Sir Harry Kroto

Speaker 30:00

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. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a scientist. Born in the first month of the last war, he was brought up in Bolton where his father, a German immigrant, made balloons.

Presenter0:38

Five years ago he and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their discovery of a third form of carbon, whose shape reminded him of the famous dome designed by the architect Buckminster Fuller for Expo sixty seven, and so this momentous find, which is leading to a revolution in material science, became known as Buckminster Fullerine.

Presenter1:00

But as a scientific explorer he's not particularly bothered about all that development. An artist by nature, a chemist by profession, it's the joy of discovery and creation which inspires him. I feel just as moved by great works of art as I do seeing an analysis of the way the electron operates, he says. They're just the same. There's no difference. It's just a matter of language. He is Sir Harry Croto. So you're an embodiment, if you like, of the two cultures, Harry, the the arts and and the sciences. Would you in many ways have preferred to have been some kind of artist?

Sir Harry Kroto1:33

Well, I I wouldn't say prefer. I feel deep down that I would have been better at art than I am at science.

Presenter1:39

What kind of art?

Sir Harry Kroto1:40

Well, my interest is in graphic art and design. I mean, all my life I've been involved in making posters or designing logos. And when I was at university at Sheffield, I was art editor for the magazine. And I think my first award was a Sunday Times book jacket design.

Presenter1:49

No.

Presenter1:56

But I I suppose in in Bolton, growing up in the nineteen fifties, making money by being a graphic artist, or indeed an architect, which I think you also, looking back, might have liked to have been, was just not on the card. It was not something that I was going to do.

Sir Harry Kroto2:07

It never crossed my mind. My father was a refugee and was desperate to ensure that

Sir Harry Kroto2:13

I, I was the only child, would do well. So he insisted that I really make sure my maths, physics and chemistry homework was done. He pushed you hard, did he? Oh, he made me stay up till midnight unless I'd finished it. And if I hadn't finished it by midnight, my mother used to say he's got to go to bed now. My father used to finish it off, you know. So I had very strange English essays occasionally. But about the age of twelve or thirteen, I said, This is not on, I'll finish it off by myself.

Presenter2:22

They pushed you home.

Presenter2:39

But but all of that explains why um there is this amazing coincidence in your life that I mentioned in in the introduction with the Buckminster Fuller dome. Let's just describe it for a minute, be for those who can't call it shape to mind. You saw it at Expo sixty seven. Describe it to me.

Sir Harry Kroto2:55

Well, it's a massive sphere on the horizon made out of a network of girders. And I think it actually is so intricate and a sort of a network of fine embroidery almost in the same way that a spider's web is. You look at this and so it's magic of engineering. In fact, you can span the whole of New York with Buckmister Fuller's geodesic dome.

Presenter3:17

What does geodesic mean?

Sir Harry Kroto3:18

Geodesic means that you distribute the forces as evenly as possible throughout the whole structure.

Presenter3:24

But did you analyse then, did you spot then that it was made up of of hexagons and the occasional pentagon?

Sir Harry Kroto3:27

Hinks a good

Sir Harry Kroto3:29

No, I I saw that it was a hexagonal structure, but I didn't realize that there were these pentagons in it.

Presenter3:34

But it's these shapes that appeal to you, and it's these shapes. Yeah, of course. But but it's interesting that you as a chemist, those shapes appeal to, because of course what a chemist needs to do is to visualize what he's seeing as a sort of line on a flat piece of graph paper.

Sir Harry Kroto3:35

That's a p

Sir Harry Kroto3:36

Yes, and to other people.

Sir Harry Kroto3:49

Well that's right. I mean the the problem that that people have in understanding chemistry is if I look at this bottle of water that's in front of me, I can see the fantastic interactions involved in the water molecules interacting with each other and then understand the way that ice has very interesting properties.

Presenter4:04

Do you think those kinds of things all the time when you when you're looking at things in everyday life?

Sir Harry Kroto4:07

You're looking at things in every

Sir Harry Kroto4:09

I think most chemists have to be able to visualize things in three dimensions, and they are visual people.

