Haroon Ahmed interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 8th December 2009 0:05:07 Born in Calcutta in 1936; my father had been posted there and three of his children were born there; he was a civil servant in the Indian Engineering Service; my mother had married at seventeen so had only just finished school; my paternal grandfather died before I was born; he was also a minor administrator, involved in dispensing justice under the guidance of the local Commissioner, usually a young Englishman; I knew my maternal grandfather well as a boy; he was a civil engineer, a very successful businessman who made a fortune building bits of New Delhi under Lutyens; he also got involved in building airfields on the Eastern border of India when the Japanese invasion was feared; they were never used and were then abandoned; later the broken concrete slabs were discovered and the story was revealed; he built himself a fine house in New Delhi where I mostly grew up until the Partition of India in 1947; my maternal grandmother died when my mother was only twelve; she was a remarkable woman because she was a photographer and also drove a car, which was an achievement at that time; I am sorry that I never met her, but maybe she influenced my mother a great deal; I suddenly remember that the car was a Chevrolet, an American car 4:07:07 I remember a very loving and caring home in my early years; I was the third child and rather pampered because the first two were girls; I am six years older than my younger brother and I suppose my earliest memories were being jealous of him; he had an ayah but I was now growing out of ayahs because I was going to school, and I greatly resented that he was staying at home; the first definitive memories were those of the Partition of India when I was eleven 5:36:09 My father had trained as an engineer and had gone to Germany between the wars, during the time of hyper-inflation in the 1930s; he had gone with a group of Indian students who were not welcome in either India or England for having participated in the non-cooperation movements; he was at Aligarh University where he got into trouble because of his involvement in political agitation; he was a very mild and unassuming man who had taken a degree of Diplom-Ingenieur in Germany which was very highly regarded there; because British qualifications were more valued in India, when he returned he became an engineer and eventually became a reasonably high-ranking civil servant; he was tolerant and did not push me, but my mother did; my maternal grandfather had to some extent supported my father's education; he realized how clever my father was when he came back from Germany, and the marriage was arranged; he was fifteen years older than my mother; that is one of the things that defines my relationship with my parents - my mother was young, my father was older; my father was calm and staid, my mother very excitable and forceful; she made us do our homework, taught us to speak English at an early age, and read a great deal herself, although mainly light fiction; she had been to good schools and had had an English governess; my mother was a strong influence on me, but stronger still was my sister; the elder of my two sisters was three years older than me and was immensely clever; I had to run to keep up with her; to be three years younger and chasing this clever person was very useful for me; I read many of her books three years before I should be reading them as I just read what she was reading; she would bring into the house a lot of things that I would never have had access to; she didn't bully me but wasn't protective either; she thought I was spoilt and sometimes hid her books from me; we are now both old but retain the happiest of friendships; my mother was always in control of my life until I was married, and would know intimate details of what I was up to; she did this with all her children and nobody would be left unaware of her views on what we were doing 10:39:06 My parents were both Muslims, but neither was strongly religious; they did not pray regularly except on Eid days, when we all conformed, like the British at Christmas; I think my father was; we obeyed the general rules on alcohol and pork, but nobody went to pray regularly; at the time of the Bengal famine I was beginning to read the newspaper; at that time I would wake up early to get hold of the newspaper before my father took it off with him; I became aware of the famine but it did not make a big impact on me as we were no longer in Bengal, but back in Delhi by then; I met Ian Stephens, the editor of 'The Statesman', here in Cambridge; he was a Kingsman and I met him in Hall; I read his book 'Horned Moon'; he lived in Chesterton and came to tea with us when my children were young; he was a nice man 13:24:22 At the time of Partition we were in Delhi; my father was given the job of helping with the partition of the assets between India and Pakistan; this made him a key target for the people who were trying to destroy the formation of Pakistan; he was attacked, his car was followed and rammed, fortunately near a police station; he telephoned from there and managed to get himself rescued; he and my uncle came to the house and we were bundled out with just what we were wearing - that