by thousands of people every year. He's invented robots, a deaf aid, and, imitating his great great grandfather, who was a friend of Isaac Newton, a telescope. He is Professor Richard Gregory.

Presenter1:08

Tell me first about the flawed flying machine, Professor Greggory. Did you and your father seriously intend to fly?

Richard Gregory1:14

Oh yes, we built it. It took about three years. It was called the Flying Flea and it was designed by a Frenchman called Mignier. And just as we got the thing finished, two people, or maybe three, crashed theirs, and I think two or three people actually got killed that weekend. And we were just learning to fly on a rather bumpy field, and we never got more than about six feet off the ground, which is probably a good thing. It had a design fault, so that if you dived it, it couldn't actually recover. There wasn't enough control to get it out of a dive.

Presenter1:43

So is it would have gone into a permanent nose dye?

Richard Gregory1:44

It was something you hit the ground, yeah.

Presenter1:46

But that was of course back in the twenties. I mean flying was still a potentially dangerous business then.

Richard Gregory1:51

Yes, indeed. It's unusual, I think, to make an actual aeroplane. It was fun.

Presenter1:54

But these days I understand you explain the principles quite simply, the principles of how something flies at your Bristol Exploratory with the aid of two beach balls and a hairdryer.

Richard Gregory2:03

Yes, we do indeed. We have two beach balls and then you blow air between them, and everybody thinks they're going to blow apart, actually they get sucked together, which is an important principle for flying, the sort of suction, as it were, on the top of the wing. These sort of counterintuitive things are very nice. They switch one's mind on, and they're often actually the secrets behind new technologies.

Presenter2:24

And that's the whole point of of your exploratory, is that people actually do things and it's hands-on.

Richard Gregory2:29

It's hands-on and it sort of jacks up, it corrects one's mental models of the world, it changes common sense, making it less common in a way, and sometimes more appropriate.

Presenter2:40

But plainly, I mean, yours was an unusual childhood. You had an inventive father, by the sound of it, and he encouraged you to be curious. I mean, do you think it was in the Gregory Jeans your inventiveness, or was it that your father cultivated it in you?

Richard Gregory2:54

Well it is awfully hard to know. My father was an astronomer. He was the director of an observatory in London. And I was brought up with telescopes and spectroscopes and things like that. And I was always playing about with things and trying to invent things. And it was a sort of way of life, having fun, having games, but also having some sort of purpose I wanted to try to understand by playing about.

Presenter3:19

Well, we'll find exactly how you're going to play about and how inventive you'll be on your desert island in a minute, but let's first of all have the first record that you'll play when you're there. What is it?

Richard Gregory3:28

Well, I'd like to, I think, very much have some Beethoven. I adore Beethoven and I'd like the piano sonata number thirty, opus one oh nine, and I very much like Alfred Brendel's playing.

Presenter3:42

And why do you want that piece?

Richard Gregory3:43

Well, it goes back, as a matter of fact, in a way, to an episode when I was at school. I was at King Alfred's school in Hampstead, and Solomon had been a pupil at King Alfred's, and he used to play to us. We used to sit cross-legged round the piano, and on one amazing occasion, he played us a Beit Holmes sonata, and then he played his thunder music, and he put the Times newspaper in the school's Beckstein piano, which was the pride and joy of the head master. The head master went purple in the face, got very fidgety, stopped Solomon playing and said, Solomon, you really can't put the newspaper in the piano. He took it out. Solomon was absolutely furious. He walked out and never came back.

Presenter5:23

Alfred Brendel playing part of Beethoven's piano sonata No. thirty in E opus one hundred and nine. Not quite the music to make thunder with, really. Even if you are Solomon.

Speaker 45:32

Yeah.

Presenter5:33

Some of your inventions happily have been more successful than the the flying flea. You invented in the early sixties a telescope to help astronauts land and dock on the moon. Now why did they need such a thing?

Richard Gregory5:45

Well actually I had two projects. That one was specifically getting better pictures from telescopes, but I also worked on illusions in astronauts. I actually had a grant from NASA, or the American Air Force actually, on problems of docking and moon landing that astronauts would have judging distance and speed in the conditions of space without any objects except the odd sort of luminous star in blackness around them, which is quite artificial.

