NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum. Life Story Interviews

Russell Stannard

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/03

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/03

Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname: Stannard Title: Professor

Interviewee’s Russell Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Professor of Physics Date and place of birth: 24th December 1931, Brixton, London Mother’s occupation: bus conductress Father’s occupation: doorman for London Electricity Board Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 15/01/2015 (track 1-3), 12/02/2015 (track 4-5), 25/06/2015 (track 6-7), 05/08/15 (track 8-10)

Location of interview: British Library, London

Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash

Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks 10 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 12 hrs. 03 min. 04 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

Russell Stannard Page 1 C1672/03 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you start then by telling me when and where you were born?

Where? I was born in Brixton in London, which is, not a very savoury district. [laughs] I was born very much of, of working-class parents. My father was, he was a sergeant in the Royal Horse Artillery; he was a farrier, he shoed the horses. Spent a lot of time out in India. And when he retired from that he became a commissionaire, he was a doorman for the London headquarters of the London Electricity Board. And my mother was a bus conductress, she collected fares on London buses.

What did your dad tell you, if he did, about his early life, about his childhood?

I, I really don’t know very much about his early life, except that, you know, he, he was out in India, you know, working with the Royal Horse Artillery. He was, he was forty-five when he had me, and so, I always sort of regarded him as, an old man. [laughs]

Mm.

So, we didn’t do a great deal together. And, not only that, the problem was that much of my childhood was taken up with World War II, and I was evacuated, so for a total of five years I was, you know, I, I wasn’t with him, you know.

What was your birth date, so we can have that on?

Birth date? Christmas Eve 1931.

Thank you. Did you know anything of his parents, of your paternal grandparents?

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Russell Stannard Page 2 C1672/03 Track 1

No. No, no. No.

He didn’t speak of them?

No. But that doesn’t mean to say I can’t go back in the family history, because, I was giving a talk on the radio once, it was ‘Thought for the Day’, and, someone called Stannard wrote me a long, long letter. He had done research into the Stannards, and what he informed me was that, all of us Stannards are related to each other, we all go back to a common ancestor called Stannard, who was the son of Æthelwig. It’s all written down in the Domesday Book. And Æthelwig was a very prominent person. He was a shire reeve, from which we get the name sheriff, and he was promoted to King’s Reeve, a very high position, and he served under Ethelred the Unready, King Harold and William the Conqueror. And, when William the Conqueror had to go back to Normandy, he couldn’t trust his treacherous barons, so he used to take them with him. And he left the country in the charge of three viceroys, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of Worcester and the Abbot of Evesham, who was Æthelwig. So, he was a big noise. And, this was all based, Æthelwig was based in Thetford in East Anglia. And this guy who wrote to me said, ‘If you trace your ancestry back you will find, I’m pretty sure you’ll find that they eventually get to East Anglia, because we’re all descended.’ And I wrote back to him and said, ‘Well I didn’t have to go very far back because my father was born in Ipswich,’ which is in Suffolk, so, it all seems to, to tie together. Mind you, Æthelwig was very, was very rich, he had lots of lands, according to the Domesday Book, but when he died in, whatever it was, 1007, most of his lands were confiscated by William the Conqueror, because William was having a lot of trouble with one of the barons called Baron Bigot, a wonderful name, that, Baron Bigot of the Castles of Bungay and Framlingham. And so to buy him off, William made over to him much of the lands of Æthelwig. So Stannard didn’t actually get very much. So, that’s why I ended up being born in Brixton [laughs] rather than a country house in East Anglia.

[04:48] Thank you. What do you know of your mother’s life up to the, up to the point that she was your mother I suppose, so her, her life before? 2

Russell Stannard Page 3 C1672/03 Track 1

Well, she was brought up in a village in Staffordshire. She was one of, ten children; two didn’t survive but there were eight surviving children. So she was one of eight. Very poor, very poor. She, I think she started off her working life as a housemaid, and then eventually came to London, married my dad and was a conductor on the buses.

Do you know how they met?

No, I don’t, no, no.

[05:37] And, did you meet the maternal grandparents?

Oh, yes, because… Yah, I should explain that, in 1939, when I was, I’d be seven or eight, war broke out, the Second World War, and, living in London, that was very very dangerous because of the bombing, and so, there was a big project to evacuate the children to safer parts of the country. And my younger brother, Don, he’s fifteen months younger than me, we were both evacuated to the maternal grandmother. She lived in this village in Staffordshire. And as I say, she brought up eight children. How she managed that in the tiny cottage that they lived in, I do not know. But obviously, she had to be extremely well organised. And she was a, a very, very strict, Victorian type of woman. She had very strict rules, which Don and I had to obey. Like for example, we must never, never be late for a meal. If we were, we were banished to the outdoor scullery where the washing was done, and in that scullery there was a big mangle with wooden rollers, and in front of the wooden rollers there was a ledge, and we had to put our plates on that ledge and stand there in the freezing cold eating our, our delayed meal. She used to beat us, you know, she would thump us on the back whenever we did anything wrong, you know. In fact, things got so bad at one stage that, Grandma was out with the coal shed, she was getting… [sound change] Oh dear. [pause] In fact at one stage things got so bad that, she was out at the coal shed getting coal in, and Don and I went up behind her and gave her a push, we pushed her into the shed, slammed the door, and bolted it. Crazy thing to do, but, it was going to give us some respite. All hell was let loose when she got out, but, you know, at least we had some time where we didn’t have to be frightened of Grandma. 3

Russell Stannard Page 4 C1672/03 Track 1

And she was very frightening. We, of course, went to the local school in the village, and the other kids would say, ‘What!? You’re living with Old Ma Birkin?’ You know, that, they couldn’t imagine any, any fate worse than to be living with Old Ma Birkin. She used to be a midwife, in fact she proudly boasted that she had brought everybody in the village into the world, you know. So, she, she was quite a figure. But, I, with the benefit of hindsight, I have to say that, I do owe a great deal to Grandma, because, when you think, she was in her seventies, she had brought up eight children. The last thing she would have wanted was to have two scruffy kids from London. And we spent three years with her, three years. So, you know, one has to sympathise with the position that she was put in. During that time our parents occasionally visited us. Travelling during the war was very very difficult, and of course they had their jobs. And, I always remember that, although we, you know, loved to have them come up and visit us, once they left, you couldn’t help thinking, now is this the last time I’m going to see them? Things were so dangerous in London. For example, my mother was on her bus; the bus pulled away from a bus stop and the bus behind came to that bus stop, and as soon as it got to the bus stop a bomb fell on it and killed everybody in it. And that, that was how close she came to being killed. So, that time in Staffordshire, you know, wasn’t good. [10:05] Also, at the school, Don and I were bullied. You know, the kids there had never come across somebody from London, you know, London was a different planet. Things got bad. Eventually I thought, I’ve had enough of this, and I got involved in two playground fights. With the first one, the other lad ended up with a black eye, and with the second one, I actually knocked a tooth out. And that was sufficiently dramatic that they laid off us from then onwards. So that was that. [10:45] So, we were there for three years, and then there was something of a lull in the bombing in London, things were a little bit safer. Not only that, I was coming up to the age of eleven, and in those days they had the Eleven Plus exam, and that was the big exam you went in for, and if you managed to pass that you were able to go to a grammar school. So, I was… they need to prepare me for the Eleven Plus, so Don and I went back to London to stay with our parents. And that was, obviously was difficult, because, although there was a lull, it was still pretty bad, there were air raids, we would have to go into the air-raid shelters. You could hear all the anti-aircraft guns going off, and the bombs falling. One of the excitements, though, was, once you heard the all-clear you could go 4

Russell Stannard Page 5 C1672/03 Track 1 out and look for shrapnel. This was twisted pieces of metal that had come from the shells, and, and the bombs, and it used to be very exciting when you found a, a piece of shrapnel, you know. And, there were bomb, you know, houses were bombed all around us. And this was the time when the doodlebugs started to come over. Doodlebugs were these aircraft which were unmanned, they had a certain amount of fuel in them, and they were directed to London, and once they got to London the engines would cut out and the doodlebug would then glide down, and when it hit the ground it exploded. And it had a tremendous amount of explosives on board. There was one doodlebug that landed on the opposite side of the road to our block of flats. It wiped out all the houses there, it killed twenty-seven people. It blew in all our windows. And it also blew down the inside wall of our flat. It fell onto my brother, Don, who was at that time in bed, so he was buried under this rubble. Fortunately he wasn’t, he wasn’t killed. So the doodlebugs were, were very frightening. And I have a very vivid memory. I was in the house – in the flat, on my own, and there was an air- raid warning. You could hear the doodlebug coming. A very characteristic sound, it was a, choom choom choom choom choom choom sort of sound. It wasn’t like an aircraft. And, I remember crouching in the hallway with the doors shut listening to this doodlebug coming, and the noise was getting louder and louder, and when that happened you just prayed that the noise would start to fade away, because once that happened, you knew that it had passed you and was going away from you, so, when the engine cut out, it would glide still further away from you so you were safe. But whilst the engine noise was coming up, it was coming towards you, you know. So I have all these very vivid memories of, of that. [14:11] I did manage to, to pass the Eleven Plus exam. But it gives you some idea of the kind of school I went to, it was called South Lambeth Road School. Having passed the Eleven Plus exam the headmaster dragged me out in front of the whole school and said, you know, I can still remember his words, ‘This boy is on the first rung of the ladder.’ They hadn’t had a boy pass the Eleven Plus for years. That was the sort of school it was. And I’m, I’m very grateful to my parents, because, they, they encouraged me to study, despite the fact that they themselves, as I said, you know, left at the age of fourteen, left school at fourteen. And they always supported me, throughout my education, the grammar school and, and also later on at university. So there I was, I’d passed the Eleven Plus, and I gained entrance to Archbishop Tenison’s Grammar Sschool. That school is situated next to the Kennington Oval cricket ground in London, which is where the last Test Match 5