memory is very clear - and then we went off to the refugee camp; camps were set up in parts of Delhi and we had a camp in the same house where my grandfather had lived; this was in a Muslim community area; the men patrolled the area with guns and the women and children were huddled into very uncomfortable spaces, and we were in this refugee camp for months; my memory is not clear because time for children is punctuated by incidents; certainly it was long enough to feel very threatened, and the memory that as an eleven year old I was being taught to fire a gun; when this refugee camp was under threat we were lucky to get a mercy flight; these were being flown between Delhi and Karachi; we went to the airport which was also frightening as we escaped in a car with my mother lying on top of us to hide the children; they were attacking cars carrying families - communal violence is the worst, ethnic cleansing as they now call it; as it appeared that there was only my father driving, we escaped through the checkpoints to the airport; then we were able to go in a Dakota; I remember there were no seats so the children sat in the middle galley way; I had been at St Columba's school in Delhi where I had had a perfectly good education, but my mother had taught us English which was a great advantage as we spoke it very well; we spoke mainly Urdu at home, we were certainly scolded in Urdu, but the children spoke in English to each other; my sisters was so much cleverer than me that they were also able to help to make sure we were getting it right; then I went to St Patrick's school in Karachi 18:24:04 I was there from the age of eleven until sixteen when I did 'O' levels; it was a Catholic missionary school with priests from all over the world, but the Principal used to be from Ireland; it was regarded as the second best school at that time in Karachi, Karachi Grammar School was the best; I think my parents would have liked me to go to the latter but I think that we weren't important enough; I think they would have found the money but they had come out destitute; my father was lucky because he was a civil servant; when the transfer of assets took place, one of the agreements was that civil servants from both sides should be retained; however, we had only the clothes we were wearing; fortunately, with the job came a house, so within a month he was getting a salary; we didn't suffer all that much; most historians are now aware that the urgency that Lord Mountbatten brought to the matter was most unwise and uncaring; there is no better truism than to say that one English officer with a dozen sepoys would hold thousands of Indians in check, but at that point the Englishman was missing from all the incidents that were taking place; the police and army tried, Mr Gandhi tried, but nobody succeeded in quelling the riots because the discipline of having British officers was no longer there; that meant that riots took place and the whole idea of a peaceful partition fell apart 22:58:06 I was playing a lot of cricket which was the love of my life; it was the main difficulty with my mother who would catch me and bring me back to study; many of my peers went on to become test cricketers; Mihir Bose's book is excellent in teasing out the love of cricket in India and Pakistan; it is partly because it can be played without physical contact - neither India nor Pakistan like games with physical contact; soccer and rugby are not played; I have always wondered about why I was so hopeless at both; they do wrestling, so contact is not always avoided; they also play hockey which is free of contact; while I was at school I only seriously played cricket which was an overwhelming obsession; we played all the year; I was captain of the cricket team and had the advantage of being able to read and do sums, so could keep abreast of the rules; I don't play anymore but cricket is still an obsession, and I watch and follow it very closely 27:09:01 I had no interest in music, didn't listen to it or have any training in it; my mother and sisters dabbled with the harmonium but I didn't; much later in life, having married a wife who is very musical, living in a musical environment, I turned towards music to find out more about it; I now enjoy it, but it has never been a passion; I listen to classical music, and whatever my wife is playing; she plays the violin in a number of informal groups and she goes to the Endellion concerts as a regular subscriber; I went once or twice but found I was not enjoying myself 28:29:24 I went to a school where the quality of teaching was very poor, despite its reputation; I was aware that I wasn't being taught very much; I also suffered from the fact that I was big and possibly looked stupid as well; in a ranked classroom they often put the big boys at the back, perhaps sensibly, but if the big boy also has bad eyesight it means that you don't see very much of the blackboard; I was short-sighted by twelve although it took my parents a little while to discover; I was fourteen when they realized I could hardly see anything; one of the advantages was that I learned to listen, and I made notes; it forced me to pay attention; the other advantage was that you understood what you were being taught and didn't have to revise it, so more time for