Presenter6:13

What no familiar objects that would give them an idea of the

Richard Gregory6:14

To give them an idea of that. Exactly. So I built a space simulator actually in my laboratory in Cambridge, which was sort of a long dark tunnel with a sort of electric railway going through it. Then we had sort of luminous objects which we could put optically to infinity. We could represent space. And we did a lot of experiments on the problems that astronauts would have.

Presenter6:33

and the illusions that they suffer from.

Richard Gregory6:35

Yes, indeed. There are lots and lots of illusions you can get.

Presenter6:37

But that that's the common thread really in your work which has been so varied. The common thread is is this concept of illusion that we we can't always believe our eyes, isn't it?

Richard Gregory6:46

Yes. I mean, I'm really interested it sounds a bit arrogant, but I'm really interested in truth, on trying to find out what the universe is like, how the brain works, what the mind is, and a tool for discovering the nature of truth, how we attain truth, is being very frank and explicit about illusions.

Presenter7:04

And and in its simplest form, I mean, we're talking about optical illusions, aren't we? That that you can see something, or believe you see something, because the brain gets a message from the eye, but then it misinterprets that message.

Richard Gregory7:16

Yes, exactly. It it misinterprets it. It can have perfectly good data, but if it if it's read, so to speak, with inappropriate assumptions, then you get the wrong answer.

Presenter7:26

Can you give us an example of that? It's difficult talking about optical illusions on sound radio. Is there an example?

Richard Gregory7:29

Well you get it whenever you get um distance represented by perspective, that is lines getting closer together, normally with distance, but on a flat plane of a picture you get the same cues to distance when in fact the picture's flat. And so the brain has an impossible task. It has to read depth on a flat surface and it does surprisingly well, but there are all sorts of distortions of size that you get in perspective pictures.

Presenter7:58

But these optical illusions that that you deal in are also, I believe, aren't they, the the secrets behind a lot of conjuring tricks?

Richard Gregory8:05

Oh, indeed. In fact, the psychology of conjuring is fascinating. The fact that the conjurer can set up a mental model in the people looking at it of one thing apparently happening when in fact a whole lot of different physical things are happening is profoundly interesting and I think it needs a lot more study.

Presenter8:21

But he's relying on your brain misinterpreting the information that he's sending to you.

Richard Gregory8:25

Yes, it's much more interesting than simply doing something so fast that the eye can't follow. He does something which you interpret as though it's something else happening.

Presenter8:30

Hey.

Presenter8:34

So when you watch a conjurer at work, do you know, more often than the rest of us, what he's probably up to?

Richard Gregory8:39

Well, I think a bit more often. I did actually see through the Indian rope trick, which I saw in Leningrad, and I think honestly, the whole audience was spellbound, but I could literally really see what was happening, quite honestly.

Presenter8:52

So we have your second record.

Richard Gregory8:54

Well, I think what I would very much like is a somewhat unusual record. It's Abdul Abulbul Amir and it's going to be sung by Frank Crummitz. And this goes back to the 1930s. My parents used to have a great big camp in the summer, but my father had ex-First War World War tents. And about 20 of his friends would have this amazingly huge camp with lots of funny old cars as we would look at them now in Cornwall. And they enacted Abdul Abulbul Amir as a play. And they made armour, and they made swords, and they enacted the duel. And it was in, I think it was Corf Castle. And it set up a local legend of ghosts, because, of course, the villagers would see the flashing armour under the moon. And I believe the ghost story still survives.

Speaker 39:44

One day this bold Russian Had shouldered his gun And donned his most truculent sneer Downtown he did go Ere he trod on the toe Of Abdul the Bulbul Amir

Speaker 39:59

Young man, quoth Abdull, Has life grown so dull That you wish to end your terrier? Vile infidel, no, you have trod on the toe Of Abdull the Bulbul Amir.

Presenter10:13

Frank Crummet singing Abdul Abul Bulamir

Presenter10:16

Experimental psychology became your field at Cambridge, Professor Gregory, how the senses work, how the brain handles information, and hence the astronauts' telescope, and so on. Eventually, in fact, you invented a robot called Freddie.