Russell Stannard Page 6 C1672/03 Track 1 of each series is played. But at the time that I joined the school, the school itself, the staff and the students, were all evacuated, they were evacuated down to Reading. So, that’s where I had to, had to go next, I had to go to Reading. And, didn’t know anybody in Reading, so, you get billeted on strangers. The system was that, the officials would go around seeing how big a house was, how many people were living there, and if there was any spare capacity, that was it, they had to take an evacuee, or more than one evacuee. And, the residents at Reading, all I can say is, they seemed as though they just didn’t want to know there was a war on, and they hated the idea of taking in these scruffy London evacuees. So, in my first year there I was moved on, I had five different billets. Couldn’t settle down anywhere. They were forced to take me in, and then they were immediately making up stories about, ‘Oh I’ve got some relative coming, we haven’t got room any more,’ and so, you know, I was moved on. With the fifth one, I thought, I’m not going to last five minutes in this one, because, the fifth one was an elderly couple, very, very posh. He had been the company secretary of a big jute import firm, and she had been a society photographer in Mayfair. And they had retired to this beautiful, beautiful house just outside Reading. You approached it by going down a driveway. It was, you know… They had a, they were well off, they had a, a live-in maid, housekeeper, and also a full-time gardener. And I thought, oh these posh people, [laughs] they’re going to have me on my way in no time at all. But it didn’t turn out like that at all. They were, they were kindness itself. Absolutely wonderful to me. I don’t know why, I, I have speculated that perhaps… Well they were certainly childless. I could only think that perhaps they had wanted a child of their own and couldn’t have one and this was their opportunity of looking after someone. And, you know, they encouraged me to call them Uncle Bill and Auntie Bea, you know, which was nice. And I stayed very happily with them for, for one year, at which stage the school went back to London. That was the end of the war. But that wasn’t the end of my connection with Uncle Bill and Auntie Bea. We stayed in touch, I would go and visit them. Whilst I was there, Uncle Bill would take me out on a, a winter’s evening with his brass telescope, and we would look at the stars the Moon and stuff like that. Eventually got to the point where he said, ‘I’m too old for doing this, so, I’ll give you my telescope,’ and, I’ve still got it. And later on he got too old to drive so he gave me his car. It was a Morris Minor, that was my, my first car. [19:18] So, we, the school went back to London. We didn’t go back to the, the Oval building, because that was badly damaged by bombing and they were repairing that, so for, I think it was about a year we 6

Russell Stannard Page 7 C1672/03 Track 1 were in temporary accommodation in Westminster. And, OK, after that we were in the Oval building, yes.

[19:41] Can I take you back over some of those things, and ask you some...?

Yah.

Great, thank you. When you said that your grandmother beat you, for what did she beat you? In other words, what did she see as being bad or wrong or…?

I can’t remember now. She, she… She, [pause] just took a dislike to so much of what we were doing, you know, if we didn’t… We had our jobs to do around the house, naturally, and if we didn’t do them the way she, she wanted them doing, you know, like, for example, she had… We had to make firelighters. We got a newspaper, and there was a, a carpet rod, you know, there were rods up the staircase, and we would get one of these brass ones, and you would have to wrap the newspaper up around this brass rod. Pull the brass rod out, so you’d then got a tight, long cylinder of paper which you then had to tie up into knots. And that was going to be used to help light the fire, and sometimes we didn’t get the knot right, you know, so, boom, boom, you know, we got beaten, you know. So, yah, that’s the way it was.

Did you get any sense of…

And in those days, you know, people didn’t think twice about corporal punishment, you know, schools were full of corporal punishment, people getting caned. I was only caned once in, in my whole school life, for which I’m grateful. But you know, everyone thought that that was normal, that’s the way you discipline children and the way they learn their lessons, you know. And she was just part of that mindset.

[21:41]

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Were you old enough to get any sense of her outlook on the world, political, religious, sort of moral, her, her wider views of…?

[laughs] Oh, well, as far as religion was concerned, she, she made us go to, to the Methodist church. The reason for that was that she had fallen out with the local vicar, and what she had fallen out over – you won’t believe this – was that she did not like the way he leant on the pulpit. You know, it was slovenly, and a vicar should stand upright and proclaim the Gospel. And slouching over the pulpit just wasn’t on. He’s obviously not the right man. And so she went off to the, the Methodist. And so we, we joined the, the Sunday school at the Methodist. Neither Don nor I liked it at all, but anyway, we had to do it.

Could you… I know you didn’t like it, but could you describe it, that, what you did, what Sunday school consisted of?

Oh, reading the Bible and having it explained to you, and then, hymns. The usual stuff. [laughs]

And the services, what do you remember of the services?

Oh, that they were boring, you know, that’s, they just went on forever, so it seemed, you know. There were other things I wanted to be doing on a Sunday, you know.

[23:19] What did you want to be doing? I mean, when you weren’t doing jobs for your grandmother, what were you able to do with your brother, or with whoever?

Oh. I remember we had, on one Christmas we got a, a toy aeroplane. It was red, I remember that. And it flew. And we used to love going out into the, into the fields, because we’re very much in the country there, flying the aeroplane. And, we used to enjoy playing football, that sort of thing.

The maternal grandfather, he presumably was…?

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Russell Stannard Page 9 C1672/03 Track 1

Oh he, he had, he had died long, long before. I never, never met him.

[24:07] The years before you were evacuated, you were born in 1931 and evacuated in 1939, so, as a younger child, what memories do you have of time spent with your mother in London?

They’re not, they’re not very, very clear in my mind. I think that, all that happened in the war years was so vivid that it almost sort of wiped out earlier. One incident I, I do remember was, Don and I were in the bath, this was in London, this was before the war, and there was a thunderstorm, and lightning struck the chimneys. And there was this terrific noise of all the bricks pouring down from a great height. Because, the, the flats we were living in were, had four storeys, so all these bricks crashing down onto the concrete down below was just so frightening. And I always remember that, you know, together with, of course, the sound of the thunder and the flash of lightning. And I do remember that.

Did you go anywhere with your mother, at weekends or, evenings or…?

I really can’t remember, no. No.

And…

No. Everyone was just so busy working, you know. It was… Yah.

And, the same for your father, do you have memories of time spent with your father before you evacuated?

No we didn’t really go out anywhere. You know, he… I, I didn’t have the same relationship with my father that I think most boys have where they go off and do things together, you know, would go off to the football match together sort of thing. Because, you know, the age gap was just so… And not only that, I have to say that, he suffered terribly from arthritis, arthritis of the knees. He was almost crippled. So he, he just did not go out very much. He had terrible problem with his 9

Russell Stannard Page 10 C1672/03 Track 1 knees. I remember he had a vibrator, and he was, he placed it on his knees to try and get some, some relief. And I always worried that I was going to suffer from the same thing, and it turned out that, yes, I was. I have now had both knees replaced, and my left shoulder’s replaced, it’s arthritis, osteoarthritis. So, my dad was always, was a very kindly but old and almost crippled man, you know. [27:16] We were very affectionate with him, and he was very affectionate with me. And, as I say, he, he made such sacrifices for me, because, OK, I went to the, the grammar school; I wanted to stay on into the sixth form, which he found very strange, you know, he had left at fourteen. ‘Well why aren’t you leaving at sixteen?’ In fact he would, half-jokingly, say, ‘When are you going to become a man and get a job?’ But, he allowed me to stay on in the sixth form. And then I won a place at the university, so that was another three years getting my, my BSc degree. And then another three years for a PhD. So I was, I was twenty-four. He had left school at fourteen; he was still supporting me when I was twenty-four. Now, I owe him so much, so much. [pause] Yah, he, he would keep on ribbing me, saying, ‘Oh, you’re still at school.’ You know, here I am, doing a PhD, but as far as he was concerned I was still at school, you know, and I still wasn’t a man, you know, I hadn’t got a job. But, you know, it must have been sort of, tongue in cheek, because… I think, well he was very proud of me, put it like that, yes.

You say half-jokingly. What effect did it have on you at the time, these sorts of comments?

I knew he was joking. I knew he was joking. He was just that kind of man, you know.

[28:54] And in the absence, then, of memories of sort of, going out and doing things with parents, how do you, how did you and your brother sort of, entertain yourself up to the age that you evacuated, and then we know what happened after that, what did you play with inside, play with outside, read, listen to?

Oh. [pause] In our bedroom we had an old radio, a Cossor radio, and you turn the dial, and you got all these foreign languages. And that I found very, very fascinating, that, you know, here we 10

Russell Stannard Page 11 C1672/03 Track 1 were in England, and here were people who were, hundreds, thousands of miles away, I could hear them in my own bedroom, you know. There was no television in those… well, television was just starting, but, you know, even radio itself was, was magical, absolutely magical. Television was just starting up. But the only way we could see television was to go to a shop, a shop in Brixton, where they had this huge monolithic piece of furniture with this tiny, tiny screen, the screen couldn’t have been more than six inches across you know, black and white obviously. And people would crowd around it, crowd around it, just looking, fascinated at these moving images, you know. We just found that extraordinary. Of course we didn’t have any electronic games. You had to devise your own games. When it came to football, what was very common in those days was what we called tuppenny ha’penny football. You got two pennies, which were large coins, and a halfpenny which was a smaller coin. The two large coins were, one was my man and one was the other person’s man, and the small coin was the ball. And then you got your hair comb, and with the hair comb you could flick your man and make your man hit the ball, and so on. So, it was called tuppenny ha’penny football. And, it was, it was a game of great skill. I know today, with their Xboxes and PlayStations, things like that, you have football games where the images are just so realistic, it really is quite extraordinary, but, as far as skill is concerned, I reckon we were more skilful with tuppenny ha’penny football than one is just pressing buttons, you know. And indeed, when, when I got to the grammar school, tuppenny ha’penny football was, was really, big time stuff, even in the sixth form we would have, we would play it… Well we, there would be something like ten of us in a league, and we were playing for a cup. The cup was actually the top of a bedstead. It was actually shaped rather like a cup, you know, like an FA Cup. And, how we came to acquire that, I don’t know, but that was what we played for. And we would play for it in the, in one of the labs, on one of the benches which had gas taps coming up, and one of the great skills was to flick your man such that the ball would flick off the gas tap and go round the man into the goal. Now I could go on forever about that, you know, tuppenny ha’penny… But, you had to make your own amusements, in that kind of way, because you had no money, you had no money.