Presenter4:14

Let's pause there and have your first record. What's that?

Sir Harry Kroto4:17

It's Musorsky's pictures from an exhibition and I like this because it's the piano version and when we got a piano for the kids, some friend had the music score for pictures from an exhibition and I saw that the first major chord as you come into it I couldn't even get my hand rounded so I thought I'll give this up but it's also beautiful because it links one of my great delights to go to cities and go to small art galleries.

Presenter5:45

Antony Goldstone playing the opening of Mazorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

Presenter5:50

The dome and the discovery of the carbon molecules that were shaped like it hasn't been the only um artistic coincidence in your life, um Harry Croto has it. Doesn't there exist somewhere in your files

Presenter6:01

A drawing you did as a boy of Stockholm Town Hall.

Sir Harry Kroto6:04

Yes, I I couldn't believe it.

Sir Harry Kroto6:08

I keep everything. There is almost nothing that I haven't kept unless my mum got to it and threw it away whilst I wasn't there. And there were drawings of buildings and one of them was Stockholm Town Hall, which is

Presenter6:18

Which is, of course, is where you got the Nobel Prize. You spent a week being fated. But what did winning it mean to you?

Sir Harry Kroto6:21

But what did you mean?

Sir Harry Kroto6:24

It's it's very difficult. I used to believe that uh people who won the W Nobel Prize were the smartest kids on the block and they must be geniuses and this, that and the other, and I I know I'm not a genius.

Sir Harry Kroto6:35

So that it changed my attitude as much as anything else.

Presenter6:37

You also got knighted that year. What did that mean to you?

Sir Harry Kroto6:41

Oh, it was amazing. I mean, my Marg, my wife, often gets the mail and she'd gone out earlier, so I got down to the bottom of the stairs and got this letter with the portcullis on and it said, you know, the Prime Minister has it in mind to advise the Queen to offer you a knighthood and and then at the bottom, little thing, Yes or No, you know, I thought, oh

Presenter7:05

What is this? Whether you would accept.

Sir Harry Kroto7:07

Did you have

Presenter7:08

Did you hover over the No then?

Sir Harry Kroto7:09

Well, you know, being a somewhat of a Republican, it's it shows the how thin the veneer of republicanism in me actually is. I didn't hover too long over that, but I had to check the postmark to see it wasn't one of my friends pulling a fast one because I mean it was just I just sat on the bottom and said this must be a joke.

Presenter7:25

So the the honours obviously are nice to have, but they don't knock you out. Neither are you in it for the money because lots of people have since taken out patents on this carbon that you discovered, and it's not really something that occupies you hugely. So what are you in it for?

Sir Harry Kroto7:40

I really don't know the answer to that. I definitely enjoy it, but the moments of real cathartic enjoyment are very, very limited.

Sir Harry Kroto7:50

Science is about discovering something that's new.

Presenter7:52

Sure, and I think that's why I said in the introduction exactly that you are creative, you are an explorer. It seems to me that you quite like being.

Sir Harry Kroto7:54

And these creatures

Presenter8:00

In that darkness at the outer edge. You don't like working on things that are kind of already there in your development. You want to be.

Sir Harry Kroto8:01

Yeah.

Sir Harry Kroto8:06

Depend upon you.

Presenter8:08

Finding something that we don't know is there.

Sir Harry Kroto8:09

I think all of us like that, but I think many of us as kids somehow lose that. Lots of kids lose that. They just become world couch potatoes in a world which is desperate for creative people to try and solve the problems that are out there.

Sir Harry Kroto8:23

Record number two.

Sir Harry Kroto8:25

My next one is Hamish and it's by Mimi and Dick Farigna.

Sir Harry Kroto8:31

This takes me back to Sheffield when a friend of mine taught me to play three chords on a guitar. But Hamish is a beautiful piece of music with a dulcimer and an altar harp, and it's also Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. So this shows you that I can play this on a guitar or on a dulcimer, and I love it because of that.