playing cricket; I remember the maths teacher being particularly poor because I could do maths instinctively; I had no difficulty understanding concepts and I knew that he was not getting it right; the English teacher was way below the standard of my sister; the teaching was bad but other influences were very strong; my mother and sister were both good English speakers so English was coming easily and I was reading way beyond the rest; I was reading Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, my favourite book at the time was 'Treasure Island', so I was reading classical English literature; later on when I was among scientists in Cambridge I realized how much better educated I was, at least in English literature; we read anything we could get; my sister took me to the British Council and to the American Information Services, and we borrowed books; she would take me because she needed an escort; I remember the British Council woman noticing that we were back again, and asking if we had read all the books we had borrowed - we had 32:54:00 When I was in the refugee camp I asked my father why we were there and why were they trying to kill us; he told me these were riots between people of the Hindu religion and people of the Muslim religion, so the conflict was religious; I decided then as a thinking child that religion was not good for one; I abandoned it then; my mother was aware and scolded me sometimes, but my father had been completely honest with me and accepted that I would not have any religious belief after that; that has remained the case, although I have sat through many religious services; before becoming Master of Corpus Christi College I went to see the clerics in the College and talked about my lack of religious belief although strongly supported the right of others to hold them; one of them said, "Well, Master-Elect, if you are prepared to do your duty we will not hold that against you"; I was rather moved and thought that if they had that sort of trust in me I would go to Evensong; I was fortunate that I was married to a Vicar's daughter; long before I went to Corpus I had learned a great deal about the Anglican faith; her father was at Christ's and grandfather at Corpus Christi, and her great-grandfather, all became vicars, so I was very supportive of other people's religious beliefs; when I went to Evensong I didn't know the hymns but my wife knows them without even looking at the hymn book; so we went into Chapel and I read the lesson when asked to; I did it as my duty and some were constrained to say that I did it well; I was President of the Philosophical Society; I certainly don't think that religion has been destroyed by science, and I wouldn't dream of being critical about people's religious beliefs; I have a great interest in cathedrals and I look with awe at them; they started to build them in the eleventh century, and what powerful forces had moved the people who then built these marvellous buildings; if you look at their history, they were built, torn down, built again, destroyed by fire or invaders, and yet there they rise above the sky; look at the mosques in Islamic countries; what wonderful buildings are created for the love of God; I just have a strong personal view that religion is not for me, and that religion taken to any extreme is very dangerous; however, my religious beliefs were coloured by the effect of Partition and have remained with me ever since; I have brought my children up to believe that they have to be extremely tolerant, to have strong principles 39:58:15 After St Patrick's I started to do a pre-engineering degree at a college in Pakistan; just at that time my father was transferred to England; he was having great difficulty with his career and he chose to be transferred to an equivalent position at the Embassy; his job was to inspect and categorise industrial equipment for the industrialization of India and Pakistan, before purchasing it; he came to the Pakistan High Commission here and brought his family with him in 1954; I then went to Chiswick Polytechnic to do my 'A' levels; that is the first time I tried to get into Cambridge but found I needed Latin to do engineering; at that age you cannot wait a year to learn it, so I went to Imperial College instead; the polytechnic was a good experience because they were so kind to me; one of the things I can say about the British education system was how fair it was; I was tested by the maths teacher, Miss Tompkins, who said that I could do problems which were way above the ability of my class; she said that the polytechnic was for students who were not of top ability and were trying a second time at 'A' level; she gave me the books and her solutions book and left me to do the work; occasionally she would ask me if I understood everything, but she was wonderful, and pushed me way ahead of the others; the physics teacher did a similar thing as he thought I could understand physics, so he made me his assistant; I had to lay out the classroom for the experiments and help him to do them; I was extraordinarily lucky and they made a big impact on me; we had come in 1954 and in October 1955 I went to Imperial College to do electrical engineering 44:03:13 My sister and I had read a lot about England; we also shared a passion for