Second Part

0:09:07 Where there is a need to work together collectively people can see the benefit of learning from each other; for research students, most see that when they have got their Ph.D.s their opportunities are very good and they are probably not in competition with anybody else for anything in particular; behind that there is a sense of their being a zero sum game, certainly if you are after one of the very few academic positions it the UK; research groups in Cambridge are very international so the aspirations of the group members will be very different, so they don't need to be in competition; Cambridge physics has always been very international although the international mix has changed with time; we have benefited through our membership of the EU; before that we benefited from the Commonwealth and before that from the Empire, but it has never been a British only mix; the College system doesn't help much though I have had very good contacts through my membership of St John's; I think the division between high table and the rest is absolutely outdated and stupid; I would far rather feel that if I turn up for lunch somewhere I would be just as likely to be sitting next to a graduate student as a colleague; I don't find much time to do things in College now; the New Cavendish building is ghastly and it is already falling down but it does have a good canteen; it suffers from not having the subsidy that College kitchens have with taking money from students for kitchen fixed charges; it is pretty good and far enough away that people will stay there for lunch; I do lunch there and have informal conversations; need to have that relationship between formal and informal because science is not a military command structure as ideas and observations come from everybody; need to have a sense of social equality and ease amongst everyone in the group; the canteen is not open in the evening and there is no useful accessible social space; the research students and post docs. are good at arranging group evenings elsewhere; we have probably lost something being out in West Cambridge but in other ways we have gained as we do have reason to stick around there for lunch; for the first years it was just us and the vets, but significant parts of engineering, the computer laboratory, and chemistry are now there

8:10:03 My original interest was that it was becoming possible to get access to synthetic molecular materials, polymers, that were convenient to handle, which were simultaneously molecular but also semiconducting; one of the best things you can do with a semiconductor if you want to work out what the electrons do when they are pushed around is to put it into a semiconductor device and make a transistor that hopefully works or a diode; the original interest was actually to borrow ideas about how you could assemble structures from biology, and how you could get those structures to be very functional and borrow from the world of silicon; the original structures we made were actually made purely to explore; the transistor which we first got working in 1988 was a tool to understand how, when you start moving electrons around, unlike the case of silicon where they travel just by themselves and the lattice of silicon atoms remains in place, if you do that with a molecular system you disturb the positions of all the carbon atoms and that makes a big difference to how things move; our transistors were absolutely useless for any practical application but they showed beautiful characteristics and we managed to get some very clean science out of that; we then were looking for something else but chanced upon this discovery that we could get diode structures to emit light; that was initially green light from the particular semiconducting polymer we were working with; that was obviously important because we could not just make one but lots of them coated over a large area; so we did what I knew one had to do which was to file a patent, which is the start of a process and not the end; within a couple of years in various ways we had a lot of support from the Cambridge community outside the University and got a company organised to exploit it; Herman Hauser and I overlapped as research students in the Cavendish; he was not initially involved but later on has come to be a wonderful supporter; Herman has done a lot to change the face of Cambridge and create a lot of opportunity through his vision; what has turned out over the years is what we had thought originally would be a corner of very interesting science, is that these structures work very much better than we dared hope; interesting check list of things that I was assured by a distinguished colleagues would never work, they were all wrong; it is amazing what you shouldn't believe; it was never planned that it would turn out so useful but it has done so, and you just have to grab the opportunity and do it

13:53:18 The problem of speaking to camera this afternoon is that next year the answer will be completely different; the current big push is with Plastic Logic which I had a role in founding in 2000; we have a very good technology for being able to put down huge numbers of surprisingly good transistors which are made out of plastic, onto a sheet of plastic; those we are using to switch a display on electronic paper which is also flexible so we end up with a display which feels like a laminated card; at the moment the active area is A5 size, so quite substantial with about 1,500,000 transistors in it; that I think is going to be what everyone has wanted say to read on the bus or train; the quality feels like reading black on white and has the weight of a lightweight book and you can bend it; to turn a page you press a button and the page will change but don't know what format we will finally use; we are spending a lot of other peoples money building a manufacturing plant in Germany; by this time next year we will know whether it had successfully hit the market or not; with Cambridge Display Technology and the light emitting diodes it has been hard but we now have astonishingly good full colour displays; they are not flexible yet but they are better than the crystal displays for TV; that company has ended up being Japanese owned; a lot of that part of the display industry is necessarily going to stay in Asia, but I believe that technology will find its way into top performing displays for computers and mobile phones; the big area which may turn out to be very important is making low cost solar cells where silicon is fundamentally too expensive and what one needs is a technology that is cheap to make and supply, maybe doesn't last forever but by the time it is worn out it will have many times paid for itself in terms of carbon dioxide not generated; sunlight is essentially the only truly unlimited energy resource we have; you could meet the entire energy requirements of the U.S.A., which accounts for a quarter of world energy consumption, by coating the state of Kansas with not particularly efficient solar cells; you could look at a map of the world with four such areas dotted around and that is world energy consumption; there are reality checks; at the moment solar cells are made out of silicon and it is a very expensive technology and requires a lot of energy to make them; I haven't done the calculation myself and its very hard to check but I am assured that if I were to put a solar panel on my roof and leave it switched on all the time so that every coulomb of electricity that came out of that solar cell avoided some fossil fuel generated electricity it would take five years before it would pay back the carbon used to make it and put it on the roof; you have got to bring that pay back time down a lot; we may be able to do it, though not at the moment, but there is a significant chance that this is a route to a low enough cost large area technology to make a big impact on energy