Presenter9:21

Hamish played by Mimi and Richard Farina. Um tell me about this balloon factory in Brotron and your father. What sort of balloons were they?

Sir Harry Kroto9:30

Well, my father, before the war in Berlin, printed faces on toy balloons for children. They were probably somewhat politically incorrect today, because they were all Red Indians or Africans or Chinese, and so they were the stereotypes. But when he came to Britain, my parents lost everything, and then my father was interned on the Isle of Man, and my mother was shipped off to Bolton.

Presenter9:54

They were Jewish then, I think.

Sir Harry Kroto9:55

My father was, my mother wasn't. Then in about nineteen fifty five my father, with the help of friends from Germany, set up a factory to make balloons and I worked in that factory uh weekends or during the holidays.

Presenter10:09

What did you learn?

Sir Harry Kroto10:11

I learned everything about colors and die stuffs and grinding colors. I did the stock taking, so I did them without scales and with weights, without the computer help. And I never want to see another balloon as long as I live. But in fact, it was a tremendous training.

Presenter10:25

How did you fit in at school in Bolton? I mean, I know you were born in this country, but you must have been very different. We could have got a funny name to start with.

Sir Harry Kroto10:33

Funny name, doesn't it? Well I had this funny name. I mean, you know, yes, in a s in a class of Higginbottom, Ramsbottom, Thistlethwaite, Entwistle, Smith-Jones and Crotasheener.

Presenter10:42

Protoshina

Sir Harry Kroto10:43

Yes, it was it was uh longer. My father cut it in half because people couldn't say it properly, or something like this. So it now looks Japanese name, but it's actually comes from an area which is now in Poland.

Presenter10:54

And you were deeply into art and deeply into the balloon factory as we hear, but also into Meccano. Meccano really got you hooked.

Sir Harry Kroto11:01

Yes, I mean my father bought me a Meccano set and I think one of the disasters of modern life is that the Meccano has been displaced by Lego.

Sir Harry Kroto11:10

Meccano gives you the ability to put nuts and bolts together, not to misthread them, to tighten them sufficiently tight that thing sticks to together.

Presenter11:19

And make little cars and things like that.

Sir Harry Kroto11:20

Yes, I mean I think 99% of all British engineers were brought up in McConnell. And then LEGO came along, which doesn't teach you that. It's beautiful and seductive. But it's not something that you can make something that works in the factory. And I think you could plot the demise of British engineering and it parallels the reduction of McCarneau. I'm sure it follows the same curve.

Presenter11:40

Uh

Presenter11:42

Tell me about record number three.

Sir Harry Kroto11:45

The third record is really my all-time favourite symphony. It's Mahler's Fourth Symphony. My mother took me back to Berlin in'61 when I was twenty-one, and I hadn't been there, and it was a fantastic experience. In those days the wall wasn't up, and I went into the Eastern sector and bought six records in the Czech culture pavilion, one of which was Mahler's Fourth Symphony.

Presenter13:09

Part of the third movement of Mahler's Symphony No. Four in G major, played by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Carol Schener.

Presenter13:16

So, Harry Croto, you got a first in chemistry at Sheffield University, in between designing for the student magazine. You you stayed on, you did your doctorate there, then you're going to be able to do it.

Sir Harry Kroto13:24

And playing tennis.

Presenter13:26

And then you went to Canada and the States of Research Scientists.

Presenter13:30

Let me spool on, if you'll allow me to generalize, because at some point in all of this, you got

Presenter13:34

Interested in stardust, and in fact, you've said something very romantic about it. You said every one of us is made of stardust. How so?

Sir Harry Kroto13:42

Yes, I think perhaps a a cathartic moment in my life was the discovery that what happens in a star like the Sun is that hydrogen four hydrogen atoms are squeezed into helium and three helium nuclei squeezed into carbon. Then the star at some later stage blows up and blows all the carbon atoms out into space. They float around and some of these clouds of gas collect again into stars and planets. And those carbon atoms, those nitrogen atoms, those oxygen atoms, were synthesized in the star and they become the biosphere or the material out of which we are all formed. And to see a little kid's eyes light up when they realize that they were floating around in space and they're here is one of the great delights. And I think when I discovered that, that I was basically an alien, was wonderful.