Richard Gregory10:29

I in fact left Cambridge to go to Edinburgh to work on robotics, and in fact it was the first department of artificial intelligence in Europe.

Presenter10:39

You were professor of bionics?

Richard Gregory10:40

I'm a professor of bionics. I think I'm the only person actually who's ever been a professor of bionics in Britain. Rather amusing thing to be, anyway.

Presenter10:47

And you made a bionic man?

Richard Gregory10:48

Well, we made a bionic man. It was called Freddie. But my own role in that actually was pretty minor, quite honestly. And in fact, I was so sort of bogged down with administration and whatnot, which I've never much enjoyed, that I never really learnt to program the computer properly. I was rather embarrassed about it.

Presenter11:05

But it was strange. I mean, in those days, in the sixties, we did all believe that our lives would probably by now actually be dominated by robots, that we'd have them around the house to do the menial tasks. That's what our popular newspapers told us every day. It's never happened.

Richard Gregory11:17

At least

Richard Gregory11:18

Yes, I'm afraid that's true. I think we all made claims that it was going to happen within the next sort of fifteen or twenty years. And let's face it, it was necessary to be optimistic in order to get funding, in order to get money, in order to get grants. There are distortions inevitably which do happen. But it all turned out to be much, much more difficult than any of us could have imagined to make an intelligent machine.

Presenter11:38

To make

Presenter11:40

An intelligent machine. But but I mean they obviously we do have them in in factories making putting motor cars together. We do have them actually as bomb disposal experts, don't we?

Richard Gregory11:41

We think

Richard Gregory11:45

Yeah.

Richard Gregory11:49

Oh, absolutely. But robots in factories are nothing like as intelligent as we were aiming at. We wanted a robot that could make its own decisions, that it could go beyond the data fed to it, make the best bet and then come up with, so to speak, an intelligent answer rather than simply being driven by the situation.

Presenter12:05

Don't we have computers that can do that?

Richard Gregory12:06

To some extent, but it's happened much, much slower than we had thought at that time.

Presenter12:11

So there is still a limit to what computers can do for us, obviously. Do you think there will always be a limit, or do you think ultimately this

Richard Gregory12:17

My own view is that I think artificial intelligence in the full sense will happen. I don't think there's something absolutely totally unique. I know you shouldn't qualify unique, but I think in this case I need to about the brain. And I think that one can probably put intelligence into silicon.

Presenter12:34

So you can make ultimately, you believe, a machine which will think and which will comprehend and be able to to reach conclusions by itself. But can you make a machine which will feel, that will be capable of emotion?

Richard Gregory12:45

We can I think envisage a machine as you say that can make decisions, can think and by the way it's bound to make mistakes and the more intelligent it becomes the sillier it's going to get every now and again and make more more disastrous mistakes. That's almost certainly the case. Uh but whether it will ever actually feel it if you tread on its toe is a really tricky question and I am absolutely not clear about this at all. I don't have a theory of consciousness.

Speaker 412:56

Uh

Presenter13:07

But what's that?

Presenter13:09

What about feeling in the emotional sense? I mean, I think it's been said before, if not by you, that you can make a machine which will write music, but can you make a machine which will appreciate music?

Richard Gregory13:18

Well, exactly. I think it's probably easier to make a composer than an audience. I think this is true of

Presenter13:23

Let's have your next record.

Richard Gregory13:25

Well, I would like to have something rather different associated with H G Wells, who was a big influence on me when I was a boy, as I think everybody in that sort of generation. And I'd very much like to have the theme music of Things to Come, which was written by Arthur Bliss.

Presenter14:42

The London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Moore Matheson, playing part of Arthur Bliss's music for the HG Wells film Things to Come.

Presenter14:50

We were talking, Richard Greggory, about the way in which the eye interprets or misinterprets the information provided by the senses. Do we learn those perceptual skills, or are we born with them?

Richard Gregory15:01

We're certainly born with quite a lot. A baby can recognize a face. There are experiments, even going back to the first ten minutes of a baby's life, where it will tend to look at a face rather than any other object. Then of course it'll learn its mother's face within about three weeks or so.

Presenter15:18

And does it recognise that when the mother smiles, or or might it think that it's a a kind of nasty teeth-revealing grimace?

