Richard Friend interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 21st May 2008

0:09:07 Born 1953 in the Middlesex Hospital in London where my father was a junior doctor; I have recollections of the house in Radlett sitting in a pram looking at paint peeling off the wall; we then moved to Staffordshire where father got a job as a consultant at the Stoke Hospitals; by coincidence my mother's family were from mid-Staffordshire and we spent two years living with her brother, who farmed; a lot of my memories were of the farmyard - pigs, cows, and horses; when I was five we moved to a large, ugly, rectory where I grew up; of the grandparent generation, only my father's mother was alive; she was not a scientist so not a strong influence on my future; father was hardworking but always playful and approachable; have brother who is now a professor at Oxford; he was previously a transplant surgeon in Cambridge; both of us did what our parents wanted us to do which was to work hard and achieve; my primary school was a small Catholic girls' school which took young boys so was taught by nuns at an early stage; sent aged eight to an absolutely dreadful prep school called The Old Hall at Wellington, Telford; as a peer group we were encouraged not to be very nice to each other; sense of remoteness, dreadful food, freezing to death on sports fields and being prevented from using our brains usefully; it never got any better; parents had probably had a harder time; mother was orphaned at eleven and her happiest times were at boarding school where she found friendship; they did not enjoy us being away but felt it had to happen; to get to a public school one needed Latin so had to go to a prep school where it was taught; younger brother went a year after me but one of the beastliness’s of boarding schools at that time was that friendship with siblings was not encouraged; the event that sparked my interest in physics was my first Meccano set aged five; eventually I assembled a great collection of gears, cogs and pulleys, not bodywork; worked my way through the sets and beyond set 5 I used to go and buy pieces individually; at about eleven I got my first electronics set; I came in right at the start of transistors; I think science has suffered, too much of it has become black box of necessity; a lot of electronic measurements are too complex to build your own amplifier and expect it to perform as well as something that comes in a box; I make useful tools at home and am a relatively enthusiastic wood-worker; I spend too much of my time writing grant proposals and not enough time at the lab bench; I am heavily oriented towards experiment where I believe most creativity happens

10:43:18 At thirteen I went to Rugby; I didn't win an entrance scholarship but got into the scholarship form so had a diet of classics and a tiny bit of science; I was so-so at classics and didn't need to be taught the science as I knew it; don't know how I knew it, but somehow it was common sense; biology somehow escaped me, but physics, chemistry and the associated mathematics were where I thought I wanted to be; this was the golden age of electronics; Rugby science in the 1960's was absolutely stunning; it was a paradox that the school rated its science as nothing and that the clever boys were discouraged from taking science 'A' levels; there were some very gifted physics and chemistry teachers; several had Oxbridge Ph.D.s, in every sense excellent scientists whose knowledge was profound, at that came across; most of the school were completely uninterested but it was wonderful for me; a famous physics teacher was Geoff Foxcroft who was a national pioneer of the Nuffield teaching schemes, who knew electronics in a way that no one else did; he was very special; there were one or two chemistry teachers, a wonderful nineteenth-century figure, George Daizley, and he went in for pyrotechnics; he thought that chemistry involved making things and if they were dangerous, so much the better; I had a special fume cupboard to do my own experiments and he decided I needed to do cyanide preparations; he drew a skull and crossbones in chalk on the glass and for weeks we had these lethal concoctions there; meanwhile other classes used the benches and nothing happened to them; it would lead to instant imprisonment these days; John Allen had just graduated from Cambridge and really gave me an undergraduate education for 'A' level; I discovered after I left school that I didn't mind games but the imposition of compulsory exercise was something I resisted at all costs; of music, I wish I could play but don't think I am a musician; enjoy listening to music of all sorts, classical, music of the 1960's, and more recently, jazz; music certainly affects me, like an opiate, but don't associate it with creativity