How did you mark out the, the pitch? So that someone listening to this could sort of, recreate this game if they wanted to. We can imagine the two larger coins and the smaller one, flicking the larger coins…

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Well, the pitch, the extent of the pitch was the edge of the table, the edge of the laboratory bench.

And the goals?

Oh, I think we marked them out with chalk. Yes. Because it was chalk and blackboards in those days. [laughs]

Why was this happening in the lab, rather than anywhere else?

It was just a very convenient shape, of, of the bench.

[34:06] Do you remember who taught you to read?

No idea. No idea.

Once you could read, do you remember what you were reading, at the earlier stages, and where you were getting the books, that sort of thing?

No, I, I… No, I, I don’t remember. I really don’t. I don’t recall doing much reading. Because my parents didn’t read, you know, they had very few books, because, you know, they weren’t particularly educated, you know.

[34:45] Thank you. Could you now talk about your parents’ sort of, world view. So, I don’t know whether you want to talk about one and then the other, because they were so different, or something, but their sort of outlook on the world, what they might say about the world, sort of morally or politically or, even religiously, although I gather from your autobiography that the latter wasn’t strong.

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No I don’t really, except, you know, our thinking in those days was so dominated by the war, you know, so, all conversations were about the war, either the war about to happen or was happening or what the war was like, you know? And, and the after-effects of the war went on for ages, because, you know, we had rationing. There was a shortage of food, and so, a lot of the conversation was, gosh, you know, I’ve seen my first banana. I didn’t see my first banana until, oh, I was sixteen or seventeen, you know? Because, they weren’t coming in or anything like that. So there was always a, a gradual lessening of these restrictions as we got back onto our feet. I certainly remember a lot of playing in bomb ruins, because as I said, all the houses on the opposite side of the road were, were flattened, and you had great excitement when demolition men came in. They had this huge, heavy iron ball suspended by a cable, and they would swing this ball and make it hit the remaining walls so as to get those walls down. And we used to think this was wonderful, you know, it was so exciting, you know, to see all these remains of houses being knocked down. So… And the conversations would be about, you know, people who had died in the war and, and stuff like that. It was very dominated by, by the war.

[37:15] Did you… I know you went to church when you were staying with your grandmother, but did you go to church in London?

My mother used to, to go to church at Christmas, and she would take us. That was the only contact we had with church, was at Christmas being taken by Mother. As far as my father was concerned, religion was ‘what women do’. That was his attitude. And, one of the most difficult things I had ever had to do in my life was, when I was, I suppose eighteen, I had to confront my dad and say, ‘I’m going to church.’ He, he could not understand that. It was just something women did, you know. Anyway.

Do you remember what he said to you when you told him at eighteen that you were going to go?

Don’t remember his exact words, but, you know, he just sort of shook his head and said, you know, ‘What’s this about?’ sort of thing, you know. Yes.

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So when you came to London in the lull in bombing, and then the bombing started again, and you said that, listening to the doodlebug you, you prayed that it wouldn’t drop on you, do you mean that literally, or not…?

Well, like anybody else in that situation, you know. No, I, I had no, no formed thinking about God or prayer, but, at that stage.

[39:04] And how like your brother were you, and how different were you? In what ways were you like him, and in what ways different?

[pause] [laughs] I must confess, I sometimes wonder how I come to have a brother like Don. He, he is a very different personality. He is very similar to my dad, and I’m much more like my mum. But he is very similar to Dad. But he was, well he’s always remained a confirmed bachelor. He has had… You know, he was a civil servant, well he, you know, he’s retired now. He has led what I would consider to be a very dull life, a very dull sort of job. I don’t think he would have said, claimed that his job was anything other than dull. It was, as far as I know it was a job where you catalogue just about everything that the Army, Navy and Air Force have, and then, because they have been ordered differently, aircraft people order their stuff, and army people… but some of the things are the same, and therefore it would be an advantage if you combined the two sorts of thing and got a better deal, just because one goes to the army and one goes… So, he was in the job of cataloguing just everything that, that goes. So that someone can say, OK, well that looks the same as, as that. So, for me it was terribly, terribly boring. And, he has his stamp collection. More or less keeps himself to himself. But very amiable. But… Like for example, we often laugh, when he sends me a birthday card he signs it ‘To Russ from Don’, and that’s it. You know, ‘To Russ from Don’. Not, you know, ‘Happy birthday’ or ‘Best wishes’ or anything. ‘To Russ from Don’. Recently I… Well he always now comes and spends Christmas with us, and, he has in fact just recently spent six days with us, OK. And I took, him back to the station, and I said, ‘OK Don, well, I hope you had a, a nice time.’ And he would think for a while, and then he says, ‘It made a change.’ You know, he, he is, very reluctant to show any emotion, feelings. I on the other hand, when I look at my life, it’s just been so absolutely packed, you know, I’ve had two marriages, I’ve 14

Russell Stannard Page 15 C1672/03 Track 1 got four children, or three children of my own and an adopted child, three stepchildren, sixteen grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. Every day is somebody’s birthday. They’re always coming in. Christmas is, is, absolute mayhem, you know, the front doorbell is going all the time, people coming in and all the rest of it. And I have all my friends at church and so on, and, and have gone round the world, and… It’s just a totally different kind of life, totally different kind of… So as I say, I sometimes wonder how I come to have a, a brother like Don. We, we love each other: well I assume he loves me, I certain love him, but, you know, [laughs] we have so little in common.

[43:11] Were these... Was this difference between you apparent as children?

Yes. Yes, yes.

In what way then?

Well, I, I was… I was much more academic than him. You know, I did, I did like studying, yes. And he just, wasn’t engaged in it, you know, he was, he just wasn’t engaged in that sort of thing, you know?

In what way, which of your characteristics, then, make you say that you were more like your mother than your father? Which is sort of, a way of getting at her personality as well, sure.

It’s difficult to say. She just always seemed much more interested in, in what I was doing, and she had a natural interest in, in what I was doing, more than my dad did. I don’t really… Just seemed to be sort of on the same wavelength. Can’t, I can’t really put my finger on it.

[44:26] Now you say that you liked studying. What memories do you have of the, the sort of content of education before we get to Archbishop Tenison church school? So this could be, the primary

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Russell Stannard Page 16 C1672/03 Track 1 school in Staffordshire, or primary, or, if it’s still a primary school, in London, what memories you have of sort of, early education I suppose we might say?

[pause] Well I suppose I’ve always been very serious-minded, and, I, I have to take into account what a strong influence on me Grandma was when I was evacuated to her for three years. A strict disciplinarian, and so, when it came to school work, I always used to take that very, very seriously, you know? If, if the, if you’d got some homework to do, then you took your homework really seriously. That, it just seemed natural to me that, that one took study seriously. I think, that’s really all I can say about that. I have been, you know, I am very disciplined in, and organised, in what I do. [laughs] I suppose it shows up in, in all sorts of ways. You know, regularly in a morning, when I’m sitting on the toilet I’m, I’m shaving, I’m using the electric shaver. You know, it saves time to do two things at the same time [laughs], you know, and that, that just seems organised, you know.

And you think there’s a link back to your maternal grandmother?

Oh, yes, I think she had a, a very power… Because she was very organised you know, in that, in that small cottage, you know. There was only an outside toilet, so you had chamber pots under the bed. There was no bathroom. If you wanted a bath, then you had to get the, a tin bath out of the scullery, stick it front of the, the fire in the kitchen, and fill it up with hot water from, you know, jugs. You know, you’d got to be organised to be living under those sort of conditions. Yes.

[47:21] Thank you. Could you then now describe the school that you went to having passed the Eleven Plus, and, first of all describe it as a, a sort of physical place, and then start to populate it a bit and tell us about teachers and things that you did.

What, the, the Oval?

Mm.

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Yup. Yah, I think that, we got back to the, the regular buildings at the Oval. [pause] I think what you have to understand is that, in those days, my obsession was with cricket. I had this very clear vision that one day I was going to play for Surrey, who is the county that is resident at the Oval, and, England. Now with… So I was absolutely delighted, in fact it was all probably bound up with the fact that Tenison’s School overlooks the Oval, you know. But when you look at that building, and you often see it on television when the cameras pan round, you know, the building is, is very narrow, and it’s only the, the narrow face that is facing the Oval. And there are only a few windows high enough up to be able to look over the wall of the Oval on the other side of the road. And I quickly learnt that, from the physics lab you had an absolutely panoramic view, you could see the whole of the field, you could… The main scoreboard was, was directly opposite. And I just found I was spending more and more time in the physics lab. It was so that I could keep tabs on how my heroes were doing over the other side of the road. I think that was partly the reason why I chose the science option when it came to Higher School Certificate as it was in those days, it’s A, Advanced Level now, sixth form work. So I joined sixth form science I think largely because it included physics. I was to study physics, chemistry, pure mathematics and applied mathematics. But I remember making that decision, that I was very very sad to be forced into the situation of having to give up English. I had a wonderful English teacher, Miss Fry, a spinster, we used to call her Fanny Fry, and, oh… And I was her best pupil, and she was so disappointed when I opted to study science so I wasn’t going to do A Level English. But, you know, you had to make a decision. Incidentally, I like to think that, because of my writing career eventually, dear old Fanny up there in Heaven can look down and think, well, she didn’t actually waste her, her efforts. But anyway. So there, there I am in the physics lab, and, my passion for cricket was, was well known. I had a very good physics teacher, Joe Butler, an elderly man, and I would sit in the back row with my back to the window overlooking the Oval, and whenever Joe turned to the blackboard I would take the opportunity to turn round and have a look at what the score was. And occasionally there would be a ripple of applause from across the road that we could hear, and, Joe would very wearily say, ‘For Stanndard’s benefit, that is Fishlock’s fifty,’ or, or whatever, whatever it was. And, a highlight of the year was that, on two occasions each year the school was allowed actually to play on the Oval. How that arrangement came about I do not know, but, one of the matches was against our old boys, and the other was against another school called Tooting Bec School. And, I can’t describe the thrill of actually playing on the Oval. OK, the, the stands were empty, apart from 17