Richard Gregory15:21

That is

Richard Gregory15:25

It seems that there's an innate response to smile, and this is a sort of link from the baby's mind to the minds of the people around it. There are some innate built-in links, almost certainly.

Presenter15:36

Is that the same as instinct, or is that something different?

Richard Gregory15:38

You can call this instinct, yes.

Presenter15:40

But how aware is a child, unlike an animal, of danger? I mean animals know who their predators are and can instinctively learn to hide. Does a child know I mean a child will put its hand in fire. Does a child know when it's going to fall over the edge of a stair? No.

Richard Gregory15:56

Well there's a famous experiment called a visual cliff which was actually done by Eleanor Gibson and Walk and uh they found that when they made um a drop with a glass plate over the top of it the baby would avoid the drop. But it wasn't that clever because the baby's bottom could actually go over the over the cliff. It would see that there was a cliff and forget where its rear end was.

Presenter16:18

Or not understand its own balance.

Richard Gregory16:19

Yes, so it's not safe actually to put a baby on the edge of the Grand Canyon. It could fall over.

Presenter16:24

But but to try to find out what a baby perceives visually, you once did an experiment together with a man who who had lost his sight as a small baby and regained it when he was fifty two years old. What did you learn from him?

Richard Gregory16:34

What do you

Richard Gregory16:36

Yes. Well, we really learnt quite a lot. Um he was called Sidney Bradford and he was effectively blind, certainly by ten months and probably from birth. And as you say, he had corneal grafts on his eyes when he was fifty-two. And I studied this with Gene Wallace, who was my assistant at the time. And we found that he was effectively blind for really a long time to things that he did not already know about through his touch experience while he'd been blind. And the most striking thing, I think, was that he could actually read capital letters, uppercase letters, which he'd learnt in the blind school by touch. They were given wooden blocks with the letters engraved on them, and the children were made to run their fingers round the grooves of the letters. He could read capital letters immediately, and also the time, which he'd been taught by touch from the hands of a clock. But he couldn't read lowercase letters, which he'd not been taught. So in general, we found that where he could explore the world by touch, that information was immediately available to his eyes as soon as the operations had been performed.

Presenter17:39

But he was terrified, wasn't he, of crossing a busy road which he'd happily crossed as a as a blind man.

Richard Gregory17:42

Which is

Richard Gregory17:43

Yes, oh yes. He had all sorts of fears from his sight. That's absolutely right. Uh he was terrified of traffic. He'd we had to literally drag him across a road with cars running along it. Previously to that he'd put his stick out and just charge across without fear.

Presenter17:59

And the whole thing had actually in the end a rather tragic end, didn't it, the story?

Richard Gregory18:03

He got depressed. Yes, he did. He expected the world to be sort of perfect. He'd wanted to.

Richard Gregory18:09

understand and appreciate the visual world and spent a great deal of time touching things, wondering what they would actually look like. And then when the sun went down in the evening he got sort of sad. He found that paint was blemished. I remember looking at a lamppost with him with peeling paint on it and he got really sort of sad that it wasn't a perfect world that he had entered. And he did in fact go into a clinical depression, I'm afraid. And he only lived about two and a half years afterwards.

Presenter18:34

At the end of the day,

Presenter18:37

After he regained his sight.

Richard Gregory18:38

Yes, yes, it's really very it's really a very sad story actually.

Presenter18:42

Record number four.

Richard Gregory18:44

Well, I'd very much like some Bach, and I think I'd like the violin concerto in E, and if I may, I'd like it played by the Academy of St. Martins in the Fields.

Presenter19:56

Part of Bach's violin concerto in E played by the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, conducted by the soloist Guidon Kremer.

Presenter20:04

Is yours a very competitive field, Professor Gregory, or have you found on the whole that you've been able to get on with your work and avoid academic politics?

Richard Gregory20:11

Well I've avoided politics. I've been awfully lucky actually. It's an expanding field. When I started being interested in perception, there were very very few people. It was an unpopular subject. It was all sort of behaviourism and then animal learning and things like that. And there were about three or four people who one read. JJ Gibson was one and so on. But in general it was not a popular subject for students or for teaching or for research and I sort of got incredibly excited by it and I did develop it really in Cambridge and I designed a practical class that the students loved. We had lots of fun and experiments and I just absolutely adored it and other people got interested in America, other places and it sort of grew and it's now an absolutely major subject.

