Second Part

0:09:07 I got trapped in Cambridge, partly because I came to work in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics which was just fabulous; it is by far the best department for my subject in the world; even now we have more Fellows of the Royal Society from Australia than anywhere else; partly because of my head of department, an Australian, who helped me make the transition from Australian/American PhD into Cambridge/England - George Batchelor, a clear-sighted, shrewd, physically oriented, fluid dynamicist, who was not interested in the mathematics per se; it took me about four years to be able to concentrate on the science and not on the mathematics; also King's was a wonderful place where I became a Fellow, totally due to Dan Mackenzie, in 1970; there were wonderful people here then and for the first fifteen years; there is not much fun any more; I loved Edmund Leach as Provost; Gabriel Horn also taught me some science; I ran a series of talks by fellows of the College and he gave one of the very best talks I have ever heard about how to do science; I was influenced by Adrian Wood as an economist and in politics; I clashed swords with Sydney Brenner but learned from him; Ken Moody was the Director of Studies in Mathematics and he was wonderful, so sensitive and understanding; all of that, and a lovely city to live in, made me stay here; I am looking to move on to somewhere better, but unfortunately I have not found that place yet; I got to know Bernard Williams well; I thought he was wonderful at clarifying ideas suggested to him; he was also a good Provost and highly knowledgeable and cultured; I also learned quite a bit of science from Pat Bateson; Hal Dixon was inspiring for his love of King's and was also interested in science; from Dan Brown I learned about chemistry; I was Convenor of the Research Centre when we hired some chemists and Dan helped to explain to me what they were really trying to do; he was a good Fellowship Elector as he understood how to describe science to us; Martin Hyland does a totally different mathematics to me, he really is a mathematician

7:40:00 On the college system and creativity, I have had enjoyable conversations but I can't say that my research was helped; there are not many people in King's who do science the same way as I do apart from Dan Mackenzie; however, I made friends here and got to know England; one of the high points for me was the non-resident's dinner when in my twenties I would find myself sitting next to an older man who would explain what England was like from his point of view; to be able to say I was a Fellow of King's gave an extra status; I also enjoyed the Chapel music and the building itself; Donald Parry was Vice-Provost when I was made a Fellow; he was enormously kind and welcoming, also to my wife; outside King's the most important contact in Cambridge is Steve Sparks whom I worked with, and together we really originated the field of geological fluid mechanics; that was again due to Dan Mackenzie; on his suggestion, Steve contacted me from the Department of Earth Sciences to ask if I knew any fluid mechanics; we met and he talked about his work and I talked about meteorology and oceanography which I was working on at the time; by and large neither of us understood what the other was saying, but I could see that he was a lovely guy and was doing some interesting and stimulating science, and I could see that I could contribute something to it; even though I had a grant that had just started to work on an area of oceanography, I turned round and started working on geological problems; my colleagues thought this was terrible risk but I knew there was no risk at all; it was obvious that something good would happen with Steve; we did some nice work looking at how fluid molten magma behaves beneath volcanoes; in some sense we did the first fluid-mechanical investigation on how the molten rock which powers the volcano operates; what I could also see was that this was not a little area but a huge area and that there were lots of other things that could be done; we started working together in November and Steve went away for a long Easter vacation in March; one of the last things I asked him was for another totally different problem in another area that I could look at during his absence; I thought about the problem, got some nice theory, did some experiments; it is one of the things that I am best known for - how viscous fluid spreads; Steve came back and I showed the results to him; it was clear that he was not interested and this puzzled me greatly as it was solving the exact question he had posed; he said that was not the question he had asked and I realized that I had misunderstood him; Lord Florey, who is my real scientific hero, an Australian Nobel prize winner, once said that he would work with the devil if he had something to teach him; Peter Medawar, Florey's student, later wrote that you should only work at the bench during the week with those people you are happy to socialize with at the weekend; I was lucky; Steve is not the devil but he knows an enormous amount and had a lot to teach me, and we were friends at weekends; after Dan Mackenzie, Steve was the greatest influence on my career, and vice-versa; I think it fair to say that the Huppert and Sparks papers are considerably better than anything either of us could do on our own; he was interested in geology but knew little mathematics, although he has an incredible insight into it; he knew what problems were important and when the solution was correct; I knew how to do laboratory experiments, which was something I learned from Stewart Turner, and together Steve and I built up this field of geological fluid mechanics