Presenter14:32

But it was that interest, wasn't it, that interest in the chemistry of space that set you out on the trail that led ultimately to the Nobel Prize.

Sir Harry Kroto14:40

Yeah, I mean the important aspect is that a lot of the carbon, a lot of the nitrogen, a lot of the people who could be here are actually still out in space. They never made it. And so well you were lucky to be here, right? Because most of the carbon, most of the nitrogen is actually still out there. And in fact, I think there are a lot of people around on Earth who I think should still be out in space. And we know who they are.

Presenter14:49

What do you mean?

Presenter15:01

Yeah.

Speaker 415:01

They are

Presenter15:02

Uh

Speaker 415:02

Be ready.

Presenter15:02

Yeah.

Speaker 415:03

But yeah

Presenter15:04

But look, let let's get back to this carbon, because your problem, as I understand it, was that that the man who had the laboratory machinery that you wanted to use, the only machinery that existed that was of any use to you to analyze this carbon that you wanted to do, wouldn't let you onto his machine.

Sir Harry Kroto15:18

Not quite like that. What happened was that I was visiting a friend, Bob Curl, in Houston. Bob told me to go and see Rick Smalley, who had this apparatus. And Rick's a very ebullient and persuasive guy, and he's jumping all over this fantastic apparatus. And I realized that if I could use this apparatus, which really took a laser to vaporize metals, changed the metal target for carbon, maybe we could vaporize the carbon into molecules that we had detected by radio astronomy. I told Bob that, and Bob was interested in doing it, but it wasn't a major priority. So it took a year and a half to do that.

Presenter15:55

But you were incredibly excited when you got the call that said, I mean I

Sir Harry Kroto15:57

Oh yeah, I mean I I mean, I took this toll story and I pinched some money from my my wife's purse to three hundred quid to go to Texas. That's only a euphemism, but I went immediately to Houston.

Presenter15:59

TR

Presenter16:10

Let let's just try and be clear about what you did and let me try and put it in simple terms for you.

Sir Harry Kroto16:14

There are no simple terms.

Presenter16:15

Yeah.

Presenter16:16

Well quite that's the difficulty. You you blast this carbon with a laser. And then you start looking at the drawings that you get as a result. And what you suddenly began to see were clusters of sixty atoms of carbon forming spontaneously again and again and again, this magic number sixty.

Sir Harry Kroto16:25

Does it mean so?

Sir Harry Kroto16:32

Take a look at the

Sir Harry Kroto16:35

Yeah.

Presenter16:36

That was the discovery.

Sir Harry Kroto16:37

You vaporize the atoms. The atoms then cluster together and they form a nice pattern.

Presenter16:42

So you had this magic number sixty. The question was, why was it so special? I'm going to ask you about to explain that in just a second, but let's pause for some more music.

Sir Harry Kroto16:45

Yeah.

Sir Harry Kroto16:52

This is By the Eagles, it's Journey of the Sorcerer, and it's from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Sir Harry Kroto17:00

It also links me to my joy of space and the fact I think that Journey of the Sorceress is something to do with our journey from stars to where we are.

Sir Harry Kroto17:10

Because we are sourcers, we've learned so much about how the universe works. And this epitomises for me why we're here and how we got here.

Presenter17:48

The Eagles and Journey of the Sorcerer. So you've got this C sixty, carbon sixty, tall lines on graph paper. What was the process by which you visualized that as this shape, this sphere?

Sir Harry Kroto18:01

Well, I think it goes back to things like Mccano. You're looking for something that has 60 atoms, but it must have a beautiful shape. I mean, you're looking for a pattern.

Presenter18:10

But did you think of Buckminster Fuller's doings?

Sir Harry Kroto18:13

Graphite is a sheet. So we discussed it and came to the conclusion that maybe the sheet had curved into a ball, a sphere of some kind, and that reminded me about Mr. Fuller's dome indexing.