cricket; we remember landing with BOAC at a hut that was then the terminal for overseas flights; then we got a bus to the centre of London, and I remember my sister saying that those were the dolls' houses, as they were like the dolls' houses that were made for us in England; we stayed at the Regent Palace Hotel in the centre of London for a couple of weeks while they found us accommodation; I remember my sister and I going downstairs to find a newspaper as we were used to doing at home; most of them looked rather parochial but we found 'News of the World' and marched up with it; my mother grabbed it and tore it to pieces and told us not to go down by ourselves again; the first impressions of England were not very positive; we used to go down to the restaurant and all the English food seemed terrible, so my sisters and I asked for fried eggs 46:36:01 Imperial College was full of inspiring people; I first came into contact with Dr Boothroyd later to be Professor Boothroyd, and he taught me transistors, which was just coming up then; also there was John Lamb, later to be Head of Electrical Engineering at Glasgow University, who taught me the physics of electronics; then there was Mr King who supervised my project; he had a big influence as he had been here at Clare College and was later to direct me to Cambridge; there was Dennis Gabor, later to have his Nobel Prize for holography, who wanted me to stay on and do a PhD with him; I was terrified of him and declined; I did well there; as always afterwards I kept telling people that the basis of engineering is mathematics; if you can do maths engineering is rather an easy subject, and I was good at maths at that point in my life; I got the top marks for maths in my year, and that was very helpful later in life as well; I worked very hard, particularly in my final year; my parents went back after a couple of years in England, and left me in charge of my younger brother; he was at Latymer School as he was six years younger, and we had a difficult time; Britain now has laws against racial discrimination, but didn't in those days, and we had a lot of trouble; I was twenty and he was fourteen, but looked older, and we had doors slammed in our faces when trying to find digs; my parents had left us in quite a nice place but we lost it due to an argument and the place was closed down; because of all the difficulties I didn't do much outside studying at Imperial College except a little sport, but I didn't have enough time to play in a team; I played in a club side with my brother at Gunnersbury Park; we were in Shepherd's Bush and there was a lot of racial tension there; I remember my brother and I nearly getting beaten up by teddy boys; it was actually our own fault as we had laughed at their clothes; I regard myself as British because I took British nationality in 1954 and have never had a link with Pakistan since then, so I am an immigrant, and the first immigrant to be elected Master of a Cambridge college; I am also proud of being the first immigrant from Pakistan to become a professor in this university; if I think back, the moment of sheer pleasure was when I was made a professor because it was such a struggle to get there; it was a personal Chair after nine years as a Reader; I was fortunate in that I got a grant from the SERC as it was then called, which included a secretary; it was such a large grant that it had management consequences; the secretary noticed that there was a letter addressed 'private and confidential'; I thought it was about my pension so left it for the day then found that, out of the blue, I was to be made a Reader; the readership could be assigned to any department that would have me; I had been in Engineering for twenty years, so thought I would like to go to the Cavendish; Ian Nicol, whom I regard as one of the great Secretary Generals of this University rang me and asked whether I was sure I wanted a change as not many people had done so; England is a very civilized country so everything is done in a civilized way when it can be; the two heads of department had lunch together and they agreed that I could change departments; this was in 1980; I think one of the most remarkable systems in the country is our higher education system, and how fair it is; it is totally without bias which we found in other aspects of life; as a great admirer of the system; I was put on the examining board of the Engineering Department when I was very young, and I was quite worried; while we were classing the students we came across someone who had done badly in one particular aspect of engineering but not too badly in my disciplines; he got a third in mine but failed in the others; the motion was put that this man should be failed; Sir John Fleetwood Baker was chairing it; he was very partial to me so that may be why I had been put on the board; I said that he hadn't done too badly in my subject; Sir John looked at me and said to me as a new member that our role was to do justice, that we were not to show any support for anyone unless we were sure that it would be a just decision, that if I felt that it would be doing justice to pass the man they would listen to me, otherwise not; he asked me to consider and give my opinion; I thought and replied that with marks that were so