John Polkinghorne interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 4th and 10th November 2008

0:09:07 Born in 1930 in Western-super-Mare but actually come from a Cornish family; father had nine brothers and a sister; Cornish grandfather was a stone mason; the village schoolmaster thought my father was the cleverest boy he had ever taught; father could not go to the Grammar School in Bodmin as it was too far away so he left school at fourteen; he had a good career in the Post Office and had moved from Cornwall to Western-super-Mare by the time of my birth; when I was five we moved to Street, a large manufacturing village in Somerset, and lived there until I was fourteen; Polkinghorne is a Cornish name and I think of myself as being Cornish; sadly I never knew my Cornish grandparents; my grandmother was a very dominant woman and quarrelled with all her daughters in law; my older brother, Peter, was eighteen months old when they were visiting them; father could see that his mother and wife would never get on, so they left; father visited his parents alone but we never went as a family; sadness to me that I never knew them; knew my mother's parents very well; their family name was Charlton which is my middle name; my maternal grandfather was a head groom and very skilful with horses; he trained and rode hunters in shows for his employers and won prizes at the White City; he was one of the most fulfilled men I have known; a contrast between the two families; my Cornish forebears were independent minded, small tradesmen while my mother's parents were both in service; we saw a lot of my maternal grandparents and eventually my grandfather came to live with us for a few years before his death

4:10:08 My mother was a remarkable woman in a way; looking back I can see that she wasn't the easiest of mothers as she was rather directive; she was the sort of person that people confided in and always gave good advice; she was very fond of literature and kindled my love of Dickens etc.; my father was a quieter, gentler sort of person; he had fought in the First World War but never spoke about it; he was a less obvious influence; both of my parents were religious people, Anglicans, and we went to church regularly; at Street we went to the local parish church where for most of the time there was a Vicar called Richard Daunton Fear who was a very good preacher; I remember having no difficulty in listening to him, even as a young child, so it was a pleasure to go to church; my parents never spoke much to me about religion directly, but it was clear that religion was important to them; looking back there was never a time that I was not a worshipping, believing, member of the church; see myself as a cradle Christian; I never really rebelled against it; I did National Service 1948-9 before coming up to Cambridge; I was a sergeant instructor at the Royal Education Corps and did get a little drunk on mess nights and began to use barrack room language; I didn't give up my religious practice and was a communicant during that time; when I came up to Cambridge I was taken to the Christian Union freshers' service in Holy Trinity at the beginning of Michaelmas term in 1949; the preacher was L.F.E. Wilkinson who encouraged us to commit ourselves to Christ; at the time I would have said that was my conversion; looking back I don't see it as such, but it was an important staging point in my spiritual life; I was very caught up with the Christian Union throughout my undergraduate days; I am to some extent grateful, but partly regretful as it was a rather narrow world with a fear of enjoyment or of other forms of Christian belief; I did find a deeper personal commitment to Christ through it, and came to value scripture; when I became a graduate student I moved away from it

10:18:16 I had a brother, Peter, who was nine years older; quite different from me and much more outgoing; he was a good pianist, was alright at school but not academically brilliant; I was clever as a boy; as he grew older he always had a fascinating girlfriend in tow; he went into the R.A.F. and trained as a pilot and was killed during the war; he was in Coastal Command; it was a curious event which we have never been able to sort out; they went out one night flying Liberators over the Atlantic; almost certainly they were killed by the weather rather than by the enemy; they went out for some special purpose and we have never been able to find out what it was; I was twelve when he was killed and was very upset; between us my parents had had a daughter, Ann, who had some sort of intestinal problem and died when she was six months old; so my parents had a sad life, losing two of their children; I was the only one left but they didn't emphasise the fact that all their hopes were in me although I knew that must be so; however, through my academic career, they were glad that I was fulfilling something that my father might have done had he had the educational opportunity; I think that I got my mathematical gift from my father; I do think there is a degree of genetic inheritance; I have a grandson who is reading mathematics at Trinity now, but of course there is the cultural aspect as well; mathematics is a funny sort of subject because either you can do it or you can't; it is a gift that people tend to show quite early; I went to the primary school in Street and from the start I was clever at sums but very slow in learning to read; my mother was worried about that; she had a friend who was a Froebel teacher who was teaching her son, who was about my age, at home; mother got me taught by her, and within a very short time I had mastered reading and became a voracious reader; the Clark family who were the local landowners ran a little school, essentially for their own family, with a few selected local children; it was called the Meeting House School [they were Quakers] and I went there; there must have been fifteen or sixteen children there at any one time with a single teacher, Miss Theobald, who was a very good teacher; she somehow managed to cope with the different ages; at that school I had what I now see as a very important experience; if you did good work you got a gold star and I used to get lots; one day Miss Theobald said she was going to do something different, and played couples of notes on the piano and asked us to write down which was higher or lower; I wrote them down expecting another gold star, and most of them were wrong; it was an important experience that you couldn't be good at everything; I have learnt to sing a note now, as I had to as a clergyman, but I still have to do it by some sort of intuition

17:40:12 Music has meant a lot to me but I never learnt to play anything; that in itself surprises me as my mother played the piano and encouraged my brother; I think that was probably because my parents recognised early on that I was going to be academically clever and they did not want anything to distract from that; I regret that but don't think I would have been any good at it; I like listening to music, especially contrapuntal music, which I suppose goes with mathematics; Bach is my favourite composer and I listen to music quite a bit; my wife was a musical person and she helped me too in that respect; I can't work to music; if I am going to listen to it I have to listen, I don't want it as background; when I write I must do it in the morning and I must have absolute freedom from distraction; I write in my study at home but I used to write in my room in Queen's; I do have a telephone in my study but am not often disturbed by that; I don't use email much to the irritation of my friends; the reason is quite simple; if you write books about science or religion you get a certain amount of unsolicited correspondence; I am very conscientious with my correspondence; the first time someone writes to me, however crazy, I always write back; I do have an email address which is unguessable and only my family know it; I love writing, it is one of my favourite occupations; for serious writing I have to write longhand; if the thought is flowing I just can't type fast enough; I write in biro on A4 paper; when I have done that I have to type it up; in the past I had a secretary who would do that for me, now I have to type it on a PC and I don't regret that at all; I don't naturally write good syntax and the close attention to the text that you get when typing allows me to correct some of the mistakes; if I am writing a serious article or a book, and I have time for it - I am very well organised with my deadlines so I almost always have time - I will set aside at least a couple of months to look at it again; this is because when I have just written something I tend to think it is good, later I can see faults and revise it; I love writing because I write to find out what I think; you read, think, ideas buzz around in the mind, but if you put something down on paper you have to ask what exactly you want to say and it crystallizes your thinking; John Robinson of 'Honest to God' fame, who was a good friend of mine, once said to me that he couldn't write without a pen in his hand; I knew exactly what he meant; the other thing I like about writing is that nobody tells you what to do; in most of life there has to be compromise but not when you are writing; the first book I had a hand in writing was a monograph that we wrote here in Cambridge called 'The Analytic S-Matrix'; four of us wrote it together and we had all worked together for many years and it was on a subject we were all pretty expert on, but it nearly destroyed our friendship; we each wrote a chapter but the arguments were so irritating as everybody was convinced that they knew the right way to do it; I have once or twice since written books with other people, but basically, never again; I have edited some multi-authored volumes, and you can't win; if you don't accept what they have written you have an enemy for life