Presenter20:55

But have you in your turn been considered as as a bit of a maverick, as it were, because you crossed so many lines from kind of astronomy to physiology to psychology to logic to biology? I mean, specialists don't like people like you, do they?

Richard Gregory20:58

How is it?

Richard Gregory21:00

Yeah.

Richard Gregory21:01

Is he only

Richard Gregory21:08

No, that's absolutely so. I think I've been criticised a lot, probably absolutely rightly, for trying all sorts of food.

Presenter21:14

You've only recently been made a fellow of the Royal Society. I mean, they they left that quite late.

Richard Gregory21:18

Jolly late, I know. That's right. So better than never

Presenter21:22

Yeah.

Presenter21:23

And you've just been given the Michael Faraday Gold Medal by the Royal Society, and and what they stressed in in the citation for that was the enormous amount of work that you've done to popularize science, to make it accessible. That in many ways has been your mission is your mission, isn't it?

Richard Gregory21:38

Yes, I like teaching very, very much. I I enjoyed it at Cambridge. I I like it now. I like giving lectures. And above all, I like sort of introducing people to the universe as it were first hand by showing them phenomena. And find that an exciting thing to try to encourage.

Presenter21:52

It has a

Presenter21:54

Hence your exploratory in Bristol, which explains in a very practical fashion, as we've said, some fundamental scientific concepts. But is there implied criticism there too that you don't actually think basic science is sufficiently well tackled at school?

Richard Gregory21:56

Yeah.

Richard Gregory22:07

Hmm. Mm.

Richard Gregory22:09

Yes, I mean the exploratory is itself criticised because it might be a bit trivial. I mean we play about with lots of things that look a bit like games, but I think that's a perfectly valid introduction to science. And as a matter of fact, I mean the Greeks played about with rubbing amber, which led to electricity, and lodestones which led to a whole enormous industry of electricity, including the radio, which this programme depends upon. It all came from the Greeks playing about with these things as toys almost.

Presenter22:37

But you still have this struggle, don't you, against the the whole British perception of science, if you like. It isn't seen as a a central part of intellectual life, and that seems to go on and on, being the complaint. Do you think that will ever change?

Richard Gregory22:47

Come on.

Presenter22:50

Yeah.

Richard Gregory22:50

I think it's amazing. We've got this incredible universe that we're born into and most people seem to just take no particular interest in it, what it's like. It's like living in a house and not knowing where the dining room is or where the stairs are. It's it's really an astonishing thing.

Presenter23:05

It's astonishing to you, but why do you think so many people are like that?

Richard Gregory23:08

Well, I think science can be intimidating. It is inherently difficult. The initial sort of excitement of playing about with things, that's not difficult. But as soon as you really start to sit down and think, you need new concepts. One has to update a lot of the assumptions that one was born with or one was given at school or from one's parents and I'm afraid one's teachers very often. And that sort of rewriting of one's mind is a difficult, often quite a painful thing to do. And people have other things to do. They have to earn money. They have to look after the children and so on. But I personally think that it is so important and so interesting to appreciate the world we're in that it's just a terrible mistake, I think, not to have a sense of curiosity and occasionally to suffer by realising that one is inadequate, we all are, understanding things around us.

Presenter24:02

More music

Richard Gregory24:03

I think the next piece of music I would like is the Sorcerer's Apprentice, because it makes me think a bit of the exploratory. Uh it's magic, it's a little bit out of control, builds up, and then it's finally controlled by the presence of the magician at the end.

Presenter25:21

Part of the Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Ducas, played by the Berlin Philharmonica, conducted by James Levine. You were saying that uh we're not as knowledgeable about science as we ought to be. Have we also perhaps become complaisant about scientific invention these days? There seems to be a gadget for everything, and our children perhaps are not as curious as they were. Do you think that's a fair observation?