Russell Stannard Page 18 C1672/03 Track 1 a sprinkling of school kids that were supporting their teams, but in my mind’s eye they were packed with people cheering me on as I played for England. And I, I remember my, my best bowling average was six for thirty-two – six for thirty-five, six for thirty-five, which was quite an achievement. So I used to look forward to that. [52:51] And then, I should explain that… OK. My parents were supporting me whilst I was at Tenison’s School, but it was on the condition that every holiday I would get a job, a holiday job. And, I must confess that I think those holiday jobs did me a world of good, because, it gave me experience of a wide range of life. So for example, I worked for Joe Lyons. Lyons in those days was a big chain of teashops, they were big tea shops called Lyons Corner Houses, and in particular there was a teashop in Piccadilly, in London. And I joined there. And I was washing up, filling the washing- up machine. I graduated as far as becoming the chip fryer, I was responsible for frying the chips. I never made it to the, the upper echelons, which was held by the salad freshener. The salad freshener’s job was to keep an eye on the display of salads upstairs, and when they began to droop he or she would bring them down into the kitchen, turn the lettuce leaves over, spray water on them, and send them back up. But it was a skilled job. I never made it to those, those dizzy heights. Then I was a shelf stacker at the Littlewoods stores in Brixton. In fact one of my bitterest memories was, it was my eighteenth birthday, and I had arranged to have a party, but I was working at Littlewoods, and it being Christmas Eve, they insisted, they had late opening until eight o’clock, and they insisted that I stay there until eight o’clock. So, this meant I missed most of my eighteenth birthday, they carried on the birthday party. They’d certainly started it before, before I got there. So that was that. And then, I became a school caretaker. This was a primary school. And my job was to clean all the parts of the school which normally don’t get cleaned, only get cleaned once a month, do light fittings and top shelves and things like that. So by the end of the day I was covered in dust. I worked for the Post Office, Christmas mail. I was a porter at King’s Cross station. And of course in all these jobs one meets very working-class people doing very working-class jobs, so it’s, you know, later on I became a university academic, which is a bit of an ivory tower existence, but I’ve always been grateful for that enduring memory and experience of what working life is for the majority of, majority of people.

Why, why have you been grateful for that experience? 18

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I think because… Well, subsequently you know, I was writing books, I was writing books for the public. I wasn’t writing… Well, obviously I have written academic books for fellow academics, but most of my writing, what I’m known for, is writing for the public, writing for children, making videos for the public, videos for children. I gave fifty broadcasts in BBC Radio 4 ‘Thought for the Day’, where you’re talking to ordinary people in ordinary jobs, you know. And, I think that, that has, if I’m looking for something that’s been distinctive about my career, I think, I hope it’s not boasting but I think it’s the fact that I’ve been able to combine hifalutin knowledge, academic knowledge, with a very down-to-earth way of getting those ideas across to, shall we say ordinary people, people in more normal sorts of jobs and ways of life. And that has all come, both from my childhood in, in a very working-class area, working-class school, but also with those jobs that I, that I did. [58:12] But the, the vacation job that I most enjoyed of course was, I managed to get on the ground staff of the Oval itself. And in those days, getting on the ground staff was, was a foot in the door, you know, you hoped that you would get noticed and perhaps people would wonder whether you could actually play cricket at the more, at the professional level. It was, it was, it was hard work. It was long hours, very long hours. On a match day you would get there at eight o’clock, and you wouldn’t leave until 9.30 in the evening. Typically, the morning was spent preparing pitches. This involved a massive roller, which weighed two and a half tons, and it took ten of us to pull it. And, regularly what we had to do is spend an hour rolling a pitch. And, you know, you’d pull it one way and then you’d swing the, the arms over and you’d pull it the other way. When you did this, you realised that the pitch actually isn’t flat, it’s, it’s actually raised in the middle, and, you have to pull it uphill. You don’t notice it normally, but if you are pulling a two and a half ton roller, you know you’re going up an incline, and then, OK, you’re down at the other end. And there was a clock at both ends, there was a clock on the pavilion and there was a clock on the, the Vauxhall stand at the other end. So, while you were dragging this wretched thing round, you were always staring at a clock, and the hands of those clocks, you could swear that they just didn’t move. So that was that. But then if it was a match day, I actually got to the point where I would then help to run the scoreboard, the main scoreboard. It took two people. You had these big wooden rollers which, they were circular, but they had ten faces, nought, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. 19

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That’s what they were labelled. And you swung these wheels round so that one of the faces would face a hole in the front of the score box, and that would be the number that was showing, and you changed the number by swinging the wheel round so as to bring another number up to, it would be… So you, you had two rollers for each batsman, the units and the tens. If they got 100, then you had to get a plate with a one on it, and you would hook it on, on the outside. So you had two rollers for each batsman, and then two rollers for the total. So if my batsman scored a run, I would put up his number, whilst my companion would put up the total, and if his batsman was batting, he would put up his batsman’s number and I would be in charge of the total. When a wicket went down, all hell was let loose, it was, just about every number on the board had to be changed, you know, the last wicket fell at what, and the last man was out how, caught by so-and-so, the number of the player that was caught, bowled by, another, so on. So… And you had to get all that done before the next batsman took his, his stance. So again, you had to be extremely organised. And I was good at that, and eventually I was put in charge of the main scoreboard. And this was for international Test Matches as well as ordinary county matches. And this… And so, you would spend the day, if it was a match day you would spend the whole day, seven hours, in the score box. And then, once the match was over you had to get your broom and sweep up the rubbish, and that would take another two and a half hours. So you didn’t get to leave until 9.30 in the evening. So it was very hard work. And, for that, my weekly pay was four pounds fifteen shillings, which sounds ridiculous now, and it wasn’t very much in those days, but, it was an essential part of, of the household budget for my parents. Because I would hand the money over to them obviously. The end of that story is that I, I never was good enough to, to be a professional cricketer. So that was, a disappointment, but of course with the, with the benefit of hindsight, and things, OK, suppose I had been a professional cricketer, my time in the limelight would have been over in next to no time, you know, mid-thirties and that’s it, you’re finished. In fact I’ve always thought how difficult it must be to be a sportsman, because, you have all that adulation at the start of your life and then the rest of your life is an anti-climax. So I think that it was a good thing that I took up an academic career eventually where your productivity just goes up as time goes on. And in fact in my own case I, I’ve written more books since I’ve retired, supposedly retired, than I had done beforehand, so…

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Thank you. Could you describe, because it’s difficult for me to imagine the scoreboard, what kinds of organisation were necessary in order to do it well. In other words, the kinds of sort of, efficiencies and routines that you got into that meant that you were asked to run it rather than anyone else, in other words, that meant you were good at it.

Oh, it was really a case of, you know, if someone is, is not up to speed on it, is reminding them, particularly when wickets go down, as to what has to be done. OK, you change the, the last wicket down at… I’ll look after, the last man’s scored how much. You find out from, from your earphones, from the scorers, you check the number of the player who caught the ball, if it was caught. So, you know, and so you rap out that number, if the other guy is the one that’s responsible for, for doing that. So, it was a question of division of responsibilities, who was in charge of which part of the score box.

[1:06:03] Thank you. Can you tell me now about the development of, well rather, your memories of the content of the teaching and learning of science at this school. We know that part of the reason for choosing the science option was the view from the physics lab.

Yah.

But, what did you do in class, in science?

I had, I had a very good physics teacher, and a very good mathematics teacher. The chemistry teacher was, boring. Or perhaps it’s chemistry that’s boring, I don’t know. I know there are people who find chemistry fascinating, but, I, I never found chemistry fascinating. And I, I somewhat blame the chemistry teacher. His name was Hipperson. He was a big man so we called him Hippo. [mimics voice] And he had this monotonous voice, you know. So I, I didn’t enjoy the chemistry lessons. [pause] The excitement of the chemistry lessons was that I vividly remember that in our class we had a boy called Jacklin, and Jacklin loved chemistry, and he was always experimenting. He loved mixing A with B just, just see what happened, you know, and if it fizzed, that was great, you know. And, quite soon, the rest of the class got to know that, if Jacklin was seen to be, in a 21