25:54:02 I would have liked to have been good at games, but wasn't; I did a certain amount of walking in the countryside in Somerset; I was a voracious reader and there was an excellent library in Street which the Clark family had endowed; I was not a very enterprising child though it was war time; my father and I used to go for cycle rides, but I had a pretty quiet life; looking back, I rather regret that but am not sure what I would have done; I do remember at the Meeting House school we did handicrafts in the afternoon, mostly knitting, and Miss Theobald would read a story to us; one that I was entranced by I realize now was 'The Hobbit'; the sort of books I tended to read were either 'Just William' books or Percy F. Westerman; my mother encouraged me to read Dickens; I left this school at ten or eleven and went to Elmhurst, a little local grammar school in Street, with a pretty remarkable staff; there was a wonderful English teacher called Miss Pugh; we used to read Shakespeare and Sheridan in class and I began to engage with drama, although it was a long time before I saw such a play on stage; we used to occasionally go to the pantomime at the Bristol Hippodrome, but I hadn't seen a stage play until probably when I was an undergraduate; at the age of fourteen my father became the head Post Master at Ely; he was advised to send me to the Perse in Cambridge; at that time the King's School at Ely was just ticking over and I would have gone to Soham Grammar School; my father went to see the headmaster there who, having read the report from Elmhurst, suggested the Perse was a better choice; by the time I reached the Perse, the same man was now Headmaster at the Perse; I enjoyed the Perse although it was tiresome having to commute by train each day; most of the boys were day boys; the senior maths master, Vic Sederman, was a really inspiring teacher; he could see that I was good at maths and encouraged me; he used to give me work to do in the holidays which I enjoyed; it is an entrancing subject if you are good at it; I particularly liked calculus at that stage, which is such a clever and powerful technique; that launched me; for higher certificate I did double maths and physics; there were certainly other clever boys; the most outstanding boy of my particular generation was Peter Hall, the theatre director; there was perhaps a little more bullying at Elmhurst than at the Perse; being a clever boy at the former made you a little more unusual; but there was nothing really bad at either school; I did play the small role of Vincentio in 'Taming of the Shrew' in a school play where Peter Hall was Petruchio; the main downside of life at the Perse was that, as a train boy, I could not take part in the many extra-curricular activities

34:26:17 I went to the Army in July 1948; they had a scheme whereby if you were going to university you could go in early; I was not yet eighteen; I did my basic training on Salisbury Plain with the Royal Hampshire Regiment; exhausting, extraordinary, and an interesting barrack room because almost all the people there were going up to university; had a corporal in charge of the barrack room, and after we had been there three or four days he asked us if we had all been friends before coming into the army; I discovered an ability I hadn't known I had that I was a very good shot; the Royal Hampshires were keen on rifle shooting and I became part of their team entered for the Young Soldiers cup in the British Army in 1948, and we won; I have a little bronze medal at home to prove it - my one sporting triumph; I did not continue shooting when I came to the University; I got transferred to the Royal Army Education Corps; that was an interesting move as the educational qualification was that you had to have passed Higher School Certificate; I had taken the exam but had not got the results; when I was interviewed by the officer about this I put it to him that being a Major Scholar at Trinity might be equivalent to having passed Higher School Certificate and he accepted that; another chap in our group, Brian Rees, who eventually became Headmaster of Rugby, was only a Minor Scholar at Trinity and the army authority decided that it wasn't good enough, so he had to go into the Service Corps; I was sent down to Bodmin to do three months training, the only formal teaching training I have ever had; I was then posted to an army basic training centre just outside Malvern; my task was every fortnight to teach an introductory course in mathematics for those who were going to be electrical fitters; a bit boring, but one had to do it; because it was a training unit you also had to do regimental duties which I found difficult as a rather young eighteen year old; I escaped the trauma of the War other than for the loss of my brother; I always think there is a big division between my generation which didn't experience it and those a few years older who had seen, and sometimes done, extraordinary things; they have had experiences that one can only half imagine