Richard Gregory25:43

Yes, I think one of the problems anything is that gadgets on the whole are in boxes and you can't see how they work. And you can see how a bicycle works by looking at it. But most electric motors, most hi-fi, things like microwave ovens, all these things are just in boxes. And the same with a car. You can't see the pistons going up and down. And I think there is a need to make explicit how gadgets work, how computers work. So there's a real case, I think, for exposing the innards of a computer with great big chips, perhaps mechanical, so you can see what's happening to interface technology, into normal experience. And this again, I think, is part of what exploratories should do. And I think there should be exploratories in any sort of major town as a resource for schools, for people of all ages, families, not just school parties, to really see what technology does, what an incredible set of tools that we have to improve our lives and use them intelligently.

Presenter26:44

Record number six.

Richard Gregory26:47

Well, the next record is going to be rather peculiar. It's not exactly music. It's going to be an illusion, a sound illusion. And it was designed or invented by Roger Shepard, who is a psychologist. I know him personally, who lives in California. And if you note, it goes up and up and up, but never actually gets anywhere.

Presenter27:44

That was the Shepard tone created on a computer by Roger Shepard, a Californian psychologist, and it could drive you seriously mad. Why does it never arrive anywhere?

Richard Gregory27:54

It's awfully clever, isn't it? The harmonics are sort of fed through, so the harmonics are going up, but the mean frequency remains the same. So you hear a change without it getting anywhere.

Presenter28:04

And can it go it goes the other way so it goes down as well?

Richard Gregory28:06

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter28:08

So that's a sound illusion, and we've heard about your optical illusions. Your recreation according to who's who is punning. These are, I suppose, verbal illusions, are they?

Richard Gregory28:17

Uh yes, punning and pondering. I like trying to combi combine the two. Perhaps I can tell you an absolutely appalling one that I thought of. Um it's my name for a cookery book. Uh what do you think about cooking in ancient Greece?

Richard Gregory28:31

And indeed, it might be cooking in ancient Greece with pan ash.

Presenter28:35

With Pan Ash, I think.

Richard Gregory28:36

I

Presenter28:38

Are you then a a a a a prankster? Do you play jokes on people?

Richard Gregory28:42

No, I don't like practical jokes at all. That's completely different, because I think one can only live by assuming that if you're sitting on a chair it's going to be a proper chair. I think that illusion was strictly for thinking about for experiments as tools, if you like, for investigation, but absolutely not for messing up people's lives.

Speaker 428:50

I think

Presenter29:00

You spent the past twenty odd years of your life as as Professor of Neuropsychology at Bristol University and and Director of its Brain and Perception Laboratory. Do you still invent things yourself? Do you go into the lab and

Richard Gregory29:13

I do admit. I must admit, I don't so much as I did, partly and this is a terrible thing, that we just don't have the facilities to make any sort of invention actually come off and be developed any longer. I mean, I think the the lack of of resources, of of finance and so on is terribly sad. I think it inhibits imagination.

Presenter29:32

And you're now Emeritus Professor. Are you still in demand for lectures?

Richard Gregory29:36

Uh yes, I well, I give a lot of lectures and I am invited, so presumably I'm in demand, yes.

Presenter29:41

And do you still attempt to inspire by uh performing pyrotechnics or by demonstration, or are you now

Richard Gregory29:48

Yes, I do. Uh when I give a lecture I nearly always have some sort of demonstrations. I think it's very important for the audience to experience something for themselves and not just rely on what somebody is telling them.

Presenter30:00

So you start off with that and then you know you've got their attention. Yes. They're going to listen to the rest.

Richard Gregory30:03

Yes, I do tend to do that.

Presenter30:07

Your magnum opus, though, must have been the Oxford Companion to the Mind, which took you ten years, and is about three quarters of a million words long. How much of it did you write yourself?

Richard Gregory30:13

Yeah.

Richard Gregory30:17

I wrote about, I should think, twenty percent of it, perhaps a bit more. I did actually write quite a lot of it, and I enjoyed doing it enormously. You say it did take ten years. I worked on it in the evenings and weekends. Uh and it was an attempt to give a rather personal compilation of a whole subject, the study of the mind, and it was a wonderful privilege to be allowed to do this, and I enjoyed it more than I can say. I sort of lived with it. Everywhere I was walking about, I could sort of see fragments of the future book in my mind.