Presenter18:25

You did think of that. You made that.

Sir Harry Kroto18:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, I had. And I'd also made a model for my kids of a stardome, which is a map of the sky on a sort of Buckminster Fuller projection. So there's a link there too.

Presenter18:36

We should say this shape I mean, actually, as it turned out, is also a soccer ball.

Sir Harry Kroto18:39

Yes, it's the same shape as the soccer ball. And the interesting thing about the soccer ball is it's 12 pentagons, five.

Presenter18:39

Uh

Sir Harry Kroto18:46

corners, five times twelve is sixty. So there are sixty corners on a soccer ball. And the reason that you're kicking it around is a very strong structure. It's geodesic in that when you kick it, the strain is distributed evenly. In a sense, a rugby ball is not, because it's designed for throwing.

Presenter19:01

Yeah.

Presenter19:02

But to make that leap, to get from these lines on the graph paper, as I say, to thinking of a soccer ball was what it was all about.

Sir Harry Kroto19:10

Yeah, absolutely.

Presenter19:11

But that's what science is. Who made that leap? How and when?

Sir Harry Kroto19:14

Well, there's dis discussions over that. I mean, I remember thinking of Ex of Expo 67, and I think Rick also

Sir Harry Kroto19:23

Had been to Expo, and he was in tune with that.

Presenter19:26

But your kid's stardome was back at home.

Sir Harry Kroto19:28

Yeah, my kids' stardome was back at home and I was thinking of ringing my wife up to count the number of corners on it. And being a typical Englishman brought up in the the sort of vein that telephones are expensive and international telephones are very expensive, I thought, well, I was going home the next day, maybe I should I'll wait till then and that was a big mistake because during the night Rick played around with cutting out hexagons. But with bits of paper. With bits of paper, which is very, very, very neat. And then he remembered that I said that I've got pentagons on this stardome at home.

Presenter19:50

What with bits of paper?

Sir Harry Kroto19:58

And he cut the pentagons and then it closed up into the sphere. And so the next morning he came with this beautiful little model, and it was just, we were just ecstatic when we saw it.

Presenter20:04

So he he did it. Um did you kick yourself?

Sir Harry Kroto20:07

I was a bit think, well, why didn't I make that phone call? But then I thought, well, you know, it was a team effort.

Presenter20:13

'Cause if you hadn't said pentagons to him, he mightn't have got there.

Sir Harry Kroto20:17

Probably not.

Presenter20:17

Probably not. Because he was trying to join up hexagons, and you can't. You can't do it. If you keep joining hexagons, it stays flat.

Sir Harry Kroto20:19

Yeah, the Hixkins keep in a sheet, and you can't close them up.

Presenter20:24

It's like a a tortoise shell, isn't it?

Sir Harry Kroto20:25

Yes, a tortoise has pentagons as well, so it curves it over. And I I usually tell, you know, that I didn't have a

Presenter20:28

Yeah.

Sir Harry Kroto20:31

Pentagon's it would have a flat shell and be bloody drafty up the backside.

Sir Harry Kroto20:36

Especially in Bolton.

Presenter20:38

Yeah.

Sir Harry Kroto20:39

Okay, we really made the discovery on a Wednesday when we realized that C60 was a special, elegant thing. And on Friday, we decided that the students should work over the weekend to try and find out the conditions under which this was special. I had an appointment in Dallas, so I was going to drive from Houston to Dallas through Texas. And it's somewhat desolate, the Texas desert type area. And during that period, I was thinking, what on earth could it be? And I'm also a great fan of Vin Vendors and the movie Paris, Texas. And I love also the music, which is very much about that drive from Houston to Dallas and back again during that period when we weren't quite sure what it was.

Presenter21:57

Rye Couda and Paris, Texas. So by this time, Harry Croto, it's 1985 and you were a professor at the University of Sussex in Brighton. Of course, all this talk of shapes and beauty of the form, it's all very well, but again it's still in your the chemist's mind's eye because you haven't actually isolated this stuff, which was the next thing you had to do, wasn't it? How long did that take?