Russell Stannard Page 22 C1672/03 Track 1 chemistry lab, if Jacklin was seen to be backing away from the bench, you knew it was time to take cover, because there was likely to be an explosion or an eruption of some kind. So that was exciting. And rumour has it that when Jacklin left the school he joined a chemistry, a mechanical company. And he did actually cause an explosion there. But that’s really all I remember about the chemistry lessons. There was so much one had to learn by heart, certainly in those days, you know, the, the properties of the elements, and, you know, it was just sheer rote learning. And I should hasten to say, I have a very bad memory. I’ve always had a very bad memory. I, I have never learnt a foreign language. I’ve tried. I just can’t remember what the words are, you know, the, the vocabulary, I just simply cannot get it into my mind. And I think that’s, that’s partly why I became a physicist, because, in physics you don’t need a big memory; much of it you can, you can just remember a few things and then you work things out from basic principles sort of thing. So, you don’t have to have that store of, of remembered stuff you know. Having a bad memory by the way does have its advantages, and that is that, when I watch a film, OK, I enjoy the film; very soon after that I’ve forgotten all about it. And I just cannot count the number of times I’ve watched a film, I’m well into it, you know, it might be an hour into the film. I suddenly think, oh my God, I remember this. And, up to that point I had not a clue that I had already seen this film. Which of course is, is wonderful, because it means I can enjoy films several times over. Most people can only enjoy it the first time and after that, well, we know how it ends, sort of thing, it’s not the same. For me, it’s the same experience held several times. [1:10:26] So anyway, I didn’t get on with chemistry. The physics, in between getting to know what the score of the cricket outside was, he was just a very good teacher, and… I, I didn’t, I didn’t actually find the physics itself all that particularly interesting, and, it, it was to become my beef that, in school all you learn are the dull parts of physics. All the exciting stuff, the relativity, the quantum physics, elementary particle, certainly in those days, you didn’t get a whiff of that. You didn’t get a whiff of what physicists today are actually doing. It was all Ohm’s law and, Newton’s laws of motion, and, and stuff like that. But, I was getting good at it. And, at the end of all this, realising I wasn’t going to become a professional cricketer, I thought, what do I do next? Well, yes, I, I like the sound of university. And, being at grammar school, there was that sort of urge amongst the staff that you should be thinking in terms of going on to a university. The question is, what was I going to study? Well, it had to be general science, you know, I, I wasn’t drawn particularly to anything 22

Russell Stannard Page 23 C1672/03 Track 1 else, and of course having been studying science in the sixth form, that was where I was heading. So, I first of all tried to get into Cambridge; I applied to go to Pembroke College and they turned me down. I then sat an entrance examination for London University in general science, and they turned me down. And so, I was at a complete loss, I felt, well, you know, I’m not good at anything. But then out of the blue, University College London sent me a letter saying, ‘We have been looking through the exam paper you did for general science,’ which I did. ‘We note that you were not successful, and in case you don’t know, the reason for that was, you did not do well at chemistry,’ which, which I knew. But it said, ‘We were so taken by your answer to the physics questions, if you are prepared to specialise in physics, study a Special Honours Physics degree, we’ll take you.’ I thought, OK, well that’s it. I’m a physicist. So that’s how it happened. And of course, during this time, I wasn’t an enthusiastic physicist; it was a way of now sampling university life. And it was good that it was University College London because, my parents were living in London, I was going to be able to live at home, which saved money, I wouldn’t have to pay for accommodation, which I wouldn’t have been able to afford anyway. And I used to cycle from home to University College. So that’s, that’s how my school life ended and I, I embarked on university life.

[1:14:26] Again, a sort of comparative question. How were you like and different from other children at the same school of the same age, your peers if you like?

[pause] Well, there were quite a number of, shall we say working-class people, you know, students like me, because of the area in which it was situated. It was situated in Lambeth, you know. But because it was a grammar school, children who lived, shall we say, in more affluent areas, would opt to send their children to Tenison’s Grammar School. So, it was, it was very much a mixture, very much a mixture of people from very low working-class backgrounds like myself and people who were, were better off.

And in terms of sort of personality and, and outlook and interests, how were you different from and like others around you? So, leaving aside any sort of class differences, just…

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No, I wasn’t really aware of that. I wasn’t, no. No. Just aware that, you know, some of the students talked posh, but, there wasn’t a, a ‘them and us’ feel about it at all, not at all. And these days the whole character of the, of the school has changed, because, oh, a long, long, long time afterwards I was invited to go back to the school to give out prizes on Founder’s Day, and when I went back, and the way it is now, it’s sort of ninety-five per cent ethnic minority children, it’s totally… And it’s not, it’s not a grammar school any more, a long time ago it was, it stopped being a grammar school. That was stopped. So now it’s a very sort of, ordinary school. And because of the, the background of the people living around there, it’s mostly black people there now, yes. Yes.

But in terms of characteristics like shyness or outgoingness or scholarliness, how were you like or different to the other boys at the school?

It was all boys, all boys. Oh, I seemed to fit in OK, I seemed to fit in OK, yah. I don’t remember any, anybody looking down on me because, you know, of my background, no.

Were there any aspects of maths or physics that were particularly striking or of particular interest to you at this stage, that is, the sort of, at the grammar school stage rather than university?

I… I suppose I actually enjoyed mathematics more than physics at that stage. I loved simultaneous equations. [laughs] Finding out what x and y were. And, I enjoyed geometry, proving geometrical theorems, it all seemed, fun, it was a puzzle. You know, I, I enjoy that.

What do you remember of practical work in physics?

Oh yes. [pause] I don’t remember a great deal about it. Obviously we did practical work. And I must have got on quite well, because, I did get good grades, yes.

[1:18:41] And could you talk about, you say of an earlier part of your childhood that, when you say that you prayed that the bombs wouldn’t drop on you, you meant that in a very general sense, but I think you were saying that you had no particular religious faith as a younger child, and, apart from 24

Russell Stannard Page 25 C1672/03 Track 1 going to church on Christmas, around Christmas time, and being made to go to the Methodist church while you were evacuated, you tended not to go to church as a child. Could you describe in as much detail as you can the development of an interest in religion, which I think in your autobiography you describe as being rather gradual rather than a sudden moment.

Yah, yah, yes.

But perhaps if you could take us through the steps of it. We’ve got sort of, the highlights of that I think in your autobiography, but how did it…?

I think I should have mentioned that, whilst I was evacuated in Reading with Uncle Bill and Auntie Bea, so-called, that was for a year, they went to church, they went to the Church of England, and they would take me along. So I, I had some experience over that year of, of going to church, but I was only going because I was taken there. And, you know, it wasn’t through conviction or anything of that kind; it was just something that Auntie Bea and Uncle Bill did and that’s what we did on a Sunday. So, you know, that’s, I just joined in, OK. When I, when I got back to London, when the evacuation was over, I stopped going to church, you know, because I was back in the, the family atmosphere with, there was Dad thinking religion was for women. No, the next thing which happened as far as my religious development is concerned is that… One has to understand that Archbishop Tenison’s School was actually founded by the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields. And in fact the original school building was next to St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. It eventually got demolished to make way for the National Gallery, and it was because of that enforced move that they eventually moved their building to, to the Oval. So, it was founded by the vicar of St Martin- in-the-Fields and he, Tenison, became Archbishop of Canterbury eventually. So that’s how the name became Archbishop Tenison’s Grammar School. But he founded it whilst he was vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields. So there’s always been a close tie between St Martin’s and, and the school. And that shows, or showed up in my time, I don’t know whether they still have that practice, but once a year the whole school would go to St Martin-in-the-Fields for a service, that was on Founder’s Day, when we remembered Tenison. And, I was, for two years I was School Captain, and one of the jobs of the school captain was to read the lesson at the Founder’s Day service. So I had to go up into the pulpit and read the lesson. And, I don’t know what it was, but, I hadn’t 25

Russell Stannard Page 26 C1672/03 Track 1 experienced this at the Methodist church in Staffordshire or the church at Reading, but there was something about the, the atmosphere of St Martin’s and the occasion of the Founder’s service and me playing a part in it that had a profound effect on me, I… I can only really describe it by, by saying that I felt at home there. I know that strikes many people as very strange, because, they don’t feel at home in a church, it’s, it’s a very alien kind of environment, they don’t understand what it’s about or anything like that, so, they can’t wait to get out. And you see that when, when you have marriages or funerals, you can normally pick out those people who are comfortable and are regular goers, and the people who are looking around nervously wondering when they can escape. But for me, at St Martin’s, I felt very comfortable, I felt, there’s something about this place, you know. And I, I can’t put it any more lucidly than that, it was just a vague feeling. And that happened twice, because I had, I was school captain for two years so I did that twice. And, it sort of crept up on me, the feeling that, well I don’t want to just come here once a year; let me come, more often. And that’s when I had to face my father to say, you know, I wanted to, to give church a try, you know? So I, I became a regular attender at St Martin’s, even though we didn’t live anywhere near St Martin’s, I, I would catch the bus and go there. Not every Sunday but most Sundays. And then, it was my, my Aunt Lettie, who was living in Lincolnshire, she would occasionally visit us, and she, she was, I believe, quite religious, and she suggested to me that I ought to get confirmed. I didn’t really know what confirmation was at that stage, but it’s the way you are admitted to, to the Church in a deeper way, and you can start taking Holy Communion. And I thought, oh OK, perhaps… Or, she explained that, you know, it’s a way of learning more about your faith. You have lessons, and, you decide at the end of the lessons whether you want to make the step of becoming confirmed and becoming a member of the Church. So I felt, well I, I didn’t have anything to lose, so I applied at St Martin’s to join confirmation class. And the confirmation class… Excuse me. [coughing]

[End of Track 1]

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[Track 2]

You were talking about preparations for confirmation.