19:27:02 There were a lot of Australians who came to Cambridge, partly due to the fact that the first non-royal brothers (Michell) who were fellows of the Royal Society of Australia, had a student called Cherry who came here as a Fellow of Trinity; on his return he set up the School of Mathematics in Melbourne which produced George Batchelor; he came here and set up the Department of Applied Mathematics; as a result lots of Australians came here to do their PhDs and then stayed on; there are not many coming from Australia now

20:57:02 The first problem that Steve and I worked on led to the understanding that in the big magma chambers under volcanoes the motion was turbulent; before that people had thought it was rather slow laminar flow; maybe ten years after we did this work I was on a field trip in Hawaii and we went pretty close to a volcanic crater; the leader of the field trip said the magma was in turbulent motion; I got excited and wondered how she knew this; she said that Huppert and Sparks tells us so; I have been lucky in having some wonderful graduate students; at one stage, six in a row became research fellows of colleges; with one of them (Grae Worster) I set up a quantitative investigation into solidification, how melt turns into a solid; this is useful to know how magma forms rocks, also how ice is formed from sea water; he was a very good student and produced a very nice theory for his PhD; I was feeling rather low when he left and thought I should do a whole series of experiment on the subject, which from a scientific point of view were the best that I have ever done; the reason was that his theory and these experiments were totally different with no agreement whatsoever; you learn from an experiment like that; part of his dissertation had looked at another possible form of motion; I could see quite quickly that that little part was relevant - so-called mushy layers; instead of it being totally solid or totally liquid there is something called a mushy which is interstitial liquid bathed in parts of a solid; we then wrote a nice paper in 'Nature' with a fabulous front-cover photograph which got us a lot of publicity, of how mushy layer ought to work; we were not the first to do that - Paul Roberts had written down the equation but he made it too complicated and didn't get the solutions; Grae has now developed the idea of mushy layers further; that development of mushy layers, looking at how they grow and affect the formation of steel ingots and influence casting problems, is another important piece of my work

26:53:06 Carbon sequestration, putting carbon dioxide into a compressed, liquid-like form, in the large porous reservoirs beneath the Earth's surface at about a kilometre, I became interested in a rather curious way; one day a small woman (Sarah Lyle) came to my room and told me that she was captain of the University women's rugby football club, a third-year earth scientist, and wanted to do a project on carbon sequestration with me as her supervisor; I told her I knew nothing about the subject but she was persistent; I learned a little about it and she did some lovely experiments and I did the theory; I realized that carbon sequestration was another huge field; I have estimated that 100,000 people are working in this area - engineers, policy makers, economists etc. - but there are only two or three groups in the world working on the fluid mechanics of it; the questions are how fast does it spread, how far will it go, how risky is it, all very important problems; I was lucky enough to get a very good post doc from America, Jerome Neufeld, and with him and Sarah Lyle, and a number of others I have done a series of investigations of fluid-mechanical aspects of carbon dioxide sequestration; my earth science background was useful because I knew about the geology, my fluid-mechanical background also, and the quantitative background so that I could calculate these things; have done some nice laboratory experiments; one of the latest experiments that we have done suggest that once you get a crack most of the stuff will eventually leak out; there is a question of how rapidly this will happen; if it is slow it doesn't matter though you have wasted energy and cost in getting it down there; if it comes out quickly, the carbon dioxide is heavier than air and will be effectively a poisonous gas; it is an interesting area that relates policy, which I am getting more interested in, with science; I partly became interested in policy because I was asked in 2002 to chair a Royal Society committee on bio-terrorism and I had a lot of interaction with government ministers because of that; these are huge policy matters; we are putting 28 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year; it is not absolutely definite that it is leading to a catastrophe but there is fairly good chance that it is a big risk; in my view you will never get people to stop using cars, planes etc., so you have to store it; that will need government regulation to store it underground, an industry to get it going, economists and the people to agree to all this, so it is a big problem; Dan Mackenzie thinks we will never get such agreement, but I am not so sure; I have been told by a number of oil companies that there is a huge amount of money to be made by sequestration but not by the first company that is involved, so each company is waiting for another to show the way; I wrote a report for an oil company which started by saying that the carbon dioxide sequestration business is likely to become as large and as profitable as the oil industry; John Brown, the ex-head of BP says that mankind has always found its way out of difficult problems, but just how we will do it is not clear; given the negative attitude of the public to nuclear energy which was badly handled by the government, hope for better treatment of carbon dioxide sequestration