40:27:07 I came up to Trinity and was part of an exceptionally talented cohort of people; the vagaries of National Service meant that two years of scholars were fused into one; there were a lot of good mathematicians around and you certainly learn as much from your contemporaries as you do from the Dons; my three closest friends were Michael Atiyah, who was my best man when I got married, and James MacKay and John Aitchison, who joined us from Scottish universities after our first year; James eventually became Lord Chancellor, so moved from mathematics into law, and John Aitchison became a statistician and Professor of Statistics at Hong Kong University for many years; they were all mathematicians although I did have friends in other disciplines; another mathematician in my year was Frank Adams who was sadly killed in a road accident when quite young, but was clearly outstanding; I was taught applied mathematics principally by Nicholas Kemmer who actually became my supervisor when I was a research student in my first year but then moved to Edinburgh; he was an exceptionally nice man and before the war he had made very important discoveries in theoretical particle physics, the subject I came to work in; something happened to him during the War; he was a Russian who had spent his early life in Germany and had come to this country in the late thirties; somehow he lost his nerve about physics during the War, and although he was still very clever he really didn't try and do anything or keep in touch with it; I was taught pure mathematics by Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch, a very distinguished Russian who had been at Trinity for a long time; he was an extraordinary teacher who would produce a tatty piece of paper with what looked like a simple problem and ask one to solve it; they were fiendishly difficult, and you would sit cudgelling your brain while he expressed surprise that you could solve it; I never solved one of those problems on the spot, but you took it away and worked on it, and with any luck came back with the solution the following week; it was a painful experience, but extraordinary; the lectures on mathematical analysis were given by Robert Rankin who lectured in a formal style, writing the arguments on the blackboard, speaking them while writing, you would copy them and that was it; it was difficult to see your way through them until Besicovitch looked at them and suggested the way to look at them – “this is small, this is large” and so on; as I went through my undergraduate years I got more and more interested in the fact that you could do mathematics to understand the physical world; I gravitated toward applied mathematics; in my third year I did Part III of the maths tripos and did quantum theory; the foundation course in quantum theory was taught by Paul Dirac who had been one of the great figures in the subject; he taught it absolutely without rhetoric and without any reference to what he had personally discovered; he laid out the argument with a sort of majestic inevitability about it, like the development of a Bach fugue really; it was an extraordinary experience and is preserved in the book he wrote 'The Principles of Quantum Mechanics'; he was a scientific saint, really, with a very simple, narrow mind in some sense; there are lots of Dirac stories which show this; Dirac's famous equation put together special relativity and quantum theory for the first time successfully; people had been trying but had not figured out how; Dirac found this extremely economic way of doing it; it was such a beautiful equation that I feel sure he felt he'd hit the bull's eye, but he immediately found that an unexpected consequence of his equation was that the electro-magnetic properties of the electron are twice as strong as you would expect them to be, which was a known fact but no one had known why it was so; it had that immediate bonus and within a couple of years he had also discovered that the equation implied the existence of anti-matter which was unknown beforehand, so a wonderful equation; it is engraved on Dirac's memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey; Dirac's concern was very much with the foundational structure of quantum theory, not very much with the nitty-gritty; a famous story of him lecturing in the 1950's when he referred to a recently discovered particle which had actually been discovered in the 1930's; of the great generation of pure mathematicians such as Hardy, Littlewood was still at Trinity though retired, and I only really got to know him when I became a Fellow; I got a first and I would have been deeply upset if I hadn't; I have always been rather reliant on those sorts of recognition to encourage one further; all our crowd were the same; I became a research student which was the most miserable year of my life; I found it very difficult to get going as it is totally different from doing tripos problems; the time scale is different because a tripos problem would take you a week and now the time scale was months; tripos problems are known to have solutions whereas research problems may or may not; I was not at all helped by Nicholas Kemmer who was a very nice man but took no particular lead; I stuck it out getting more and more miserable; then Kemmer left and Abdus Salaam, a Pakistani physicist, came; he knew where the action was; curiously enough he didn't give me a problem to work on but through him I found a problem in my second year; it was not too difficult but certainly one that was worth doing; it was concerned with quantum field theory - you take a field and add quantum mechanics to it; when you do that you get a richer theory than you would looking at them separately, but there is a danger of not making sense as it is full of infinities and you have to do various tricks to remove them; that had been worked out by a brilliant post-war generation of physicists - Feynman, Freeman Dyson and others; they had shown that you could remove these infinities but they applied it to something called the S-Matrix which was essentially saying that the time scale in which the interactions were taking place was infinite; that was not a bad approximation, but these manipulations were very delicate and it seemed to me worthwhile if you had a long but finite time scale to see if the thing would still work; that I was able to do; that formed the basis of my Fellowship thesis which I put in after two years; I didn't tell my parents I was putting this in as I didn't want them to be disappointed if I was unsuccessful; I travelled back to Cambridge at the beginning of my third year of research on the day that the Fellowship election results were announced; I arrived at Trinity in the afternoon to find my name on the list; also there were Michael Atiyah and John Eliot, the Cambridge historian; that was a great experience to become a Fellow; my parents were obviously very pleased though it was very important in our family not to be uppity about success

56:34:23 In my day when you came up as an undergraduate at Trinity, in your first year you lived out unless you were a Scholar; as such you got to know each other well and had to dine in each night, so I knew John Eliot moderately well; we got to know each other better when we became Fellows; I was a Fellow for more than thirty years and had expected to die a Fellow; I was first of all a research fellow for four years; I became a lecturer in applied maths here and became a teaching fellow, and then a professorial fellow; I was here long enough to become a life fellow; when I went off into parish life I was still a fellow, but when I came back to Cambridge I came to be Dean of the Chapel at Trinity Hall and became a Fellow there; this meant I automatically lost my Trinity Fellowship but it was a real bereavement not to be a Fellow of Trinity; I am still at Queen's, I like it and am grateful to it, but I am still a Trinity man underneath; there is the weight of past glory, you feel that you are some tiny part of this enormous intellectual tradition; in my own part of the world you can recite the names of Newton, Maxwell, Rutherford and Thompson, it is a great succession; it is a very beautiful college; it is very big and when I went to Trinity Hall it was a very different experience; it compensated for this fact that congenial groups formed within it; I go back very occasionally, perhaps once a term, and it is nice to do so