Yes. Well I felt that, you know, joining the confirmation class I had nothing to lose, so, I joined. And, those lessons were taken by the Reverend Austen Williams, who at the time was curate at St Martin-in-the Fields. After that he went and became a vicar in the south-west somewhere and then came back to St Martin’s and became a very well-known vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields. But at that time he was just a curate. I don’t remember anything that Austen Williams taught me in those classes. What I remember is, is the man himself. I find it hard to describe, but there was just such a, a spiritual air about that man. It was just deeply attractive. I just felt instinctively that this man’s got something, and, I want it. It was a classic example of religion being caught rather than taught. And, by the end of those lessons there was no doubt that, yes, I was going to get confirmed. And I was. [01:34] So Austen Williams was the first important influence in my life, you know, directed me towards the spiritual side. The other big influence came much later when I was living in, in Harrow. I was married by then, had children. And the vicar there was Father Nadkarni, Edward Nadkarni. He was an Indian. He was born in India, as a Hindu. And what happened to him was that, his father died, and his mother and her children, Edward and his siblings, were more or less ostracised by society. The woman in those times and in that place, without a man, was nobody. The only kindness that was shown to them was by Christian missionaries. And that was how Edward came to become a Christian. Eventually they emigrated over to England. And he was such a committed Christian that he became an ordained minister, he became vicar of this new church in South Harrow, St Andrew’s. And, he had the zeal of the convert. I think most people who go into religion sort of, drift into it, but his was very clearly a very conscious decision, for good reasons, and, he had this tremendous zeal. And he expected everybody else to, to regard their love of God as being the number one priority in their lives. He was very demanding, very demanding that you demonstrate your, your love in all sorts of ways, helping round the church et cetera et cetera. Several people found this just too hard to take and they drifted off to, either out of the church or 1

Russell Stannard Page 2 C1672/03 Track 2 into other churches. But for some of us, we just found Father Nad very inspiring. And, it was he who eventually said to me, ‘Look, I think, you ought to consider becoming a reader, a reader in the Church. At that stage I had never heard of readers, I’d never met one, didn’t know what they did. And he explained that, you had a two-year part-time training course, and if you passed the exams at the end of the course then you became a reader, or sometimes called a lay reader. And that allows you to do various things in church, like for example preaching, baptising, taking funerals. You are not allowed to celebrate the Holy Communion, that is reserved for priests, and, and as a reader you are not a priest, you’re not ordained; you are still a lay person, but you are allowed, because of your training, to do various functions which a normal lay person is not allowed to do. [05:30] And by that stage I was a lecturer at University College London, and, I had a reputation for being a good lecturer. And so I thought, you know, perhaps this is the way I should be going, preaching, lecturing, making things understandable. So I embarked on two years’ training as a reader. And that’s how I became a Reader. So, my conversion… There was no conversion experience. I think most people don’t actually have a conversion experience, a blinding flash or anything of that kind. It was a gradual process. But gradually, the question, you know, does God exist, just, doesn’t become an interesting one, it, it’s, you know, it… Of course He exists. You know, you, you just become like that you know.

[06:28] You say that it’s difficult to describe in words anyway the, the impression made on you by Austen Williams. Could you attempt in any case a description of him, you know, perhaps just visually and physically. So, thinking yourself back to the confirmation classes, what did he look like, how did he move, how did he speak, that sort of thing.

[pause] I suppose most… I don’t remember. I think he was, you know, quite handsome. He had a very nice voice. [pause] He during the classes he would lounge about, you know, he wouldn’t sort of, sit upright or anything like that. It didn’t feel like a, a lesson; it was very much, well, like us two now, sitting in a lounge, comfortably. So it was that kind of, lack of pomposity. But there just seemed to be an air of serenity about him. As I say, it’s very, very difficult to, to put it in words. You know, you just felt that this man knew what he was doing, that he, he had got things sorted 2

Russell Stannard Page 3 C1672/03 Track 2 out, and that, if you had a problem, that he, he’s probably someone you could go to, someone you could talk to, you know, quite intimately about things, and he would put you at your ease. Easy to get on with. Something like that.

Did you… You imagined that if you had something to talk about you could go and talk to him about it. Did you actually do so?

No. No no, the occasion didn’t, did not arise, no. I’m just describing the sort of man he struck me to be you know? Mm.

[08:57] And, the fact that you say he, he had something that you wanted almost, that he, whatever he had, you wanted it. How would you describe yourself at the time more widely? I mean, were you, were you feeling a kind of lack of something, or were you feeling, confused as…?

Well I suppose, I suppose, I was at a very formative stage of life, you know, here I was, embarking on university, and, not quite sure of the direction I was taking. You know, what is life all about? You know, you can’t help but have thoughts of that kind. So, I, I was, you know, in an enquiring kind of frame of mind I suppose.

Was there anyone else, adults or other young people, at school or at, were there people at home, your parents, that you could, that you were asking questions of, about, what’s the world about, what is life?

No, not really. Not really, no. I certainly didn’t discuss them in the home.

Why would you not have done?

[pause] It would just be embarrassing. You see I think that, it’s very difficult to look back and really put yourself in the way things were in those days. You know for example, there was never, never any discussion about sex in the home, none whatsoever. You just didn’t talk about sex. OK, 3

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I think these days people overdo it. [laughs] But I certainly wouldn’t want to go back, people to have to go back to that. You know, I was, I was twelve years old before I learnt the difference between a boy and a girl. Can you believe that? That was when I was in Reading. I was in a playing field with a friend called Hardy, and he said something which indicated that girls didn’t have something that boys had. I didn’t believe him. I think, well, if they don’t have that, how do they do a wee? You know? I was that naïve. And I that wasn’t alone, you know. You just didn’t talk about those sort of things then. You didn’t talk to people about the meaning of life. They were very different times to what, to what they are now, very different.

You wouldn’t have talked to your parents about sex or the meaning of life. Is there anything else you wouldn’t have talked with them about?

[pause] No I don’t think so. I think… No. No. That’s, that’s enough. [laughs]

[12:43] Thanks. You also said that in that particular church you felt at home in a way that you hadn’t in the others, the other two that you had experienced most. I wondered whether, within the, within the church itself, its sort of interior geography, whether you had sort of, favourite places or places you were particularly drawn to or most interested by. I know you’ve said, in your autobiography you say that climbing up into the pulpit was moving, but is there anything else in particular in the church?

Well, when I became a regular attender there I always, like most churchgoers, had my favourite seat. It was up in the, the balcony. There’s a balcony runs around the church. I don’t know why I fitted on that. It was, at that stage it was directly opposite the pulpit, so you had a very good view of the pulpit. Actually since then they’ve actually moved the pulpit to the other side of the church, I don’t know why but they have done. But… And a few boxes, the balcony is divided up into boxes, and a few boxes down the way from me were a couple of girls who regularly were there, and I rather fancied the blonde one, but, it never came to anything.

That’s, you found that to be the case, that other, other churchgoers have a favourite seat? 4

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Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. On a Sunday morning you know exactly where everybody’s going to be sitting. It’s just an unwritten law. I, I just don’t understand it, but, that’s the way it is, you know.

And, so, at what age were you actually… You were confirmed at the age of…?

About eighteen or nineteen, something like that.

Had you already left university?

No no. I had just started the, the BSc degree.

OK.

Yah. Yah.

[14:45] Could you talk about why it was that you… You talked about why it was that you went to that particular place, and, I wonder whether you could talk about the selection of the particular course that you took? This is at, at UCL.

Well I, I studied… I was accepted onto their Special Honours Physics degree course, OK, where you simply studied physics and the mathematics required for the physics. So it was highly specialised. And, as I’ve said, at the start of that course I, I wasn’t all that interested in physics, but I had a kind of eureka moment, and that was, quite early on in the course. I happened to be in the library, and I came across this book, in my mind’s eye I can still see it. It was a fat book, dark blue, very faded, it was an old book, and it was on the bottom shelf. I don’t know who it was by, but it was an introduction to Einstein’s relativity. And, I began reading it, and, it completely blew my mind. I thought, this is the most extraordinary thing I have ever heard. If you’re not familiar with relativity, it includes things like, for example, the faster you go, time slows down. You know, there isn’t just one time which we all inhabit. If you were able to observe what was happening in a very 5

Russell Stannard Page 6 C1672/03 Track 2 high-speed spacecraft, you would see that everything is slowed down, the clocks in that spacecraft, the astronauts breathing, his heartbeat, everything is slowed down. Not that the astronaut knows this, because his brain has slowed down in the same ratio. And if you are looking at a slow clock with a slow brain, it, it looks normal. So the astronaut is living a normal life, just as the mission controller on the ground is living, but they’re living at a different rate. You can’t go faster than the speed of light. You think, well, if I had a, an engine with infinite power, surely I could go faster, and the answer is, no, you can’t. Because, as you go faster, you take on extra energy. A fast- moving thing has more energy than a slow-moving thing. And energy is heavy. So you can’t take on the extra energy without taking on the extra mass which goes with the energy, which means it’s now more difficult to make you go faster, because you’re now heavier. And eventually, when you approach the speed of light, the mass becomes infinite, and you can’t make something that weighs infinity go any faster. So you, there is a speed limit. All right, modern-day spacecrafts can’t get anywhere near that speed, but with sophisticated time-measuring equipment, yes, you can, you can measure the slowdown. And, not only that, but, eventually I was to become an elementary particle physicist, where we take very tiny things, electrons, say, and with electrons, they’re so light you can make them really go fast, and you can make those go very close to the speed of light. And you find that for fast-moving subatomic particles, yes, time does slow down in exactly the same way as Einstein said it would do. Not only that, but the faster you go, space gets squashed up. So for example, a spacecraft that is, say, 100 metres long when it’s on the ground, if it’s travelling at, say, nine-tenths the speed of light, it physically can’t do that but let’s just suppose it’s going at nine- tenths the speed of… it is half its length, it’s only fifty metres long, not 100 metres long. And everything within that spacecraft is squashed down to half its normal size, including the astronaut. The astronaut’s body is squashed to half its normal width. Now you might think, oh gosh, that, that’s the end of the astronaut, you know, if you squash somebody down to half their normal width, their ribs are going to be broken. No no no. This is a special kind of squashing, because, the atoms that make up his body are squashed to half their normal… So they only need half the normal space to fit in. The astronaut doesn’t feel a thing. He doesn’t even see that his spacecraft is squashed up, because the retina at the back of his eye, on which he is looking at things, that is half its normal size. So, the picture still takes up the same proportion of the retina, so the signals going to the brain are normal. So there you have the mission controller and the astronaut living apparently identical lives, but when you compare the two, one is only half the size of the other. And those are 6

Russell Stannard Page 7 C1672/03 Track 2 just some of the effects of relativity. Is it any wonder that it just blew my mind? I thought, this is incredible, this is, better than science fiction you know. And this is physics, and I am going to be a physicist. This is going to be my sub… I’m going to be able to tell people about these mind- blowing things. Why wasn’t I told this at school? If I had been told this at school I would have applied to colleges that study physics, not general science; I would have wanted to be a phys… And from that moment I, I was proud to be a physicist. It really was as sudden as that. And, subsequently, I went on from that to study quantum theory, which is even more amazing, and elementary particle physics. I have had a wonderful life studying physics, I can assure you, and it all began with that faded, dark blue book on the bottom shelf.

