Second Part

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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