Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A scientist who served as chief scientific adviser to the British Government and is President of the Royal Society.
On the island
Eight records
My first record is a reaffirmation of my essential Australianness, and it's by a chap called John Williamson, whom I think is a particularly interesting Australian, as it were, country Western singer, and it is just about what it means to be an Australian.
Loreena McKennitt & Cedric Smith
This comes from a record of Lorena McInnett's. I choose this because this is the town my father moved from when he was about fourteen to move to Australia.
Choir of King's College, Cambridge, New Philharmonia Orchestra & Sir David Willcocks
Well the third record is in a sense a leap ahead to a year I spent at um King's College in nineteen seventy six, and it's partly for that reason that I chose the choir of King's College singing part of the sanctus from Foray's Requiem.
I did not grow up with music, and music more came into my life when I met my wife as a postdoc at Harvard. And she, in particular, had been, when younger, a counsellor in summer camps where Pete Seeger used to come. And I have always had great affection for him for all those associations. And I particularly like him on the 12-string guitar.
String Quartet No. 17 in B-Flat Major, K. 458 "Hunt": IV. Allegro assai
My next piece of music again goes back to my wife in that in Judy's house music was always playing and almost always Mozart. Her father was immensely fond of it. My own C D of this is one that I inherited from her father. It's Mozart's string quartet in B flat major.
which is, I think, one of the canonical statement of the spirit of the sixties and it was my own entrainment toward the end of that time, sixty nine, seventy, in the founding of the Movement for Social Responsibility and Science in Australia that quite accidentally led to me as a physicist getting interested in ecological and environmental questions.
Schwanengesang, D. 957: No. 8, Der Atlas
It's a Schubert Leder based on one of Heine's poems, Der Atlas, Atlas carrying the burdens of the world, with the baritone sung by Ralph Cohn. It has a sentimental association in that Ralph Cohn is a friend and he's a benefactor at the Royal Society, and he's the person who generously put up the funds for the Royal Society's enterprise on science and society.
Parsifal: Prelude to Act IFavourite
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Georg Solti
My last record is the prelude to Wagner's Parsifaul. I chose that partly because I like the opera and partly because I like the theme of the holy fool that runs through it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30Which do you prefer, the passionate values or the cold analysis, Bob?
I don't wish to make the choice. They're different things. … We need to ask with the potential that science opens to us, what are the doors we want to open and what are the doors we want to keep closed? What's the kind of tomorrow we want to build with the possibilities? That's about values and beliefs, and science has no special voice in the choices we should make.
Presenter asks
8:19How do you want to leave your mark on the Royal Society?
I want to build on what was begun by my predecessors, and I want to carry us further back essentially the origins of the society, where it was much more broadly representative of science in society. I think in recent years there has been a slight tendency to drift toward recognizing pure science accomplishments, and that has to be the core of our values. But it needs to be wider in its recognition that that extends to popularizers of science, it extends to people who create applications. It is not simply publications in elite journals.
Presenter asks
9:53Your father was a disaster as far as the family was concerned, I gather. [He] left you when you were a small boy?
I never knew my father well, and it's only recently that I've come to learn more of the family through his sister. … [He suffered] from devastating alcoholism. So I saw very little of him and my mother divorced him when I was quite young. … I saw him very rarely and I didn't see him since the age of seventeen. It it's one of these things that uh it was a messy divorce, it was a painful thing and it it just seemed, as my brother once put it, dealing with one parent is hard enough. But I wouldn't have my childhood any different in retrospect on the grounds that on the whole I feel I've had such a lucky and privileged life, I wouldn't want to mess round with any of it unless I change the whole thing.
The keepsakes
The book
Capablanca's Hundred Best Games of Chess
Harry Golombek
the book that my brother gave me for my twenty first birthday, which is uh Capablanca's Best Hundred Games in Chess. And I could keep myself cheerfully employed for the better part of a year working through that
The luxury
I was going to take from the British Museum the Isle of Lewis chess set with those wonderful old things that were found on a back of a cave, that would be my chessboard
Presenter asks
11:18You have said even after he'd gone that yours was a curious childhood. I wonder what you mean by that.
I was also, I had asthma rather severely when I was young, and I missed a lot of school up to the age of about 13 or so. But I was the kind of child who spent a lot of time by itself, and I read voraciously. … And I inhabited a very rich world of the imagination.
Presenter asks
13:22Tell me about the school teacher who inspired you, Bob. Who was he? How did he do it?
I had a succession of excellent teachers, but one particularly inspiring person, a chemist, named Lenny Basser. He had through his hands seven fellows of the Royal Society, one Nobel laureate, three members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He also coached the track team, which won the state high schools championship, and there are several hundred state high schools, 28 of the 31 years he coached it. What an extraordinary man. … [He had] a kind of creative laziness in a way. For example, he didn't like uh marking exam papers, so he did this brilliant thing. The exam papers were handed back to the class and we marked each other's papers, which if you think about it, is a brilliant, if somewhat uh occasionally abrasive pedagogic device.
Presenter asks
29:47What will you miss most [on the desert island]? Family apart, of course.
I would miss uh my friends and colleagues. I would miss the cut and thrust of sort of daily activity, whether it's uh the science itself or whether it's the science more in a social context. And I would miss the games I play, and I would miss uh tennis.
“the straight answer is very often one doesn't know. The the notion that most people have of science from things like weakest link is a set of certainties. That's how we see science in a society.”
“What chaos says is the simplest rules you can imagine. … really, really simple things can actually sometimes behave in a manner that is as complicated and as unpredictable as anything you can imagine.”
“We couldn't feed today's world with yesterday's agriculture and we won't be able to feed tomorrow's world with today's, but to do it in a way that is more environmentally sensitive, producing crops that are water tolerant, salt tolerant, resistant to particular insects while not putting stuff on them that kills all sorts of other things. In short, shaping the agriculture to its environment rather than wrenching the environment to the agriculture with fossil fuel energy subsidized things.”
“bridge I act contract bridge is the only training I ever had for administration and management, and brilliant training it is if you think about it. You have a partner. … You have to make decisions under uncertainty. … And very often you make the right decision brilliantly, but the opposing cards lie in an improbable way so that you get a disastrous result, and you have to cheerfully forget it and go without any disturbance on to the next hand. It's a perfect model for the civil service.”