[21:28] Do you remember how these thoughts, these sorts of things were presented by that book? I’m, I’m guessing that the, the spaceship description is your own rather than that of the book that you found on the bottom shelf? Can you remember how it was presenting these ideas?

Oh, I think it was drawing upon an example that Einstein himself put forward when he was trying to explain the theory in terms of a train. A train going fast is shorter than a train stationary at the station, you know. It was just, different examples, but, for today’s audience, spacecraft is much more relevant.

And was it sort of texts and images and diagrams and things, or just text?

Yes, it was a textbook. Oh it was a straight textbook, it was a teaching textbook, so, it, it would not be easy reading for someone who hadn’t already got A Level physics and A Level mathematics. So going from that to, as I was subsequently doing, teaching eleven-year-olds relativity theory, that was a long, long path of finding out how to translate what I had read in that blue book, and what eventually goes into a paperback for a kid.

[23:08] Thank you. Could you describe the, the course, the sort of, the teaching and learning on the course? 7

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Yes, I can. It was… The teaching was very poor, very, very poor. Oh there were, there were gradations of poorness, but, oh dear. There was, for example, I can tell you his name now because he’s dead, G B Brown. His strategy was that, he had a book, a book written by someone called Crowther, and his lessons simply consisted of writing on the blackboard what he had copied down from Crowther. That was the lesson. [phone ringing] It got to the point where we knew what he was doing. And I can always remember one lesson where, he was writing on the board, and a student mischievously said, ‘Oh sir, I think you will find that Crowther has a comma after electron.’ [laughs] So that was G B Brown. R C Brown, oh he had this monotonous voice, and we always had him first thing after lunch, and after you’ve had a good lunch, you know, you’re not as attentive. Oh he used to send us to sleep. The general atmosphere at University College London, which I hasten to say is an atmosphere reproduced in just about every university, then and now, is that, the lecturers were really only interested in research. Promotion went on performance in research. There were no Brownie marks to be gained by being a good teacher. So, lessons were, lectures were hastily put together, untidily put together, and, the lecturers couldn’t wait to get out of it and back into their labs to do their real work. There was one exception, D O Wood. Mr D O Wood. He wasn’t even a doctor, he wasn’t a professor; he was Mr. He took his lessons incredibly seriously. He didn’t do research. Before a lesson, you would find him in the library, usually for about three hours he’d be in the library preparing the lesson, perhaps a lesson he had given many times before but he wanted it to be absolutely up to date and, and polished. His lessons were beautiful, just the way they were constructed. And, I, I was very indignant about the way we students were fobbed off by the other lecturers. I thought, if I were in their place, I would want to be like D O. I really felt very strongly about that. And, eventually I became a lecturer at University College London, and I tried to put into practice that, that resolution. And, OK, I did become a very good lecturer, if I say so myself, to the extent that, the department decided that it would be a good idea if, instead of plunging into specialised topics, you know, mechanics, electronics and stuff like that, if the first-year students were subjected to a general course where they got an overview of physics as a whole, classical physics, modern physics, so that, with that behind them, they could fit in their more specialised lectures into an overall pattern and they could see how it relates to the whole field of physics. And I was given the responsibility of taking, devising and taking that course. A huge course, seventy lectures over the space of the first year. 8

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They came to be known as B11 courses, B11 course. And, it actually became quite well known. Even today, even today, what is it, something like fifty years on, I’m still in touch with one or two students who remember those lectures affectionately. So, the idea of getting physics across to other people, and later on religious ideas to other people, has always figured very strongly in my, in my thinking.

[28:43] In spite of the, well let’s be generous and say patchy teaching that you experienced as an undergraduate, what were the, what were the ideas or demonstrations or calculations that, over the course of the course, sort of made the most impression on you? I’ve got, I can picture you looking at this, this book introducing relativity, and you’ve described some of the things that you thought were astonishing. Were there things that you discovered in doing the course, even if they were things that you had to read about yourself rather than be taught, that were particularly striking and interesting?

I think it has to be said that, it’s modern physics which caught my imagination, OK, relativity, but also quantum theory. Quantum theory is, is very very strange. You know, we, we, in normal everyday life we think that everything that happens is a result of some cause. If you reproduce the same cause, you get the same effect. If you miss-hit a tennis ball, it’s not because of quantum uncertainty; it’s because you must have hit it in a wrong, a different, different way to what you were intending. But when you examine the, the microscopic world, the subatomic world, things are totally different. They’re very chaotic. It’s subject to uncertainty. If you set up exactly the same situation as before, you don’t get the same outcome. All you can do is calculate the probabilities, the relative probabilities, that various possibilities might take place. So, if two particles collide, they might go off in one direction, or they might go off in another direction, and you can work out the probabilities of one rather than… but you cannot predict what the direction is going to be. And this is all summed up in something called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which is named after the German physicist Werner Heisenberg who first proposed this principle. So that is strange. And then you think, well, why isn’t the world chaotic if you can’t work things out? And the reason is that, in our normal everyday life we are normally dealing with huge ensembles of subatomic particles, and the behaviour of, say, a cricket ball is the average behaviour 9

Russell Stannard Page 10 C1672/03 Track 2 of all those particles. Now the average behaviour is predictable, you can predict averages. You cannot predict individual, what an individual subatomic particle will do. And that in everyday life is what we’re normally dealing with, we’re dealing with the averaged-out uncertainties, so we can live our lives in a predictable way. But, if we were extremely small, life would be very very different. [32:23] And then, you get the various paradoxes. What is the wave-particle paradox? If you say, well, what is an electron? Well if you carry out a certain kind of experiment, it reveals itself as being a particle, it’s a tiny particle, one of the constituent particles that make up the atom. The atom consists of a, a big particle called the nucleus, surrounded by tiny particles called electrons. So that’s, that’s the answer. What is an electron? It is a particle. But now if you ask, well OK, an electron is going to go through a hole in a slit, say. Where is it going to go? You then have to switch over to talking about waves. The electron then, when it arrives on the screen, it behaves as though a wave had passed between the starting point and the end point. You get what we call diffraction patterns, you get interference patterns, which you only get with waves. For example, in a normal laboratory, if you pass a light through a grating, a series of parallel lines, then, the light goes in certain directions and not others. And that is perfectly understandable in terms of waves, because, coming out of those slits in the diffraction grating, you have troughs and peaks of the wave, and they interfere with each other. A wave which has a, a trough, if it meets up with a peak, they cancel out. So in those directions, you get nothing. Whereas in other directions, the peaks reinforce each other, the troughs reinforce each other, so you get a strong beam of light. And that is what happens if you pass a beam of electrons through a diffraction grating, made up of a crystal, you get diffraction patterns, which is not what you expect of a particle. So if you only knew about that sort of experiment, your answer to the question, what is an electron, will be, well it’s clearly a wave. It’s a wave. like light. Now the question arises then, how can an electron be both a particle, a tiny, tiny particle taking up this virtually no space, and a spread-out wave? Well that has to be spread out over space so you can distinguish waves from, troughs from peaks. And this is called the wave-particle paradox. How that is resolved, well there is no consensus. Niels Bohr said that what the paradox was telling us is something very profound, and that is that the question, what is an electron, has no meaning. All you can talk about, all you’re permitted meaningfully to talk about, is, how an electron is observed to behave. If you set up a certain experimental set-up, it is observed 10

Russell Stannard Page 11 C1672/03 Track 2 to behave as a particle. If you set up an alternative experimental set-up, it behaves like a wave. You can’t set up both experimental set-ups at the same time; you must choose one or the other. So there’s no mixing of the words particle or wave; depending on how you observe it, you will get one answer or the other. And therefore, there is no paradox. But the penalty you pay is enormous. The penalty you pay is that you have said nothing about what the electron is. You have always involved yourself in how you are looking at it. And, Bohr maintained that all the words we use in science, energy, momentum, space, time et cetera, they are meaningful only in the context of describing observations. If you try to apply them to the world as it is in itself, that is a misuse of language, and it’s no wonder you get paradoxical situations. Now that’s what Bohr claimed, and that gave rise to what is called the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics, Copenhagen being where Bohr was, was based. Einstein and many other prominent physicists would not go along with it. They claimed that the ultimate aim of science is what we have always claimed it’s going to be, and that is to describe the world the way it is. OK, you have to look at it, you have to observe it, you have to experiment with it, to find out why it’s like. But having done those experiments, having made those observations, what we write in the physics books is the way the world operates, whether or not anybody is looking at it. And Bohr would say, no, the physics books are not telling you that. And there was this big debate called the Einstein-Bohr debate, which had no, led to no consensus, and even today there is no consensus. [38:45] Now, I find it absolutely fascinating to think… You know, it just takes you to the, the limits, where you’re thinking, what is the very nature of the scientific enterprise? You know, it’s, it’s the most basic question of all you know, it’s the sort of thing that most, most professional scientists never, never think about. They just get on with the job. But here is this tremendous philosophical question, well, what actually is it all about? And, this discussion of the Copenhagen interpretation and alternatives was, when I was a student, considered so deep that you didn’t even include a discussion of that in a Special Honours Physics degree. You just got to what we call the Schrödinger equation of quantum physics and you turn the handle and you solved problems. You weren’t encouraged to think about, you know, what is this actually all about? And I had to do extra reading to come across the Bohr-Einstein debate, and I was furious, that we are not getting any of that kind of discussion in a Special Honours Physics degree. And very early on I determined that, somehow I had to alert the public to just how extraordinary these ideas, together with, with 11

Russell Stannard Page 12 C1672/03 Track 2 relativity. So, I, I found quantum physics, like relativity, absolutely fascinating, and then elementary particle physics, you know, what actually is the world made of? Now, the world’s made up of molecules; molecules are made up of atoms; atoms are made up of a nucleus and electrons; nucleus is made up of neutrons and protons; neutrons and protons are made up of quarks and gluons. Does it make any sense to go any further than that? Have we at last reached, reached the end? You know, questions like that, deep, deep questions. Which is so much more interesting than just simply applying Newton’s laws of motion to how various machines work, and so on, you know. It’s a totally different kind of physics. And that is the physics that turns me on.