low this man could never become an engineer, so it would be unjust to pass him; I learned the lesson that there was no other way of judging but to do justice, and that advice has stood me in good stead Second Part 0:05:07 At Imperial I got a good first; I wanted to return to Pakistan but my father suggested I should do some sort of industrial training; I became an apprentice for the second time, the first being before I was a student; I was then not committed to electronics as such but to electrical engineering because in Pakistan there wasn't much in electronics; I was going to go back and set up power systems which my father wanted me to do; when I was at Imperial I was asked if I wanted to stay on and do a PhD; I didn't even know what it meant so said no; while I was an apprentice I met Donald Beck and David Young, two other apprentices who had graduated from Cambridge; by chance I became very friendly with them, and still am with Donald Beck; they told me stories about Cambridge and how wonderful it was and how you could spend all your time playing sport if you were minded to; I went back to Imperial to consult Mr King, my project supervisor; I felt that being an apprentice was not such a good idea and I was not that good with my hands; as part of my apprenticeship I was sent to Wembley to their research labs which I loved; I had been given a problem to solve which had bothered one of the research scientists; he was very pleased with the outcome and suggested to me that I should be doing research; that was very formative and it was afterwards that I went to see Mr King; he suggested that I try for a scholarship to Cambridge to do a PhD; with his help I found one advertised at King's and another at Trinity; I applied for both; the one at King's was an open studentship; I was interviewed at King's by a group including Paul Dykes, a Fellow in engineering, and Kendal Dixon; after the interview I heard nothing so assumed that I hadn't got the scholarship; when I got the telegram it said that if I didn't return my acceptance by the next post the scholarship would be awarded to the next candidate; I responded immediately and Kendal Dixon admitted that the original letter was still on his desk but there was no need to send it now; he was very kind to me and made a point of giving me a room in college in my first year which research students usually did not get; the interview had gone badly as I admitted I much preferred sport to music; I did not realize then that it was the wrong thing to say in King's; Dixon said he would get me a room in college so that I could get to know some of the other sportsmen who were mostly undergraduates; I did so, and had a wonderful time 6:16:07 I still have the book that I bought when I came for the interview, to keep me from staying awake; at Cambridge railway station there was a book stall and I bought 'The Masters' by C.P. Snow to read, never realizing that I would suffer the same fate; I remember getting to the Catholic Church and thinking it was King's; I was too nervous to take a taxi; my PhD subject was electron emitters, cathodes, under the supervision of A.H. Beck and Sir Charles Oatley; the latter was a Fellow of Trinity and a very strong influence in my life; King's had Professor Moullin who was very ill by then, the first Professor of Electrical Engineering, so the person who was running the engineering department was Sir Charles Oatley; he was an outstanding scientist; he suggested that I should work with the scanning electron microscope so I moved from cathodes to that; it was a much bigger and much more open topic; when I did reasonably well with my PhD work he asked me whether I would like to stay on to do some post-doctoral work; I said I had been offered a job in California - it might have been one of the big mistakes in my life not to have gone - but I was offered a Turner and Newell Fellowship, which I took; after a year I think I gave a presentation of my work; he caught me in the lab where I was acting as a demonstrator and asked if I would like to stay on and teach; it had not been my ambition and I did not apply for the post he had mentioned, but he called me for the interview and I was appointed as an assistant lecturer or Demonstrator as it was then called; I have hugely enjoyed teaching and feel I have had a wonderful life; I taught myself to teach; in those days we were unprofessional in teaching; the delivery of the lecture was enough in itself; I did not believe that and felt that the purpose of the lecture was to teach and not just to show off one's own knowledge; I think that it led to changes that I was then part of creating in Cambridge; I wrote my second book, 'Electronics for Engineers', as a teaching book; that was a success as the book is still in print, from 1973 until now; for an electronics textbook, thirty-six years is a long time; I believe very strongly that one should teach principles as once they have been understood, the rest is frills which you can acquire; that book is still in print because it did concentrate on principles; I wrote it with my colleague Peter Spreadbury who was also a very big influence on me 13:10:16 I was here first as the only foreigner in the engineering department; yet Cambridge has the duality of department and college; I