Second Part

0:09:07 The University is a great marriage bureau so I met my wife as an undergraduate, through Michael Atiyah; he was interested in someone in Girton who was a mathematician; she wanted to invite him to tea but the convention at the time dictated that there should be someone else present; she asked Michael to bring someone with him and he asked me; her room mate was there, a young woman called Ruth Martin, also reading mathematics, and that is how we met; Ruth was also part of CICCU and we tended to meet each other; we didn't meet each other in maths lectures as she was doing the slow course while I was doing the fast; by the time we both graduated - Ruth left Cambridge and trained to be a statistician - there was an intention in both our minds that we should marry; circumstances were not favourable until I became a Research Fellow at Trinity, four years later; we married in March 1955; we lived in a little flat in Trinity Street above Hobbs’ sports shop until we went to America; I got a Commonwealth Fellowship to work as a post-doc. and we had a wonderful year there; the deal was that you spent nine months in the university of your choice - I went to Caltech - then you had to spend three months travelling around the United States; I am very much a Protestant work ethic type of person and couldn't think of taking a three month holiday unless it was compulsory; we had a wonderful holiday zigzagging across the States; Ruth had an aunt who lived in New Jersey and we spent time with her; I had gone to work with a very famous theoretical physicist called Murray Gell-Mann; he was only a few years older, but already a world famous figure who went on to win a Nobel Prize; he invented the name and concept of quarks; I learnt an enormous amount from him; he was absolutely at the forefront of particle physics at that time; I also learnt how you work with somebody of that kind; you have to pick up from them where the action is but you can't stay in their immediate company too long; they will always out-think you and overpower you; after you have seen the sort of area where you might do something you must retreat and figure out on your own how to do it; that is what I did; much later I wrote quite an important paper, working out models of deep inelastic scattering; this happens when a projectile collides with a particle and comes off at a very wide angle, having been turn around on impact; that means it must have hit something point-like within the target particle; you can construct theories of these things and analyse experimental results in terms of them; on analysis you find the properties of these little scattering centres, the hard things inside, had the properties of quarks; nobody has ever directly seen a quark there, they never appear on their own, but this was one of the more direct ways of inferring that they were within; that work came very much later in the late 1960's, early 1970's

5:14:08 I came back to my first university teaching job in Edinburgh, in Nicholas Kemmer's department; we lived there for two years; I enjoyed university teaching; again there were research students hanging round the place not knowing quite what to do and I was able to give them suggestions and liven up the place a bit; after two years the opportunity came to return to Cambridge as a lecturer in applied maths; I also became a Teaching Fellow of Trinity; that gave us an established position and we bought a house in Rutherford Road; we had our first child, Peter, in Edinburgh and he was about six months old when we came back; Rutherford Road was just a new block of houses; we thought we should buy the biggest house we could afford which at the time was £5,000; it was a cul de sac and most of the other houses were occupied by people with young families, so our children grew up with friends in a safe environment; from then I was continuously in Cambridge until I resigned to join the Ministry; Ruth lived the conventional life of a Don's wife in those days, at home bringing up the children; I used to go to supervise two nights a week at Trinity and would stay for dinner afterwards; I would go into Chapel on Sunday evenings and stay in for dinner then too; on the other hand I did try to make a clear separation between work that I did in the Department and family life at home; when at home I was available, and on the nights when the children had not gone to bed I really enjoyed reading to them, which always ended with a Bible story of some sort; in terms of the standard of the day I was not a bad father, though the next generation were rather more domesticated; we had two more children, a daughter, Isobel, and son, Michael; Ruth was quite a musical person and played the cello; she had played in CUMS as an undergraduate and played in the Cambridge Philharmonic when she came back; her family were an amateur musical family who formed a string quartet together; she was engaged in voluntary activities, later Diocesan Treasurer of the Mothers' Union, and things of that nature; we were a devout family and were anxious to help our children grow up in the Christian faith, but equally anxious not to shove it down their throats; we devised a scheme, a two week pattern, where in the first week I went to early communion in Trinity and came back in time for Ruth to go to the mid-morning service in Holy Trinity; on that day the children could choose to go or not; mostly the boys chose not to but our daughter did go; on the second Sunday we all had to go to Holy Trinity; eventually that system dissolved when I went to spend some time on sabbatical leave in the States, and Ruth and the children all went to church; when I came back they were used to that and they have grown up in the faith; it was only when the children were beginning to leave home that Ruth began to think about what to do next; she didn't want to go back to statistics or to teach maths, so decided she would like to train to be a nurse; at the same time that I was training to become a priest she did her training; she subsequently worked as a nurse for about a dozen years before retiring; she did geriatric nursing almost entirely as she liked its hands-on character

11:57:17 In terms of academic achievement, one would be the deep inelastic scattering referred to earlier, probably the most important piece of theoretical physics that I did; before that there had been a lot of interest in trying to formulate an S-matrix theory, a theory that didn't directly appeal to quantum field theory but simply said there must be a quantum mechanical amplitude which connects what goes in and out called the S-matrix; this would have certain general properties, and maybe those general properties are so powerful that they ought to determine or almost determine the structure this has to have; in order for that to be a hopeful programme you had to first of all determine what sort of property these amplitudes had; they turned out to be mathematical properties concerned with analytical mathematics, concerned with their behaviour and singularity; no mathematical function can be completely smooth or well-behaved, all functions have to have some points where they blow up, where they are singular, and you can characterize functions by finding what the singularities are; I did a lot of work on a variety of models in collaboration with others, determining what the singularity structure of these amplitudes would be; the work went on over a longish period, ten years perhaps; a great body of information came out of that; in the end, I am sad to say, the S-matrix programme collapsed under its own weight; we found that the properties were so complicated - the original hope was that they would be very simple properties - but we kept on finding more singularities, and it became so complicated that the whole thing as a calculational program or a way of formulating particle physics just collapsed; these properties are part of relativistic quantum mechanics, they are there, but don't relate directly to experimentally explorable possibilities in the way that the deep inelastic scattering models did; so that is my career in a nutshell; I have to say that I enjoyed all that, and certainly regarded it as being a Christian vocation to use such talents as I had in that area; I eventually became Professor of Mathematical Physics and a senior member of a large, very talented, research group; I loved supervising research students; I had a very clever student in Edinburgh called Tom Kibble who was the first of my students to become an FRS; he worked on variations of the Higgs boson theory and things like that; then I had a very clever chap called Peter Goddard who eventually became a string theorist and Master of St John's, and is now Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; my last research student of all was James Stirling who worked on the deep inelatic scattering models that I was interested in, and is now the Jacksonian Professor in the Cavendish; I taught Martin Rees as an undergraduate, and also Brian Josephson who was undoubtedly the most talented undergraduate student I ever had; he came up very young and was very shy; he was fantastically competent and could do any problem that you asked him to do; so supervisions were a nightmare in a way because after five minutes where you just checked he had got everything right, I would try to get a conversation going about some further aspect of physics and he was unresponsive; at the end of term I had to write a supervision report in which I said he was extremely technically competent but may lack originality; within five years of that he had done work which won him the Nobel Prize; I also taught Martin Rees quantum mechanics, he was much more forthcoming and a pleasure to teach; he is obviously very clever but I hadn't seen that he would become such a creative physicist; all my research students got a PhD in the end, some by the skin of their teeth; I had about twenty-eight in all; of course, we all worked in the Department and saw each other for coffee and tea; everybody had a blackboard in their room and you would go down an write some equations on the board and discuss them; in the new Centre for Mathematical Sciences they have blackboards in the lifts; the shift from the old to the new Cavendish had no effect on me as I wasn't in the Cavendish