18:05:17 Although I went to a Catholic primary school, parents were not Catholics; father's grandparents came from Eastern Europe and were Jewish, but had lapsed; mothers family were Church of England; I was pushed through the C of E world to the extent that it matches with a humanism approach to the need for a civilized society; characterize myself as tolerant as I am allergic to anyone telling me what I should think on these matters; try very hard not to impose my thinking on anyone else; the best of C of E is its tolerance; in UK and many parts of Europe one can take a very relaxed view about the role of organized Christian religion and its impact on society; I am shocked every time I go to U.S.A. by the fundamentalism there which I see as usually bad; do admire Richard Dawkins for his TV program, 'The Root of all Evil', but don't agree with everything he does; I don't think that religious belief or lack of it correlates at all with ability as a physicist; think they seem to involve different parts of our brains; of course you can make the connections, but in general it is hard for a physicist to be as profoundly atheistic as Richard Dawkins appears to be; I have not spoken to him directly and perhaps one needs to know someone well to understand what they really think; one is aware that physics a lot of what we deal with appears to be certainty; the models work quite astonishingly well; but we are aware that they are not reality and when you stretch a bit beyond that you have no secure foundation; a lot of the contemplation that takes place in cosmology drifts fairly quickly into theology;  the language used is near to religion but don't think the relationship is that straightforward; certainly there is a sense that there is a lot we don't understand, the paradox that the sum of what we have done and make use of works so well that we are confronted with the fact that it has no particular right to do that or that we may be confronted with a different description one day; the sense of being both certain and uncertain is probably good; I have always chosen my science to be in areas where I can keep going back and measuring; in cosmology all you can do is observe, you can't design an experiment and do it; one cannot deny that we seem to feel the need to create something like religion; I don't like feeling that I need to abandon a rationalist approach to understanding what has gone on in the past and what may happen in the future, but I don't know

27:10:15 At Rugby I did three 'A' levels at sixteen; I stayed on for a year beyond 'A' level to practice for the Cambridge scholarship exam; had an interesting year being taught in very small groups, doing probably more chemistry than physics; think there was a discussion between my father and my housemaster and I was told I was applying to Trinity College, Cambridge; that is where I went to read natural sciences; I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do chemistry or physics but during the first year it emerged that it was physics; physics was taught in a much more intellectually appealing way; it was structured round ideas rather than facts; in chemistry the ideas were there but they weren't presented so profoundly; I was a pretty unruly undergraduate and thought that I could learn things largely by myself; I enjoyed the elegant and carefully structured lectures that Gordon Squires gave; he was Director of Studies in physics at Trinity; I was intrigued by Brian Pippard who was not an easy person to learn from as an undergraduate; he gave a very interesting lecture course from which I thought I learnt nothing at the time but, looking back, I learnt a lot; he did give me some supervisions in my final year which felt rather terrifying, but he was very good at stretching me by testing why I believed something I had been told in a lecture, and getting me to think; he was then Cavendish Professor; my brother came and read medicine at Magdalene a year later; it was a very good undergraduate crop at Trinity - Steve Elliot and Mike Neuberger were exact contemporaries, both fellows of Trinity now; Stephen moved to chemistry and Michael to molecular biology and then to biochemistry; in my first undergraduate year I did very little work and I knew the whole of first year chemistry from what I had learnt at Rugby; physics I have always found hard and have had to stretch myself to understand it, and I did find it stretching; need mathematics to solve problems in physics and some problems require deep and profound mathematics, but those are not the problems I went off to try and solve; I have never rowed, never saw the point as it seemed such a non-cerebral thing to do; being an undergraduate in the early 1970's was a time to be fairly left-wing; general buzz of alternative activities; the Vietnam War never seemed to matter very much as it was an American rather than a British problem

35:05:17 Did a Ph.D. in physics, on the borders of chemistry; joined a group of Abe Yoffe who was leading a group that actually migrated from Physical Chemistry, the group that Bowden had brought to Cambridge in surface and friction; I think under Nevill Mott it had moved across to be an activity in the Cavendish, Superficial Physics; what was interesting then was that these were some of the materials that were of interest because they made good lubricants, were appreciated as materials that were interesting as semiconductors; the thought that materials you could make transistors out of might themselves be chemically complex I found intriguing; the thesis was about a rather obscure property of metals; when the electrons of a metal are constrained, rather than travelling around in all three dimensions, in a layer or a chain they are not stable; they naturally distort and do so usually at a low temperature; they reorganize the crystal lattice to put in a distortion which switches them across to be semiconducting; that sense of coupling between structure and electronic structure  was interesting; I was looking at that in Cambridge on some two-dimensional metals; ended up being sent to a wonderful group in Paris in my second year as a research student, specifically to do some experiments whereby we could measure the electrical properties on samples subjected to enormously high hydrostatic pressures; pressure is a physicists alternative to chemical variation; that was very productive and caused me to decide to really finish my Ph.D. in Paris; I ended up spending a post-doc. year even before I had even contemplated writing my Ph.D.; I had been elected to a Research Fellowship at St John's in 1977 and that is when I switched from the world of inorganic materials to working with molecules, carbon-based conductors, because that was the main research line in Paris; have continued on that theme in various ways; my Cambridge supervisor was Abe Yoffe and in Paris the professor there was Denis Jérome, who has a lot of significant discoveries to his name