was not elected to a fellowship; I was promoted to a lectureship three years after my appointment as a Demonstrator; by this time I had become strongly aware of the college system, particularly the fellowship system, and I wanted to be a Fellow; I had a horrible time as I looked around and saw others getting fellowships, but not me; four different colleges interviewed me as having been recommended to them by the engineering department, but I wasn't elected; one was a very interesting experience; after the interview I had a letter saying they really liked me but would I accept a two year period of probation before being made a fellow; I declined as I thought it rather insulting; I was then invited to have tea with the Master, but the letter was couched in such a pleasant manner that I thought I would have to go; the Master explained to me very politely that it was nothing racial but was cultural; would I be able to cope with the cultural aspects of living in college as a bachelor, mixing with the fellows on equal terms; he asked me to reconsider, revealing that although he had supported me, other fellows had not and the votes had gone against me being elected immediately; I declined; it was a difficult time in Cambridge in those days, though Corpus was wonderful as they elected me in 1967; I think Sir Frank Lee, the Master, had seen me playing cricket; I don't have any negative feelings about Cambridge as it was a different world then, but it was a pioneering moment because I was elected to teach in Corpus; I think I was the first teaching fellow from Asia in any of the Cambridge colleges; interesting that I then thought that the students would have trouble with my accent; after giving my first set of lectures I asked them if they had difficulty following me; they said that I was absolutely clear and that it was a pleasure to hear me 19:07:24 I did a huge amount of supervisions at Corpus and enjoyed them very much; I supervised from five to seven because I was committed to research and could not possibly leave the lab in the daytime; my children learned to eat their supper at quarter past seven while their friends all ate at six; I have friendly relationships with large numbers of former students; I lectured to seven thousand in the Engineering Department, so at one time I could go to almost any part of British industry and someone would greet me asking if I remembered him; I stopped taking supervisions when I became a Reader and concentrated on research after that; I have had nearly one hundred PhD students, a huge number; that was wonderful; every time I was tempted away from Cambridge the one thing that brought me back was the wonderful people one has to work with here; they stretch one even if they are twenty-one and you are a fifty year old professor; I think my PhD students were just gold; I would be strongly opposed to separating teaching institutions from research institutions because the two play a part in making things work; people have to have the information which comes from teaching; a clearer understanding of a subject comes from actually teaching it; my belief is that those things that I have taught well I have been forced to understand at basic principles; I strongly believe that teaching and research must go together and helps both sides; many people who do research feel teaching can be done in a second rate way because their research is so good, and I would be strongly opposed to that; one is paid to teach here; it is a big effort to teach well; I bought myself a tape-recorder to listen to my lectures to improve my accent and style; I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach and some of this is reflected in the book that I mentioned; you must make sure that you are teaching not to impress but to inform, excite, and inspire; what we did in the book was to create a stop in the lecture half-way for a quiz; Peter and I experimented with prepared overhead projection of quiz questions on the lecture so far which would take five minutes and give a break; it would also show how much they had understood and encourage concentration; in a twenty lecture series I would do this during every fourth lecture; the students were very nice to me in their reports on my lectures which were started during my time; my daughters would plot out the results and I could see that I was improving as a lecturer 25:58:20 I started my research using the scanning electron microscope but early on I had come to the conclusion that this subject was something that had moved on and that I would like to start something new; this was to use the electron beam which is used in microscopes to actually make things; I had come to this through the work of my mentor, Alec Broers, with whom I spent a very formative year in IBM; he had shared a flat with me and I had got to know him; he is a very fine research worker and had set up this activity in America; when I spent a year with him at his invitation, that year was wonderful, I learnt so much; first of all it was America where everything moves at twice the pace; I came back I thought we should do this in England; the first work with electron beam lithography, writing electronic circuits on chips, was what I started; I am very proud of the fact that I started it here; it never reached