Sir Harry Kroto22:21

Yes. I thought I in nineteen eighty five when we had seen this result, we really only had circumstantial evidence that it was the structure. And for five years, I call it sort of working in the desert to try to prove that it was correct.

Presenter22:34

But didn't it in the end happen slightly, again serendipitously, that that it something was left on the bench overnight? It always seems to be the story behind these things. And you come in on a Monday morning and you say, Hey.

Sir Harry Kroto22:41

Is it coming on?

Sir Harry Kroto22:44

Yes, well it it was a bit like that. I had three projects in which I was pushing. And then uh the one project which would have gone right to the heart of the matter wasn't funded.

Sir Harry Kroto22:56

Then we got back onto the project in 1989 because a German-American group had done some very interesting work. And we went back to it and Jonathan Hare, working with me, extracted some C60. That was on a Monday, and on a Thursday, I got a call from Nature, and that's the journal. And would I referee this paper?

Sir Harry Kroto23:16

That someone else

Presenter23:16

That someone else had done.

Sir Harry Kroto23:17

And it was a disaster really for us because it had been done by this this same German-American group that had got us back onto track. So it would have been really unfortunate if we got there first. And we were very close to doing it.

Presenter23:28

And we were very close to ringing they scooped you.

Sir Harry Kroto23:30

Well, they did, but nevertheless, you know, that's the way it was. But they.

Presenter23:34

But he must have been terribly miserable.

Sir Harry Kroto23:36

Uh

Presenter23:36

The f

Sir Harry Kroto23:36

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Presenter23:37

You've got the thing in your hand and then you're being asked to referee a paper that says in their hand a few days earlier.

Sir Harry Kroto23:40

It was not a good day.

Sir Harry Kroto23:45

Not about the day at the office. No, no, but that's the way science is, and you mustn't go on.

Presenter23:45

What's the bottom?

Sir Harry Kroto23:51

Being hampered from enjoying what you're doing in life by that sort of mishap, you've got to keep going.

Presenter23:57

Because now everybody's working on it. All those patents that I mentioned have all been taken out. What are its applications?

Sir Harry Kroto24:00

Yeah.

Sir Harry Kroto24:03

Well, if you look back to the geodesic dome about mister Fuller, you can actually cover the whole of New York using modern materials with that construction technique. Now we've got a microscopic Meccano kit out of carbon atoms to build similar structures.

Sir Harry Kroto24:20

If we can know how to put these things together.

Sir Harry Kroto24:24

Them nuts and bolts together, we could make almost anything. We can make

Sir Harry Kroto24:27

Molecular machines.

Presenter24:29

But you could build, just so it's something one can g grab a hold of, you could build a bridge, could you? You could build a bridge from Dover to Calais instead of the tunnel. Oh, yes, if.

Sir Harry Kroto24:29

But you could

Sir Harry Kroto24:37

We can

Sir Harry Kroto24:39

control the production of these materials. For instance, you can elongate them. You can make tubes out of graphite. And this would be a material that is one hundred times stronger than steel.

Sir Harry Kroto24:51

and one sixth the weight.

Presenter24:52

So you could build a massive bridge. Could you build a bridge from Boston to Plymouth?

Sir Harry Kroto24:54

You could do it.

Sir Harry Kroto24:57

Well, I'm not sure about that. I'd have to look at the but possibly, yes. I mean, I'm sure you could build a a bridge quite easily over the channel.

Sir Harry Kroto25:04

But

Sir Harry Kroto25:06

We can't control the creation of these materials. We know it exists. We can measure the properties and their amazing properties. They are the limit of material strength.

Presenter25:17

But how much can you create of this material? I mean, can can we order up a square metre metre.

Sir Harry Kroto25:21

And order up a square metre of any kind of square metre. We can find them under an electron microscope, which is the microscope with the highest magnification you can get. You can make maybe bundles of 100. But we need to make bundles of 10 to the 14, so that's a million, million, million. When you can do that.