19:18:03 I did not leave physics because I was disillusioned by it, but in these mathematically based subjects you don't get better as you get older; what counts is mental flexibility rather than accumulated experience; while it is unlikely that you will have done your best work before twenty-five it is very likely that you have by the time you are forty-five; the second thing was that the subject was changing its character; all the time I had worked in particle physics there had been very clever theorists around but it had been experimentally driven, resulting in the second half of the 1970's in the so called standard model, which is the quark structure of matter; then the input from experiment began to dry up; many of the experiments were too expensive to do and a mode of extraordinary speculative freedom came upon particle physics; string theory began to come into existence and for the last twenty-five years it has dominated my sort of theoretical physics; very clever people are involved in it and it is sensible to explore the richness of putting quantum theory and relativity theory together, but it is highly speculative theory; people don't hesitate to say theory works in ten or eleven dimensions of space time, therefore there must be ten or eleven dimensions of space time; now we know that the theory has something like ten to the five-hundred sets of possible consequences, people say there must be ten to five-hundred different universes; it is purporting to speak about what happens in the physical realm, sixteen orders of magnitude, sixteen powers of ten beyond anything we have direct experimental experience of; sixteen orders of magnitude take you from a city the size of Cambridge to something smaller than an atom, that is a very big leap of imagination; so the subject has changed its character; string theory involved new types of mathematics which I would have had to learn, I was losing mental flexibility and I was not congenially disposed towards it, so I thought the time had come to do something different; Christianity has always been central to my life and I had the experience of becoming a lay reader at Holy Trinity, I did occasional preaching and helped with services, and found great satisfaction in doing that; I had long thought I wouldn't stay in theoretical physics all my life, but only after my forty-fifth birthday did I begin to think seriously about what I should do and to discuss it with Ruth; quite quickly it came into both our minds that I should seek ordination; it was a big change but it did seem to be the right thing; the next thing you have to do is to go off to a so-called selection conference where the Church would test your vocation; that was a very helpful experience because you join a group of fifteen or so people who want to be ordinands and there are wise and experienced people there who have individual conversations with you; you worship together, each take turns leading a discussion group, and they watch you over a three or four day period in a retreat house somewhere; at the end they can either say yes or no or wait; they said yes to me, and I was pleased and helped by that as there was no sign that they were impressed by the fact that I was an FRS and a Cambridge Professor, which of course they should not have been; then I had to begin winding up my academic affairs and I had an eighteen month period to do this; it had been a secret between Ruth and me and one or two close friends, then I told the family and very soon after told my colleagues in the Department; this was early in 1978; there was a stunned silence at first, then one of my colleagues, Peter Landshoff, with whom I had done a lot of work, said that if I had told him I was going to leave physics he would have guessed this was what I was going to do; news spread quickly as particle physics was a sort of intellectual village and we all knew each other; during the eighteen months I was asked often why I was a Christian at all and I would try to give an explanation; eventually it formed in my mind what I would have said if I had seven or eight hours to explain; this was the basis for the first book I wrote about science and religion, 'The Way the World Is', but that came significantly later

27:22:24 There was a twofold theme of the book; the world that science explores is wonderfully ordered and amazingly fruitful; I think you can discuss this in a truth-seeking way which supports the notion that there is a divine mind and purpose behind the unfolding fruitful history; that would give you a picture of God as something like the cosmic architect or the great mathematician; there would still be many unanswered questions such as whether God cares for individual human beings which you can't solve in that way; that is where my Christian belief comes in; that really centres on the figure of Jesus Christ as I meet him in the New Testament, in the Church and in the sacraments; he is somebody I have to absolutely take seriously; the pivot of my belief really is that Jesus was raised from the dead the first Easter day, a counter-intuitive thing to believe, obviously; I write books and arguments about this sort of thing, but in a nutshell there is something very strange about Jesus, he draws the crowds, says wise things and then everything seems to collapse on that last visit to Jerusalem; he is arrested, painful, shameful death, a death that any first century Jew would see as a sign of God's rejection, hung on a tree, deserted by his followers, cry of rejection - Jesus's life seems to end in failure; if it had ended there I think we would never have heard of him except as yet another messianic pretender; but something continued his story; all the New Testament writers say that he was raised from the dead; of course you have to look at that very carefully and you have to evaluate the stories, but I do try to do that, and do believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; that leads me to believe that Jesus really is, as Christian belief came to formulate, God living a human life to make manifest the nature of God through that human life; does God care for people? did Jesus care for people? this begs an enormous number of questions but I do try to address those questions, both in my own mind and in my writings

31:04:11 I am really saddened to read Dawkins' writings because I think it so polemical and it doesn't have the signs of being truth-seeking at all, full of assertions and distorted evidence; I do think that science and religion basically are friends and not foes, as they are both concerned with the search for the truth; the truth attainable through motivated belief, though the kinds of truth and motivations are different between the two; I like to say that I am two eyed and can look at the world through both science and religion, and binocular vision allows me to see more than one eye on its own; never felt an either or crisis situation in my life, I need both; the suggestion that nineteenth century science gave rise to the idea of the end of religion is a gross over-simplification; if you think about the great figures - Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, J.J. Thompson - they were all people of religious belief; there were more difficulties on the biological side and that has remained the case, partly because biologists see a much more ambiguous picture of the world, and religious people have to take that ambiguity seriously; even when you think of 1859 and 'Origin of Species', the idea that all the scientists said yes to Darwin and religious people said no, is of course untrue; there were religious people from the start who welcomed Darwin's ideas, such as Charles Kingsley and Aubery Moore; equally, there were lots of difficulties on the scientific side with Darwin's ideas until Mendel's discovery of genetics was recovered in the twentieth century to explain the small variations through which evolutionary process has to work; so it is a complicated story