what they were doing in America but at least we got started; I started it with my colleague Geb Jones who is now a Reader in the Cavendish; having done that I later went back to America for another period to work in the semi-conductor industry, making chips, but also becoming more interested in how semi-conductor chips worked; when I came back I started working on semi-conductor devices at the time when they could just about be put into personal computers; that again pioneered this activity in this country; I set up the collaboration with the Hitachi company from Japan; that is the second topic; the third topic that arose out of that work was that we became interested in reaching the fundamental limit to where chips could go; a fascinating thought was can we actually make an information bit using just one electron; mostly chips use collections of electrons, the presence of electrons would be 0, their absence, 1; that was very exciting because at the end of my career we published the work on single electron devices; although you had to reduce the temperature that that of liquid helium they could in fact define an information bit; of that work I am immensely proud and thought it would get me some pleasure and recognition, but that was about the time that I was leaving science because of the unexpected move towards college matters; those are the three areas that I became most involved in and aware that I had made a contribution; Hitachi was important as people from it had helped me a lot; Sam Edwards, the then Cavendish Professor, was enormously helpful in facilitating my move from engineering to the Cavendish; I had spent twenty years in the former, and the opportunity to work in the Cavendish with colleagues like Sir Michael Pepper and others, who had a very basic understanding of physics, was very important for me; and again with Professor Broers when he returned to Cambridge where he was a forceful figure in science until moving off to become head of Churchill and then Vice-Chancellor; he is a long-standing friend to this day 31:43:16 The way that chips have gone into our lives is that as they become smaller - the actual device that controls the flow of electrons is the transistor - and as that becomes smaller it has become possible to put more and more information on one small chip; the amount of information, and the functionality that can be put on a chip defines how complex a system one can make with it, not only complex but how portable a system; complexity and portability are both enhanced by making the chip more functionally capable; the more you reduce the number of electrons taking part, the more complex you can make the chip; there are many subtleties to this argument but the basic principle is absolutely right; eventually chips use fewer and fewer electrons and when we get down to fifty, one hundred, electrons, there is some uncertainty about whether their actions have taken place; the one electron device brings certainty; it is a very interesting philosophical concept as well; it is approaching the limits and therefore pioneers the way to what might happen twenty years from now; it may never reach one electron, but until we reach it Moore's Law will continue to give us more and more complex devices; if you only had to charge your mobile phone once a month or your laptop once a week, it would make life much easier 35:14:12 With reference to conservation, anything that uses less energy is good; the more important thing is that as you become aware of the environment and what is happening to us, we have two possible solutions, one is to use less energy and deal with carbon emissions, the other is to provide ourselves with some technological solutions; I think that anything that we have done in chip technology and microelectronics is to arm us with the means for developing technology which may make it possible to solve some of the problems that face us; I play golf, and when I go to Scotland the courses used to close on 1st November, now they play the whole year round; the climate has changed; think that Richard Friend is doing some fantastic work but I have been out of science now for ten years so am not in a position to comment in detail 38:27:10 I was so honoured to be elected a Fellow of Corpus that Sir Frank Lee became something of a hero figure for me; chance, many years later, gave me access to those papers on my election; I realized that he had played a fundamental part in my election because even in Corpus there was powerful opposition on bases that I can now sense was racist disguised as cultural; he had fought those forces and got me elected; many colleges up to 1919 did not permit the admission of Indians; the telling moment came at the end of the Great War after so many Indians had given their lives for King and country so should be admitted and rules were changed; I fell in love with Corpus because it had done something extraordinary in electing me as the first immigrant teaching Fellow; I then decided to do whatever I could to do my duty at Corpus; later on I was made an assistant tutor; I knew it would interfere with my research but did it for Corpus; once I became a Reader I was left alone to get on with my research; the then Master, Michael McCrum, asked me to be head of the research students part