Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Polish-born scientist and broadcaster.
On the island
Eight records
My father, who was a splendid singer, hence most of my records, will be vocal. My father was heartbroken about the fact that I could not sing. He often had singers come to the house, There was at that time at the Dresden Opera this was in Germany where we live A very promising young singer called Richard Tauba. And Tauber came to the house and sang Schubert
My second disc marks the moment in my life when as a young undergraduate at Cambridge, the bottom fell out of the stock market, Europe suddenly became full of unemployment, and all of a sudden you realized that in past ages The terrible hardships of the working classes were not just history, they came home to us. And so I've chosen to recapture moments from the Industrial Revolution from the steam whistle ballads. The song that I've chosen, which still makes a lump come to my throat, is called The Four Loom Weaver.
Napoleon was not foolish when he called the marriage of Figaro The Revolution on the March The Revolution in Action So I have chosen a piece out of the marriage of Figaro the great Aria Savool Ballare.
Record number four represents the sort of Hitler days, the war drums coming up. Um In Germany in the late nineteen twenties, the beginning of nineteen thirties, Bertolt Brest and Kotwal wrote an opera called the Sepni Opera, Die Deikauschen Opera, and in it Lotta Lenia sang some wonderful songs, and one of those, the song about the little girl who thinks she's going to be the bride of a pirate, Die Se Roy Bajeni.
The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be
Record number five commemorates my war years, because we might just as well face the fact that making the bomb is what we did during the war. And uh Never forget it. So this is Tom Lehrer singing The Wild West.
Well, naturally, if we're going to have a record about The things we did during the war that we didn't care for, the bomb, we should have some great piece of modern music about the war, really about the two wars, about the first and the second world war. So I've chosen a piece out of Britain's War Requiem, of which you'll remember most of the words are written by a great poet of the First World War, Wilfred Owen. and which I first heard sung on the night that Coventry Cathedral was dedicated.
I thought that I should choose one record which had no words on it. and which is a piece of modern music. and a piece of modern music with which I regard myself as being in some way associated. It's by Peter Arcine Fricker. Fricker and I wrote an opera together for the B B C, called My Brother Died, but since no records of that exist, I've chosen another piece by Peter Russian Fricker which I'm very fond of, the string quartet number two.
Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt
Well, my last record is Marlena Dittri, the fabulous Marlena, singing Ich bin von Kopf bisfu sauf Lieber Eingestellt from the original Blue Angel.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:49Could you endure extended loneliness?
Yes, I think that I have now stored up enough questions in my head that I have never answered to last me many years.
Presenter asks
5:01Why did you become a mathematician? What did you see as the end product?
I fell in love with mathematics because it is a marvelous language. I regard having become a mathematician as simply an extension of my passion for languages which I developed as a child.
Presenter asks
5:49Was there any sense of bitterness because mathematics in a sense had betrayed you [during the war]?
Oh, mathematics hadn't betrayed us. We betrayed mathematics. We betrayed all our human heritage. We betrayed everything that we had stood for morally and intellectually in those two great catastrophes, of which the first was Hitler's coming to power in nineteen thirty three And the second was the dropping of the atomic bombs in nineteen forty five.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
Fischer v Spassky: The Chess Championship of the World
Svetozar Gligorić
I've not got to the bottom of Fischer playing Spassky in the last World Chess Championship, and that's the book that I would take
What sort of work are you doing [at the Salk Institute]?
The work that I'm doing is in a subject which I have invented, and I've invented its name. It's called human specificity. That means what is specific or special to human beings, which makes them so different from other animals.
Presenter asks
10:26What were your terms of reference when you began planning the series [The Ascent of Man]?
Well, the BBC came to me and said, Can you make a series which shall do for science what Kenneth Clark has done for the arts? And I said that uh I didn't know whether I could, but I didn't mean to. And then they said, Well, what would you like to do? And I said, Well, I would like to do something about The History of Human Ideas in the Making. in the course of which science will be shown to be a natural expression of the human spirit, but only one of many expressions.
Presenter asks
15:49Can the earth give everyone its share and at the same time spare the essential effort needed to separate that from pollution?
I hope so, because I do not believe for a moment that I am that privileged man who was allowed to come out of a miserable ghetto in Poland in order to sit here and luxuriate, while some poor black man or brown man is condemned not to rise from his particular ghetto, because I'm bothered about his pollution. No, I reject that thought utterly.
“Music is a language in which I stutter.”
“We betrayed mathematics. We betrayed all our human heritage. We betrayed everything that we had stood for morally and intellectually in those two great catastrophes, of which the first was Hitler's coming to power in nineteen thirty three And the second was the dropping of the atomic bombs in nineteen forty five.”
“I do not believe for a moment that I am that privileged man who was allowed to come out of a miserable ghetto in Poland in order to sit here and luxuriate, while some poor black man or brown man is condemned not to rise from his particular ghetto, because I'm bothered about his pollution. No, I reject that thought utterly.”