35:22:03 I also feel saddened by creationism and its prevalence in America; I go to the States quite often and people will try to put you right about it; it saddens me as these are people, who I think are genuinely seeking to serve the God of truth, are refusing some of the truth that comes from science; it certainly doesn't provide the whole truth but it does provide some of it, and they should be grateful for that and take it seriously; I am also sad that they are insisting on a literal, flat-footed, interpretation of Genesis I and II, they are seeking to bind burdens on people wanting to believe which they should not be asked to bear; it is also a very brittle position; if some of these people get convinced that evolution is a substantial part of the true account of the history of life, then maybe everything goes, not just their views about the age of the earth but their whole religious belief as well; though these people want to be respectful to scripture they are in fact refusing scripture because they are reading Genesis I and II as if it were a divinely dictated scientific textbook, and are not respecting the genre which is not scientific but theological; it is a terrible mess and it upsets me that it seems to be so prevalent, particularly in the United States

37:48:01 I don't doubt that the problem of evil and suffering is the most difficult problem for religious belief and holds more people back from it than anything else, and troubles us believers more than anything else; I do think that as far as moral evil is concerned, the cruelties and neglects of humankind, that the free will defence has some power to it; it is not clear to me that God could have produced a world in which people always freely chose to do the good; I think in some ways more troubling is natural evil; wars and genocides are clearly substantially human responsibilities, but disease and disaster seem much more the responsibility of the Creator; we don't make earthquakes or invent the HIV virus and things like that; here I think that science is mildly helpful though the notion that an evolving world is a great good because creatures are free to make themselves, and bring the birth the fruitfulness and potentiality with which creation has been endowed; that is a great good but has an inescapable shadow side because the shuffling explorations of chance which is what the evolutionary process is, will of course have great fruitfulness but also ragged edges and blind alleys; mutations will cause new forms of life but also malignancy, you can't have one without the other; I think that is somewhat helpful in relation to this; it suggests that disease, for example, is not gratuitous, or that a God more competent or less callous could easily have dealt with it; then there is a specific Christian response to the problem of evil and suffering which is to see the cross of Christ as God's actual participation as a fellow sufferer; the Christian God is not simply a compassionate spectator in heaven but has been impaled in the contradictions of this world in that lonely figure at Calvary; it is a deep, mysterious, extremely important insight, and is an important part of what makes the Christian faith possible for me

41:28:08 I think the second biggest problem of religious belief is to think about  the diversity of the world's faiths; I certainly don't think that Hindus and Buddhists are all damned; that is a very terrible and crude mistake about the mercy of God; I do believe that in the end all must come to God through Christ because I believe that He is the unique link between the life of Divinity and the life of creatures, but that doesn't mean that only people that know Christ by name in this life are going to be able to cross that bridge; I am puzzled and disturbed by the diversity of the world's faiths; in one sense they are all speaking about the same domain of experience, but they say such different things about it; they have things in common - all value compassion, mystic encounters - but they also say such different things; the Abrahamic faiths see the human being  as of unique and abiding significance, our Hindu friends think that the human being is recycled through reincarnation, our Buddhist friends think that the self is an illusion, ultimately from which to seek release; those are not three different sets of people saying the same thing in three different cultural languages, they are saying three different things; I am deeply puzzled by that, and am particularly unnerved as a scientist, because although science started in seventeenth century Western Europe, now it is worldwide; you stop the right sort of somebody in the street in London, Delhi or Tokyo, and ask them what matter is made of they will say quarks and gluons, if you ask them about ultimate reality you will get three different answers; I think we are just beginning to struggle with this problem because the multi-faith, multi-ethnic, nature of our society means that people of other faiths are our neighbours, and we can see that they have an authenticity in their spiritual life that is not to be gainsaid, nevertheless there are these clashes of belief

44:33:22 I think that there are a number of things special about Cambridge; one is the collegiality of Cambridge, a big University split into small intellectual villages where you do meet people who are working in all sorts of different subjects; conversation on high table is not always at the highest academic level, nevertheless the variety of interests can be very stimulating; it is a beautiful place in which to live so is a privilege to more round in these beautiful buildings; Ruth and I had the privilege of the President's Lodge in Queens which is a lovely place to live in; wonderful to feel you are a bit of this ongoing stream of knowledge which has continued for eight hundred years; more generally, I am not a big town person so Cambridge is just the right size for me, and because of the University it has cultural resources far in excess of what you would expect in a average town of this size; I would like to say something about training for the Ministry, coming back to the University and becoming the head of a College