39:36:37 As a graduate student I did supervise to earn a bit of money; I have always been frightened of teaching, particularly undergraduates; I have done my bit of teaching and examining since; I have sort of liked it but I am not a born teacher; I did four years as a College tutor in St John's from 1987-91; I quite enjoy lecturing but am never as organized as I should be; on teaching in Cambridge, for every two undergraduates we have one graduate student here; we give scant attention to what we give our graduate students, a lot of the time they don't need it, but we have failed to understand that this university has changed; I would say that the business of graduate teaching is very interesting; it is not the same as undergraduate teaching; in experimental science, some aspects of it are like an apprenticeship; teaching how to use some tools but stopping short of telling a student what to do with them; the difficulty with physical sciences are that the subjects are hierarchical and have to be taught; there is a lot of stuff that has to be known and it is dry; we teach the consolidated understanding of the field rather than the pieces that were used to construct the field in the first instance; the business of how you deal with incomplete information or conflicting models happens right at the end of the undergraduate period; I don't think we should be allowed to escape all forms of contribution to the University; I think a separation of what seem to be lowlier tasks and those too grand to have to do them would be disastrous; on administration, I am in my fourth year as Head of the School of Physical Sciences; I actually have a very firm view that we should be led by people who take time out from doing the job rather than creating a cadre of professional administrators; we are a bottom-up organization for that reason; this works if it has been designed from the top-down, which may not be prescriptive but has been skilfully designed to allow bottom-up to flourish; I don't believe that people who are outside research and teaching understand that; looking back I took for granted that I had freedoms in Cambridge that I wouldn't have had anywhere else; as an assistant lecturer I had complete autonomy; I was never constrained for space, always had the resources I wanted for my research, given access to very bright research students, and as I climbed up the career ladder here I realized that I was just as able to do my work as an assistant lecturer as I am as Cavendish Professor; it is good that Cambridge can do that; of course I have more to do now so in some ways it is harder, but I hope it is still the case that whatever your rank is the freedom to do what you want to is there

49:15:06 On trust; a lot depends on scale; the Cavendish is a little bit too large and there is some tribalism there; there is considerable loyalty within a research group and some rivalry between groups which doesn't serve us well as we don't necessarily share resources as well as we should; maybe this is well understood that there is a group size where it is possible to work on the basis of trust, but beyond which it just becomes a bit too remote and fractionates into different pieces; the research group that I am part of in the Cavendish hover around fifty which is absolutely the largest it can be; beyond that it ceases to be a cohesive group, where members would expect to find companionship, friendship, social outlets, as well as work; the experimental science is a people-centred activity, a lot of sharing of know-how, helping of one another to get an experiment going, passing on techniques, and you have to engineer that that is done well; I have been told by non-Americans who have been to American universities that in their groups everyone is in competition with one another; someone's success would mean they were more likely to get a job, or a better letter from their supervisor; I taught while on sabbatical at Santa Barbara, California twenty years ago; I have had lots of offers from America but was never really tempted to go there; hard to say quite why, but they seem to be at work all the time and I don't like to be at my desk all the time; work is a more complex business, it is taken more seriously there; I do take my work seriously but like to keep an ambivalence; I have been involved in work which has led to very valuable inventions which we have protected by filing patents; the view that I've come to is that if you try to avoid putting yourself in a compromised position you switch off opportunities; there is nothing wrong with a conflict of interests so long as you are open about it and make sure that everybody who is in some way associated with that conflict knows what the issues are and what the resolution is; any structure or set of rules that a university creates to manage away that problem is deluding itself; should allow things to go the way they are going and then manage it correctly; I have been involved in forming a couple of companies; no one in the research group has been denied information about the experimental results; we had an extremely important discovery in 1989 when we discovered we could make little diodes made with semiconducting plastics which we could get to light up by putting a voltage across them; it has turned out to be very important and we have a fundamental patent which controls the use of any  those materials for anything that emits light; there were dozens of people in the Cavendish who knew about it before the patent was filed; we made no effort to keep it under wraps because we trusted people would not tell anybody outside;  science depends on the real world; technology has been the biggest engine of discovery, being able to make things and measure things which previously was not possible, which keeps throwing up how bizarre and unexpected the world turns out to be; does take you into the world of industry which is fair game; although I took a big risk taking time out, along with others, to get the first company, Cambridge Display Technology, going, and had somehow presumed that the company would head off at right angles to my line of university work, it didn't; it has continued to sustain, to provide an engineering base which has fed back into the university group; so here is the paradox, because we set up a company we didn't have to do the engineering in the Cavendish, we could just do the science