Presenter30:48

Next record.

Richard Gregory30:50

Well, I think I would like a Shakespeare song, and I used to sing this in the car to my children when they were very small. I'm not very good at singing, but I can well remember it, and they loved it, and so did I. And I'd like the song When That I Was a Little Tiny Boy.

Speaker 431:07

When that I was and a little tiny boy with hair

Speaker 431:12

All the wind and the rain, a foolish thing was but a toy. For the rain, it rained every day. With a

Speaker 431:25

So we didn't underline for the rain

Speaker 431:32

But when I came to man's estate with

Speaker 431:38

The wind and the rain Tainst knave and thief men shut their gates For the rain that raineth every day We

Speaker 431:49

For the wind and the rain, for the rain it rain and the heaven.

Speaker 431:59

Less I can to walk.

Speaker 432:02

Yeah.

Presenter32:06

Alfred Della singing When That I Was and A Little Tiny Boy. So prepare to cast away, Professor Gregory. What horrors does a desert island hold for you?

Richard Gregory32:16

Well, I like puns and you can't have a pun all by yourself. I would enormously miss not having arguments, and by that I do not mean quarrels, I mean discussions of a sort of fun, dynamic way with my friends and my colleagues. I would miss that tremendously. On the other hand, I do like thinking by myself. I like spending hours and hours with my

Richard Gregory32:38

computer, writing, drawing pictures on it, thinking. I'd enjoy that. I'd like the piece and I'd like to look at the stars. I like the stars very much.

Presenter32:47

You're a nice big dark sky, I wanted more

Richard Gregory32:49

I want a nice big dark sky. That would be essential, yes.

Presenter32:52

Yes. And how inventive do you think you'll be? I mean, might you be able to make a kind of a flying machine from a palm tree or something?

Richard Gregory32:59

Oh, I'd have a go, yes, absolutely. I'd have ever such fun, trying to make use of everything available and trying to understand the plants. I assume there are plants and the fish and all the rest of it. I do a bit of sort of nature studies and I try and look at the sort of engineering basis of how plants and animals work. This is where bionics comes in. It's really comparing engineering principles in nature with engineering principles in technology. So I think I'd go back to being an amateur thinker along the lines of bionics.

Presenter33:34

Last record.

Richard Gregory33:36

I think for my last record I'd like to have that absolutely wonderful duet, redolent of life and of passion, in Act One of Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Speaker 433:50

Achira Rome la Varo Lamirai Disi.

Speaker 434:00

Verinondarohortiam.

Speaker 434:14

The name of all who fly to it is

Presenter34:20

It's

Speaker 434:39

If I live in

Presenter34:43

Nikolai Georov and Mirela Freyni singing the duet L'Accidarem la Mano from the first act of Mozart's Don Giovanni, with the new Philemonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemper.

Presenter34:54

So if you could only take one of those records, Professor.

Richard Gregory34:58

I found it jolly difficult. I think it would be the Mozart or it would be the Beethoven. And I think I'm actually going to take the Beethoven. I find that he always remains surprising. I've heard those piano sonatas umpteen times in all the symphonies, and every time I play them I get an extraordinary sense of surprise every now and again, which is quite ununderstandable to me. I think music is very mysterious. I think I understand something of visual illusions, but I feel I understand nothing of the magic of music. I wish I understood it better. I think I'd have the Beethoven. What about your book?

Richard Gregory35:32

Well, that's a very, very tricky one, isn't it? But I think I would like to study the stars and commune with the stars. I think of observatories as temples. And I think I'd like to have a really good astronomy book and study the stars more deeply.

Presenter35:47

And have you got an author of your astronomy book?

Richard Gregory35:50

Uh I didn't didn't come on to state, an author. Patrick Moore is a friend of mine. I suspect I might well choose a Patrick Moore book.

Presenter35:57

And what about your luxury?

Richard Gregory35:59

I think I'll have a telescope, if I may, an astronomical telescope, to study the universe.

Presenter36:04

Right. Professor Richard Gregory, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Richard Gregory36:09

Thank you very much. I enjoyed it immensely.

Speaker 436:16

Uh

Speaker 436:19

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.