Third Part - 10th November 2008

0:09:07 I went to Westcott House in 1979 just before my forty-ninth birthday; it was a funny experience becoming a student again; I was used to standing up and talking for an hour but it was much more difficult to sit and listen for an hour; there were many things I had to learn; I particularly enjoyed the New Testament courses; if you are a scientist, your instinct is to say what are the foundational phenomena which I can understand here, and for me Christianity is contained in the New Testament witness; I taught myself elementary New Testament Greek before I went to Westcott and I learnt a bit of Hebrew there, which was quite useful in using commentaries based on texts; I was the oldest person in the House and most of my contemporaries were talented young people in their late twenties; I felt very aged and wise at times; I also lived a double life; I got tired of being a student all the time and I could walk up Jesus Lane and turn into a Don again because although I had given up my Professorship the College kindly allowed me to work my way through Westcott by teaching for Trinity; I therefore remained a Fellow and could get away from student food from time to time; it was a very interesting two years leading to ordination; the Church of England believes in the apprentice system still so there are lots of things about being a clergyman that you can only learn on the beat; you have to do three years under the supervision of an experienced priest, serve your title as we call it; I did most of my title in a large working-class parish in Bedminster, south of Bristol; I was glad to go to Bristol as my mother was still alive and living in Wells, so we were quite close to her, and also Bristol was the big town of my youth, having grown up in Somerset; that was a very interesting experience; a lot of the time you just cruise around visiting the sick etc.; one of the things I learnt being in Bedminster in an area called Windmill Hill, that you could have a village within a big city; Windmill Hill was a working-class area, but typically people lived in what their parents had bought in the 1930's; it was a very stable community so they knew their neighbours; they had a constrained notion of the neighbourhood; I asked one old lady if she had any family nearby to which she replied that she had not as they lived at Whitchurch, a mile and a half away; the intellectual side wasn't exercised very much; there were one or two people in the parish interested in science and religion with whom I talked, but mostly I was just learning the job; after I had done that I was licensed to go solo and became vicar of a largish village outside Canterbury called Blean, a curiously, straggly place topographically, but very coherent socially; it was a community and the church had a real role within it; I would be expected to be at the flower show, the pensioners afternoons, they insisted on giving me a raffle ticket every time and I embarrassingly frequently won prizes; again the intellectual side was not too exercised though part of the agreement was that I would have some spare time to do a bit of writing; I wrote a book called 'One World' about science and religion which was quite successful; after I had been there for two years I went for a interview with the Bishop of Dover who ran the Diocese; I told him that I enjoyed being at Blean but in the longer term wanted something with a more intellectual component in it; I thought I was making a marker for several years hence; the Church of England is a very odd place in how you find jobs; some are advertised but you need to be watching your own interests really; within six months of having that conversation I was rung up by someone I knew in Trinity Hall who said they were looking for a new Dean and would like to interview me; after the interview they offered me the job; I then had to make up my mind whether to accept it because I had only been in Blean for two and a half years; my wife also was very reluctant to leave as she really enjoyed village life and the Women's Institute; I went to see the Bishop again and he said that he thought I had been offered the job I had described when I had last gone to see him - a wise and helpful thing to say; after a bit of hesitation I accepted the job and we returned to Cambridge; we had been away almost five years and people assumed we must be glad to be back; I said it was not as simple as that and Ruth just said "No"; she reconciled herself to being back; I enjoyed Trinity Hall; it was an interesting job as it had a liturgical and pastoral aspect, I ran the worship in Chapel and did what I could pastorally though I was not terribly good with undergraduates, bud did some with Dons and the staff; I also directed studies in theology in the College, and had a chance to write; I enjoyed the Hall very much; Trinity was large, grand and rich; Trinity Hall was comfortably off but small and domestic; they had this very good system where every Tuesday there would be a dinner for Fellows only and most of them came, a real binding occasion; I would have been perfectly happy to have stayed there for the rest of my academic life; then one day I was contacted by someone in Queens who said they were looking for a new President and would I like to be considered; I agreed though said I would have to think about it very carefully; after about three weeks the Vice President invited me to dinner, after which I was to be asked some questions; later I was invited with my wife for lunch; as it looked serious, I contacted three senior bishops, including the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood; I explained that I might be offered the Presidency of Queens but was unsure whether to take it as it was a secular job, though I knew I would have a role in the Chapel; they all independently said they thought there was some merit in some clergymen holding secular jobs it they had the experience to do it; eventually I was offered the job; then there was one final thing to be sorted out; Queens have double sets and there was agitation among the students to have mixed sharing of double sets which had not been allowed in College before, and the governing body was about to make up its mind; my own personal morality is pretty straight-forward - I believe that sexual relationships should be within lifelong marriage; I realize that not everybody agrees, and that Colleges no longer stand in loco parentis; I was not happy with the idea that colleges pry into people's relationships but to allow double sharing would be an institutional acceptance of something that I personally disagreed with; I said that if they decided to allow it then I couldn't accept the Presidency; in the end they didn't accept it so I became the President and moved into Queens; I was there for seven years; we lived in this wonderful Lodge, and had nice staff that helped us; just after we moved in there was a census which included a questionnaire about accommodation; we had twenty rooms  for the two of us; had a desire to write in the margin that this was not as scandalous as it sounded; I think that one of the key things in being head of house is to realise that you are not the CEO, you have to carry people with you; I liked that as I am not a CEO by temperament; of course, the governing body didn't always do what I thought was best but we didn't have any pitched battles; we did a lot of entertaining; I was not an enterprising sort of person so didn't produce enormous change; when I had been interviewed I said that I would do what I could for fundraising and be friendly with alumni; I had to essentially start from scratch as I didn't know any old Queens people and I did not have a natural taste for fundraising; two years after I retired in 1996 was the five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the college; that was a big fundraising challenge for my successor, John Eatwell, who is a natural at that sort of thing

14:03:05 I had given up science although I had kept an interest in it, but I was able to do a fair amount of writing on science and religion; one of the things I missed in parish life was working with colleagues; parish life is fairly lonely; I used to go to chapter meetings with the local Deanery clergy, and people would stagger in with enormous diaries, I think to emphasise how busy they were; another thing I missed was the rhythm of term and vacation, although term is busy there is always vacation; parish life is fifty-two weeks a year chugging away; being the head of a house is not absolutely full time and gives you room for some of your own work; I think it important that heads of houses do have some sort of academic interest; I longed to be an FRS and it took me a little bit longer to be elected (1974) than I thought it might; I am very sad about this recent episode at the Royal Society, with their education advisor, Michael Reiss; he made it perfectly clear in a letter to the Times that what he had said at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was, of course, evolution is far and away the best explanation of the history and diversity of life; that creation science is not science and is not scientifically supported; but he also said that if in a science lesson somebody raised the creation question, you should not tell them not to, but explain that this wasn't the accepted way of thinking about things; they should be treated with some degree of respect; that seems to me to be an entirely reasonable thing to say; he was the victim of a sound bite which twisted his meaning so that he seemed to be saying that we should teach creation science in science lessons; my understanding is that the initial stance was to support him but then some fairly militant Fellows made such a fuss that they caved in; I very much regret that

18:29:01 I am interested in the history of Anglicanism and it is quite true that the English reformation was intellectually inspired from Cambridge; on the whole, Cambridge has played an interesting role over the centuries in this respect; one of the persons who got the old-fashioned natural theology going was John Ray who was a pioneer of taxonomy and wrote 'The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation'; William Paley represents the peak of that sort of movement was also a Cambridge man, a Christ's man; another Christ's man, Charles Darwin, gave a different form of the argument in 'Origin of Species'; in the nineteenth century the great strength of Cambridge was in New Testament studies, Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort were all people of very great scholarly ability and played a fundamental role in developing that kind of study in this country; the English style of doing that sort of study was careful but not as sceptically inclined as much of the German scholarship was; that has continued until fairly recently; Charles Simeon was an influential figure and CICCU has remained active here; I spoke earlier of my undergraduate involvement with it; one of the most extraordinary things has been the decline and disappearance of the SCM (Student Christian Movement) which was a more liberal counterpart to the evangelical Christian Union; it turned tremendously Marxist in the late sixties and withered away because of that and has not really re-established itself; Platonism has had an ambiguous influence on Christianity and has tended to encourage too spiritual a view at times; I think the dualistic view of the soul is not sustainable, nor a Biblical option either; most of the writers of the Bible saw human beings as animated bodies rather than souls; from my own belief I find Christian belief of a fairly orthodox kind more persuasive than a rather nebulous thing; think there is an explanatory power and comprehensiveness in a well articulated Christian theology than in a more nebulous spirituality