36:48:15 On the potentials of solar energy, there is the possibility of a huge supply but the capture efficiency is very small at the moment; I believe that it will happen though I can't say directly how; that may mean that it is even more important to know how to capture the carbon dioxide that we are using at the moment because there will come a time soon when we won't be producing so much and it will be a good idea to store it; we need to store about half the output at present but the chance that it will be effective would be increased by the use of solar energy; I think that will come but the time scale is the question

38:56:05 The recommendation we made on bio-terrorism to the government as the result of the Royal Society initiative was that there should be what we called a 'one stop shop'  built - one place that looked into the relevant science, that knew what was involved and would be called upon to do both the decontamination and the fighting; the government almost immediately said no and I had a fascinating interview with Hazel Blears who was then a junior minister in the Home Office; I spent an hour and a half with her and she looked me in the eyes the whole time; she understood all I said but could not accept it politically; Roy Anderson became the chief scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defence later and he basically put the recommendation into effect; he set up a counter terrorist centre in the Ministry of Defence and that is doing more or less what we had in mind; I have the feeling now that scientifically what we said was very sensible but I don't think that politically we were as astute as we might have been; setting up a 'one stop shop' was definitely the right thing to do but the Labour Government didn't want to do it so you could say that it wasn't a sensible thing to suggest; I once went on a course on entrepreneurial skills for scientists and engineers and learnt that the style one should present to a CEO was the style that he was used to; we did not couch our suggestion to the Labour Party in such a way that they might have accepted it; that is when I became more interested in policy; now I am more senior and have learnt how the game works; unproductive and productive meetings with government officials; had a meeting a year ago with the 'Mr Fixit' of Australia, the Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, David Gonski; somehow we got onto the subject of what we wanted in the world; for him, it was to make a difference, which I thought was a good answer; being interested in policy is about that; I can write papers with hundreds of citations, but will they make a difference? Not at all; maybe in policy matters you can have an influence, but it is much harder

50:12:17 Felicia, my wife, is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry; she is interested at present in wellbeing and happiness, also a matter of great policy importance; I have enjoyed getting to know some of her connections; in Britain she has been asked to speak to the Cabinet Office a number of times; in America she has been asked to arrange conferences with Marty Seligman the originator of 'positive psychology'; he has worked for the American government on bioterrorism but his work is totally confidential; I have made the point that my work is always open; I have talked with him about it but he can say very little; people have ask me how I feel having a wife who is now more famous than I am, but it doesn't worry me at all; she doesn't enjoy Cambridge nearly as much as I do, but she has been a wonderful mother to our children, and worked hard

53:32:16 I think that you are more likely to be creative when you are relaxed, but I have had ideas in all sorts of situations - in keep-fit classes, the shower, with the tension of doing an experiment; the other day in relation to sequestration I was thinking about the efficiency of storage, and while in the shower thought of a wonderful experiment which I did with a post doc this morning; I enjoy working quietly in my office but I'm not good at fitting things in short time spans; I lecture a reasonable amount which I enjoy, except for the time that it takes; when I first came here I taught first-year undergraduates which I enjoyed enormously; I think I am good at enthusing people who are interested; I have taught final year graduate students; I always supervise the courses I teach in King's, and enjoy it; some of my good friends have been students that I have supervised, although they still find it difficult to call me Herbert

58:50:11 My advice to a young scientist would be to be in the best environment that you can, find the best supervisor that you can, do something different; my own experience of the importance of environment was with Dan, where everything was so easy; I have sometimes been in other places for a month or so by myself, but have never accomplished much; on supervisors, there is a huge correlation between individuals who have won Nobel prizes or become Fellows of the Royal Society and their supervisors; I was asked to name the ten most influential scientists in my career and they are all FRS or the American equivalent; to do important problems is clearly worthwhile, problems that other people will be interested in and have some point to them