of Corpus at Leckhampton; first I was asked if I would be President and declined as I did not think I would be good at social occasions; I had been married by then for a long time; Ann and I did things together, so we have shared our lives; I did become Warden of Leckhampton and we shared that job; when I finished that I felt I had done my duty towards Corpus; in the Corpus Mastership selection I believed that the College selected an internal candidate to be a stalking horse for a much more distinguished external candidate; when they were advertising worldwide for applicants they isolated me as the stalking horse; they then decided to elect me; I was flattered to be asked, but also felt I owed it to them; what gave me most pleasure was when a daughter of a Master from the twenties, wrote to me saying that I was the first internal candidate for nearly a century; one of the odd letters of congratulations that I received read that it said much for the Fellows of Corpus that they had elected me; one of the high moments as Master was when John Taylor, the inventor of the cordless kettle, wrote to me asking to come and see me; we got along well and discovered we were the same age; he offered to help with whatever ambition I had for the college; I said that we would like to build a new library; he offered to give us half the money needed; what a wonderful way to start a Mastership; he was at Corpus when I was at King's, and was a physicist; I had to look after the Parker Library and the building of the conservation centre; again, an old member managed to raise the money for the latter; also we were able to get the Corpus clock put in, the digitization of the Parker manuscripts was begun by me, so it was a very active Mastership; in a college to get things done is a curious interplay of democracy and leadership, and I found I was able to do these things; it was partly because I had been a Fellow for so long that they more or less trusted me; the most touching moment was when I left and they gave me a silver present; it was inscribed in Latin so I asked William Horbury to read it for me; it said 'to a much loved Master'; I thought that was very nice, to be efficient was one thing, to be loved was another; I retired happy, that although there had been ups and downs, on the whole I had a wonderful time 50:34:22 Uniquely among Corpus Masters I actually resigned; President Musharraf and his colleague Atta-ur-Rahman, who is an Honorary Fellow of King's, jointly approached me to help them in a new scheme where five European countries were signed up to set up their universities in Pakistan, and a Chinese and Korean university also; they had looked around and identified me as perhaps uniquely, someone who was an academic, knew Pakistan, and was familiar with universities worldwide; they put a powerful case to me and in the end I accepted their argument that there was no one else in the world who was better qualified; because of this I resigned the Mastership in my last year; for the next two years I worked harder that I have ever done; my part was successful as I have left them with a scheme and with connections, and with everything in place to do something quite wonderful; alas, both Atta-ur-Rahman and I suffer from a huge disappointment that the Government changed and the new Government won't have any truck with it; just imagine these five university plus the two Asian ones, taking young people and moving them out of extremism into moderation; each one that graduated would create a thousand more moderates; it was such a missed opportunity; I am sad towards the end of my career not to have achieved this; the scheme could not be implemented at present as it meant Europeans going and teaching in Pakistan initially while they trained up Pakistani academics; I hope that in the next decade things will calm down; fortunately, in some ways, the scheme is being taken up by other countries; I am on the Board of Imperial College now, and when they told me they were hoping to set up universities in India using the same model, I was delighted 55:13:21 My life here has been so unconventional in the sense that I married an English woman who is a Vicar's daughter, and she has played a huge part in my life; when we married it was in a Registry Office, but the blessing was in her father's Church; at the ceremony were many of her father's friends who were now bishops and priests; many years later when I carried the Canterbury Gospels at the enthronement of Rowan Williams, among the Bishops was the then Bishop of Rochester, Bishop Say, and he wrote a little piece in the parish magazine that the young man whom he had blessed, with some trepidation, marrying his best friend's daughter, a non-believer, was so thrilled at seeing me carrying the Canterbury Gospels; so my wife played a huge part in my life, and so did my children; I have two daughters and a son; the two daughters are both academics, one by curious chance is working in the King's archives at the moment looking at E.M. Forster’s connections with India; the other one lives in Cambridge and is an educational psychologist advising people on how to set examination papers; my son is a tennis coach; he excelled at all sports, and is a lot younger than the daughters; he is adopted, but just as precious