Presenter25:37

When you can do that.

Sir Harry Kroto25:38

We can do fantastic things.

Presenter25:39

And that's what people are trying to do.

Sir Harry Kroto25:41

Yes.

Presenter25:41

How long is it going to take?

Sir Harry Kroto25:42

Uh they take forever.

Presenter25:45

Nicole number six.

Sir Harry Kroto25:47

I often go to California. My wife and I spend about three weeks there every year. We often drive up the Pacific Coast Highway and switch the radio on there and every time this fantastic track by Kansas comes out, Dust in the Wind, not only speaker music but also the sum of the words, you know that your money will not another minute buy. It's very much the way I feel in a way that many scientists feel.

Speaker 426:12

All we are is dust in the wind All we are is dust in the wind Dust in the wind Everything is dust in the wind

Sir Harry Kroto26:23

Everything

Presenter26:42

Kansas and Dust in the Wind.

Presenter26:44

You believe, Harry, I know, that interesting, important science comes from people following their instinct. And in that sense, the story you've just told us of what you did is the perfect example. You arrive at something that is a revolutionary discovery when you're just investigating something that fascinates you, like dust in space.

Sir Harry Kroto27:00

Dustin's

Presenter27:02

The trouble is that, you know, how many of those scientific whims come to nothing and there isn't money available to finance scientists to go out to play in that kind of way?

Sir Harry Kroto27:12

Well, I think there is money available. I mean, the huge amounts of money which are spent on frivolous things are is By comparison, the amount of money spent on research, fundamental research, is trivial by comparison.

Presenter27:24

Because people won't put up the money. They want to know exactly what they're going to discover, don't they?

Sir Harry Kroto27:26

Yeah, they want to know

Sir Harry Kroto27:28

Yeah, yeah, they want to know why you're doing it. And you can't. You what we know historically is that the greatest and certainly the most important and most surprising discoveries are made by surprise.

Presenter27:41

What about us? What about our understanding of it? Again, I I I think you feel we're pretty hopeless at science, don't you? We the general public, I mean.

Sir Harry Kroto27:49

I don't think it's hopeless. I think there's a desperate desire to understand and know this, but the problem is the language. But it's like Shakespeare. I mean, you have to spend a lifetime.

Sir Harry Kroto28:00

learning English and meeting people and learning about life until you really start to read Shakespeare again and when you're thirty or forty. You learn it at school, and then when you're thirty four you start to realize, wow, this guy really

Sir Harry Kroto28:13

was fantastic.

Presenter28:14

So how does that analogy apply to science?

Sir Harry Kroto28:16

Well, it applies in a similar way that you have to learn the language of science, which would be symbolism, and spend some significant p part of your life trying to appreciate it and do it even.

Presenter28:27

But schools are allegedly doing exactly that. It's

Sir Harry Kroto28:31

No, they aren't, and that's a big tragedy because kids have got too many other things. I don't know how you get kids like me.

Sir Harry Kroto28:40

to do differential equations, work hour upon hour trying to understand do their homework and their maths homework in a time when the television is showing them people who are celebrities, who are saying, well, here am I, I'm making millions of dollars and I

Sir Harry Kroto28:55

Jacked out of school, and here I am. I've I've made it. When they're only one in a million, the rest are on the streets or nowhere.

Presenter29:03

Mechanical number seven.

Sir Harry Kroto29:05

May 7th is again, I suppose. It's Jefferson Airplane, and I love this piece of music. It epitomizes San Francisco and when Marg and I go up to the Napa Valley to have a drink of wine and this, that, the other. And I like it because it's one of the nicest places around.

Speaker 429:28

Moving a right through the corner

Speaker 429:33

And they don't even know they've been around and around and around before Ringing and ringing against each other on a singing chain like a flying lightning. Ibir Trive has never seen any reason to remain the same.

Presenter29:57

Hyperdrive, sung by Jefferson Airplane. Harry Croto, your parents are are both dead now, you say, but did they live to see you achieve your honours, your noble crowns?