25:55:23 I think there is something in the idea that religion is necessary for science; the Abrahamic faiths all see the world as having a rational creator whose creation will have order to it, but the creator was also free to choose the order of the world, so you have to look and see the order that was chosen; that brings together the idea that there is order in the world, perhaps mathematically discernable, but you have empirically to look to see what that order is; moreover, if you believe the world to be God's creation then it is worthwhile to explore it, to read the book of nature as well as scripture; these things do combine together and provide some explanation of why the Ancient Greeks didn't quite get onto it, despite Archimedes, and the Chinese with their tremendous medieval civilization didn't get onto it either; I think you neither want an endlessly interfering celestial magician nor a deistic spectator; my picture, supported both by science and theology, is of a world of open process, not a clockwork deterministic world, but something more subtle and supple, and that God does act providentially within history just as we are allowed, in our small way, to act as agents; on the question of miracles, something I can't duck is my own belief that Jesus was raised from the dead; the problem of miracles is not such a scientific problem but a theological problem, that whatever God does he is surely not a celestial conjurer, capriciously doing today what He didn't think about doing yesterday; there is the question of divine consistency concerning miracles; God is not condemned never to do anything new, that is why we use personal language about Him; God is more like father than force; the force of gravity is always a force and will never change; God is more like a person and people can do things in particular circumstances which are unprecedented; that is the problem of the miracle; that is why, if you take the Christian view of the nature of Jesus, that he is God living a human life, then the fact that he was raised from the dead becomes not a random, capricious act, but a fulfilling and testifying act; miracles are not to be trivialized

31:02:24 I like Freeman Dyson's statement: "The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming"; what he means is that we have come to realize as we have understood the processes of cosmic history, that though this has happened through a whole sequence of evolutionary processes, nevertheless its possibility also depended on the given physical fabric of the world, the basic laws of nature taking a very particular and finely tuned form; only if the laws of physics lie within a very narrow range will it be possible for stars to make carbon, for example, on which life depends; there are many examples of this fine tuning; that is what Freeman Dyson is referring to; he phrases it in a curious way; I don't know what he means by saying the universe must have known that we were coming; Freeman has an ambiguous relationship to religious belief; he would call himself a cultural Christian but not a fully committed believer, and I think he was just trying to avoid the word God at that point; I would say that God intended that something like us (i.e. Self-conscious beings of some sort) should become; I believe that when I left science for the church, I turned my collar around but didn't forgo the search for truth; the question of truth seems to me absolutely central to religion as it is to science; I understand truth in a correspondence sense, matching our thinking and understanding to the nature of reality; of course, not a totally adequate or perfect match, but that is what we are aiming for; that is as essential to religion as anything else; religion is not, in my view, a technique for consolation or getting us through life; it is concerned with the reality within which we live; I think in both science and religion we are seeking truth through motivated belief; religious belief is not based on some unquestionable authority, some guaranteed sacred book that tells you all the answers, it is the understanding of particular events, persons and experiences which seem to be transparent to a sacred reality; of course, religion doesn't have the repeatable character that science does; of course, theology is much more difficult than science; we transcend the physical and biological world and put it to the test, God transcends us and can't be put to the test; I do not believe that when I moved from concentrating my intellectual efforts on science to theology that I changed all that much

35:40:00 Anthony Kenny's statement: "After all, if there is no God, then God is incalculably the greatest single creation of the human imagination", is another that I like and I think it is justified; Dawkins tells us how terribly malign belief in God has been; nobody could deny that belief has been misused and has lead to inquisitions, crusades, and all sorts of terrible things which religious people must take responsibility for and feel penitent; but equally, religion has been extraordinarily fruitful in individual human lives, in inspiring art and movements to improve human life - the abolition of slavery would be an example - it does seem to me that its highly suggestive, the influence so powerful and fruitful, that it is reasonable to think that there might be reality inspiring it; obviously, human beings have limited imaginative and intellectual resources, and we have to use what we can; seems to me that it is less misleading to think of God in personal terms than in impersonal terms; therefore we can't help having some sort of human images; of course, Christian belief would say that that is not wholly misleading as there is some analogical relationship between human beings and the true nature of God, but I don't want to make that an a priori principle; in physics we have the wonderful language of mathematics which seems so perfectly tailored to what we want to do; in almost everything else we try to do we don't have quite such apt resources to use; I think that it is an extraordinarily significant fact about the world that we are able to plumb it to its depths; obviously we have got to understand the everyday world, but the quantum world is quite different, and although there are some unresolved problems about our understanding of it, nevertheless we can make a great deal of sense of it; I do think that is a very striking fact about the world; incidentally, I find talking with non-believing physicist friends, that it is one of the things they find they are most uneasy about; the fact that the world is deeply intelligible and wonderfully ordered, does seem a non-trivial fact about the world in which we live; it would seem intellectually lazy to say it was just a bit of good luck and there was nothing more to say about it; it is difficult to know what to say about it other than that is seems to be evidence of some sort of cosmic mind; people can be made uneasy by this explanation, but I have personally not encountered any really serious counter-suggestion; of course, if you think that argument is really convincing it still gives you a very limited notion of God - God as the great mathematician or something like that; I think there is a lot more that we would want to know about God and can know about Him than that, but at least it puts the theistic question on the agenda; there is a possibility that our minds are not equipped to understand anyway, nevertheless I still think it is very significant that we can understand as much as we can; I don't want to claim that the human mind has unlimited ability to understand everything but it really is quite astonishing the range of our understanding; that in itself is sufficient to put the question on the agenda; as for encountering limits, the only way to find that out is to push the boundaries back and see what we find