19:50:22 Don't think that electronic paper will mean the end of books as we know them; technology always has unintended consequences; the information revolution is good and the way one can now track an out of print book through the Internet that before I would not have bothered; the ridiculous unavailability of the stuff you would like to read is probably going to be a thing of the past; I don't think we are going to lose our interest in having books but I don't have the same sentiment about newspapers; if I could put them through my mobile phone onto my plastic logic display and then read it on the train, I think I would rather do that than get news print all over my fingers then throw the paper away; you could put a keyboard on these displays but the virtue is with text that we can hold at the right distance to read and you don't want to have that cluttered up with a keyboard; the problem with reading information is that it has not had the attention it deserves as we have been more concerned with being able to do everything on the same device

23:10:01 On my career, I have had sabbaticals elsewhere but I was always rather proud that I was never thrown out of Cambridge; I have never had another job in the UK in the university system; my excuse is that by getting involved in the two companies was outside the University and was pretty major diversion at various times and that provided the diversity of experience that I don't think I  would have had if I had been just mainstream in the University; I have been many times to Japan as in my world Japan has been a major player; I have very good links with Singapore, largely because I had an absolutely brilliant research student from Singapore who is now Professor there, and we enjoy working together; I have some limited contact with India and China I have never really got to grips with; I think the problem for me is that I can only do so much and I suppose I am jealous of those opportunities that lead very directly to things that are going to happen in my lab; the rapidly growing Asian economies are very interesting but they are not exactly the same thing as what I think my academic work is; the notion that Western systems are more creative than Eastern systems is last century's view; I don't believe that is true at all; the de-skilling of the West and the up-skilling of the East is absolutely terrifying; I don't see how Western economies will cope; I don't know what we have to offer the East; I do find it terrifying that there is so little appreciation of the virtues of technology and engineering; I think we have been through a very damaging decade where we have seen manufactured goods become absurdly cheap because they have been outsourced to, principally, China; we have failed to appreciate how sophisticated, complex and wonderful they are, and have no idea how to make them now

27:49:12 Physicists have been worrying about whether the days of great discoveries are over for a long time; Maxwell, in his inaugural lecture as first Cavendish Professor in 1873 dwelt on this; he said that it was generally put about that physics was essentially complete and that the remaining job was to measure some fundamental constants to higher precision; of course, he didn't agree with that proposition as he thought it was a subject limited by our imaginations; he was right as it was just before the great quantum revolution; if one looks back one would have to say that the dawn of quantum mechanics and the probably much underrated role that Maxwell played in the significance of electromagnetic theory is just astonishing; so the sense that discoveries from physics which will change everyday perception from reality, probably it is hard to see how that is going to happen in such a profound way as in the first half of the twentieth century, but I don't think that takes away the pleasure or anticipation or sense of discovery away; maybe it is a bit of a diversion; I don't think that we used to imagine that we had to completely change the universe through our discoveries; a lot of the best science is often low key and small scale, just good, brilliant, observation and there is plenty of that to do; it does, of course, raise the question of what is physics; I don't know whether the people who spotted that we had an ozone hole over the Antarctic were physicists, but they were physical scientists; that may have been one of the most momentous observations in recorded history; the impact that good physics can make on what appear to be huge challenges with a sustainable environment is probably going to be critical; I can't think of a more important time to have the tools that come from the numerate sciences

31:58:14 I rarely get into the lab given the role I have got in the University; a lot of what I do is within the group, toying with ideas, planning experiments, dissecting observations and working out what didn't fly; I don't really like doing that in formal settings, it is often the chance discussion that happens somewhere round in the Cavendish probably; also, a lot of my work sits at the boundaries of chemistry and I have benefitted from being able to get access to the materials; we get people to make materials that I couldn't make where I can see whether we can do something good with it; I have had wonderful working relationships with a great number of chemists, and there the pleasure is being a rank amateur at chemistry but enjoying and it not mattering, where we understand that the prize is to make the connections where both sides are fumbling to understand each other's worlds; that tends to happen outside Cambridge although I have some collaborations with people in the chemistry department; I think what I was alluding to earlier is that it is very easy to go on the grand circuit and be grand; either you have no visibility or too much; I think one has to be relatively selfish about understanding what you are after, when is a visit somewhere likely to generate the next good idea; of course, it doesn't happen to order; good ideas can come anywhere, sometimes when I am extremely stressed about something rather mundane but important or when I am relaxed; the good idea that got the work on transistors going probably arose on a train journey back from BP labs in Sunbury after a desultory meeting; for me half the time it is the solving of the problem that turns up when the experiment is done; that is the way I like science to go but then there is the formulating of what it is one  should try and do which is not quite the same thing as a eureka moment, but you can probably look back and say there is a point when I advanced it beyond the point where everyone else knew what to do; it is not mechanistic; you have a hunch that there are things that people don't really understand in some preferably large green field that has not been trampled on by everyone else; you don't quite know what you are going to find but you know that you can get to that field as you have worked out things that you can measure that no one else has thought of measuring or thought it would be possible to measure; probably rather imprecise but not a bad way to go; you haven't asked me about my hobbies; in some way I felt distanced from laboratory work as part of everyday life which is part of the lot of the modern research grant holder in a British university; it somehow feels like a meta-activity that writing a good grant proposal that gets funded is almost the same as discovering some good science; I sometimes frivolously contemplate rather than producing a biography or collection of essays I shall publish a set of my grant proposals; on home life, we have recently moved and have a large garden, and for the first time I have a large workshop and a rather professional set of woodworking tools; I think the pleasure of doing practical things is very satisfying