Sir Harry Kroto30:06

No, I I think one of the my again, one of my great disappointments was that my parents, and particularly my father, uh died in seventy seven and my mother in seventy eight and the Nobel Prize came in ninety six and the knighthood my father would have just gone over them and he he was a refugee who loved

Sir Harry Kroto30:26

Britain and England in particular so much.

Sir Harry Kroto30:29

Um

Sir Harry Kroto30:30

So for that that would have been the most fantastic thing in his life. Um and he never really thought that I was a success because he didn't see me do any work. I mean people in university don't do any work, do they? And uh people

Presenter30:42

Yeah.

Sir Harry Kroto30:44

I didn't run the factory. I I didn't want to see another balloon as long as I lived.

Presenter30:47

A bit of a disappointment to anybody. Yeah, I think so.

Sir Harry Kroto30:49

Yeah, I think so.

Presenter30:50

Yeah.

Sir Harry Kroto30:50

And so this might have indicated I wasn't a total disappointment. So that is unfortunate.

Presenter30:57

He he was a a practising Jew to his dying day, wasn't he?

Sir Harry Kroto31:01

Well, he was Jewish. I mean, he was very mild and he would go to the synagogue occasionally and things like that, and he made me go. But I.

Presenter31:09

Yeah, I went through all that. He would he would be, I suspect, very disappointed too to hear you say today, as you do, that you're a devout atheist, a militant atheist, uh a fundamentalist atheist.

Sir Harry Kroto31:11

Yeah, I went through all that.

Sir Harry Kroto31:22

Well, I'm not a fundamentalist yet, but if things get any worse, I'll become one, I think.

Sir Harry Kroto31:28

I see all

Sir Harry Kroto31:30

ideas and philosophies that separate people as being the most dangerous things that are happening today and they're becoming more entrenched.

Sir Harry Kroto31:40

I'm actually I have three religions. One is atheism, the second one is amnesty internationalism, and the third one is humanism. I think if you had these three, you end up, I think, being a reasonable person.

Presenter31:52

Hence your last record.

Sir Harry Kroto31:54

Yeah, that's why uh my last record is uh by John Lennon, and it's imagine I'm sure many people feel like I do uh that if we could get a w rid of

Sir Harry Kroto32:05

things like our worries about heaven and hell, which is part of religious mythology, and national boundaries, these sorts of things, I think the world would be a better place.

Speaker 432:18

You may say I'm a dream

Speaker 432:24

But I'm not the only one.

Speaker 432:30

I hope someday you join us

Presenter32:41

John Lennon and Imagine. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Harry, which one would you take?

Sir Harry Kroto32:47

Uh I think I'd have to take the

Sir Harry Kroto32:53

Ah

Sir Harry Kroto32:54

Yeah, I think I'd take the Adagio from Marlus.

Presenter32:57

Symphony number four.

Sir Harry Kroto32:58

Yeah.

Presenter33:00

What about your book? I I take it you don't want the Bible.

Sir Harry Kroto33:03

Uh no, I don't think I've had a good read of that and I've read the Koran and I've read much of the Jewish Jewish text, but I I think I'd get um

Presenter33:08

Yeah.

Sir Harry Kroto33:12

That would take me on to a deeper understanding of particle physics. I'm something like Feynman's Quantum Electrodynamics, where I really have to learn some new mathematics to do that.

Sir Harry Kroto33:24

As a chemist, and I know a lot of quantum mechanics, I'm limited in the sense that I understand how the material world works, but I don't understand really how things work within the atom. So that would be one a book like that.

Presenter33:36

Keep you busy. Um, what about your luxury?

Sir Harry Kroto33:39

My luxury would have to be a complete airbrush and computer graphics set so that I could really try to experiment in pushing art into the next sort of technical regime, to do things with computer graphics that have never been done before.

Presenter33:59

Sir Harry Croto, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sir Harry Kroto34:03

My pleasure.

Speaker 334:10

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