[41:22] That’s wonderful, thank you. Could you say a little bit more about how limited just doing the Schrödinger equation, and churning things out, how far that got you, or didn’t get you, towards the sorts of things that you were reading about outside the course, such as the Bohr-Einstein debate, how far was the course going, where did it, where did it stop?

Well, because, you, as part of just regular physics, you have to learn that, you know, the electron is a constituent particle in the atom. And also, you have to learn about electron diffraction. So there you are in, you know, in one lesson talking about the electron as a particle; in other you’re happily talking about it as being a wave. So anybody who’s got any element of curiosity thinks, well hold on, that doesn’t seem to tie up with, with what we were taught in then other lessons that we had last week you know. And, and it makes you then go to the library and start looking in the more philosophical section, to think, oh yes, people have been asking this question, so what answer have they come up with? And you discover that, they don’t agree about the answer. And so you just find yourself delving more and more into the nature of that debate back in 1927 between Bohr and Einstein. But it’s not part of the, the coursework, and you don’t get any marks for it.

Reading about these things as an undergraduate, who did you talk to about them, if you did?

I don’t really remember talking to anybody about them, because, I think my fellow undergraduates had their noses to the grindstone, you know. They knew what questions were going come up in exams, you know, they’d got, we all had our stack of past exam papers. So a lot of one’s thinking 12

Russell Stannard Page 13 C1672/03 Track 2 was, OK, I, I know how to answer that sort of question if that turns up. Now on to the next one. And, and, if the questions don’t talk about Bohr-Einstein debate, then, you’re not likely to wonder about it.

Why do you think that you at this stage were the undergraduate who was curious, and was…?

Sorry?

Why do you think it was that you were the undergraduate on this course who was following these things up outside and was interested enough?

I don’t know. [pause] I, I think I’ve, I’ve just had a, an abiding fascination for what one might call deep questions. And that’s, you know, why I later on got into theology, because, theology is all wrapped up with philosophy, which is all dealing with deep questions, you know, the nature of consciousness, have we got free will? All these, these sorts of questions have always fascinated me. And I have, I have produced a video series called Boundaries of the Knowable, where I have examined some of the deepest questions facing science today, and speculating on whether these questions will ever be asked. You know, people unthinkingly are dazzled by the advance of science, you know, the way it has completely transformed the world in my lifetime, it’s, it’s just amazing. You can’t be immune to being amazed at what science can do. Always progress going forward, always progressing, always progressing, and so one, one gets into this lazy way of thinking, well that, that’s the way science is, it always progresses, it’s in its very nature that you’re always building on the past and finding out new things. And I, I think, no, that’s not the way it is: well it is at the moment, but it didn’t used to be that way. And, more importantly, it’s not going to be that way. Eventually science, the discovery, well pure science, the discovery of new laws and things of that kind, that is going to come to an end. One day there will not a be a thing such as scientific progress. Applied science, yes, using known scientific laws and employing them in different ways to create different gadgets and PlayStations and stuff like that, yes, there will always be room for technology to use scientific knowledge to produce new things, but the actual scientific knowledge itself will stop. If you are an optimist, then you think, OK, yes it will stop when we’ve discovered, everything. We have a complete understanding of what the world consists of, and how 13

Russell Stannard Page 14 C1672/03 Track 2 it operates. My own view, and it’s just a view, my own view is, science will come to an end long before then. It will come to an end incomplete. I say that for a number of reasons. One is, I think one has to think about what one is doing one’s science with. One’s doing it obviously with one’s brain. So what is the brain? The brain is part of a survival machine. Evolutionary theory tells us about how we originated, and it’s all to do with, well, roughly called survival of the fittest. It’s, it’s the formation of molecular structures that are good at replicating themselves under conditions which can be harsh, and those systems which, purely by chance, have good genetic mutations, have certain advantages when it comes to surviving, finding shelter, finding food, finding a suitable mate. Other mutations are bad; well those, those die out. So, you, you get a whole range of, I call them survival machines, existing in different niches able to make use of different niches in the environment. And, humans’ main survival asset is their brain. They don’t need sharp claws when they can make knives. They don’t have to run fast if you can get in a car. You don’t have to fly if you can build an aircraft. OK? You use your brain. So it is, by its very nature it is something which has been fashioned through evolution, and is good at surviving, replicating itself and surviving. Now what makes anybody think that something like that is automatically capable of understanding everything about the world? Stuff to do, or stuff that’s got nothing to do with survival. It is amazing that it’s been able to understand as much irrelevant material as far as survival is concerned as it has done. But I think it is arrogant, absolutely arrogant to think that this very limited thing is going to be able to have a complete understanding of everything. There are going to be things which are just beyond the comprehension of our set of neurones and so on. So that’s one reason. [50:20] A second reason is, practical limitations. Scientists, sciences began advancing when it became realised that the best way forward is to find evidence, to do experiments, to make observations. So you need experimental equipment. And the most spectacular experimental equipment today is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva where I used to work. This huge machine, circular, underground, seventeen miles in, seventeen miles in circumference. Extraordinary. It cost an enormous sum of money. Why is it so big? Well because, you’re accelerating particles in a circle. It’s a little bit like at the Olympics, a hammer thrower, got a weight on the end of a chain, whirls it round his head, goes faster and faster and faster, and then you release it. Well that’s the sort of thing that goes on in a particle accelerator, you take a particle, might be electrons, might be 14

Russell Stannard Page 15 C1672/03 Track 2 protons, and you use electrical forces to accelerate it, but then you use a magnetic force to make it go in a circular path. And that is very efficient, because it means you bring it back to its beginning, and the piece of equipment which accelerated it first can give it another boost, and another boost and another boost and so on, so it gets repeated. The trouble is, of course, that, the faster the particles go, the more difficult it is to keep them along that same track. So, the magnetic field that holds them on that circular path has to be progressively increased. So, they are electromagnets, so you’ve got to increase the electricity going through the magnet to increase the magnetic field, to keep them going on the same path. Eventually you get to the point where your magnetic field is as strong as it can get and it can’t get any stronger. And if you accelerate any further, OK, you, you lose the particles. The only recourse you’ve got then is to build another machine which is even bigger so that you can squeeze in more magnets, and then, OK, you can then go faster. And, that’s the way it’s been, gradually these circles have got bigger and bigger, and now you’ve got the Large Hadron Collider. Well then you think, well, that’s all very well, and, and we’ve discovered new… Every time we’ve built a bigger machine, we’ve discovered something new. So the question then arises, how big a machine do you need to build in order to put, if you like, the last piece of the jigsaw in place? There’s no reason why that should fit in with the gross national product of the Earth. In fact what is very worrying is that, one of the most attractive theories in physics is that, the ultimate particles, like electrons, are not actually bits of dirt, solid bits of dirt, particles; they are actually strings, tiny, tiny, tiny vibrating strings. It’s a very attractive idea, because, by varying the, the variation, by varying the, the vibration of the string, this gives you different particles. It’s a lovely unifying idea, that you’ve got a string, and by vibrating in different ways you get the different elementary particles. The trouble is that these strings are so extraordinarily tiny, if they exist, they’re so tiny, that in order to be able to make out, yes, I can see, it actually is a string and not a bit of dirt, you would need a Large Hadron Collider the size of the galaxy. [pause] As I say, there is no reason why understanding the last bit about the universe has to fit in with what we can afford to do, or are physically capable of doing. So, I think that, this is a call for, this video series I made, it’s a call for people to, to be more realistic when they think about science, and not to be overwhelmed by things that some scientists say about, our goal is the theory of everything. I think, many scientists are just too arrogant for words, and that they need a dose of humility. But that is because I am interested in these, these deep questions. The majority of scientists aren’t. Like the man in the street, they just, get on with their lives. 15

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[55:50] Thank you. As an undergraduate at UCL, taking the Special Honours course in physics, were you aware of whether or not your fellow students, like you, went to church, were Christians?

No. No.

So, you weren’t…

Well… [pause] No, there wasn’t a strong, that was not a topic which, which came up. It really didn’t. We were very, we were very serious-minded students. You see, the thing that you have to realise, in those days it was only a tiny, tiny minority that went to university. These days, almost anybody with any ability can find a university place somewhere, you know. In those days, it was such competition, you know, to get into a university, there were so few places, that, you couldn’t help but feel privileged when you got there and you thought, you know, you’d better make sure that you study hard for these… and you don’t get thrown out because you’ve failed your exams, you know. So, we were very serious. Not all the time. I hasten to… We did have our non-studying times, you know, there was, sports obviously, you know. I would… I carried on my interest in cricket by, by playing cricket for the college, I was, I was in the first eleven, so, there was that. I also played football, because everybody was playing football. I didn’t take that very seriously, I was in the college’s third eleven, you know, we were just the sort of, muckabouts, but we, we used to enjoy it. There’s one incident I must tell you. It was, it was a Saturday, and we had a match, and, our team had collected in the students’ bar ready to, waiting for our coach. And on this particular day we discovered we were a man short, someone was ill, couldn’t come. So we were only ten men, you know. And, sitting in the bar was someone called Jeff Taylor . Jeff was very famous at University College London, because, he had managed to combine being a student, he was a year ahead of me, he combined being a student with being the centre-forward for Huddersfield Town. Now Huddersfield Town in those days was, was in the top league. It was called the First Division in those days; today we would call it the Premier League. And, Jeff was one of the best-known strikers in the country. And there he was, as a student at University College London, and there he was, sitting in the lounge. And one of our team members spotted him and 16

Russell Stannard Page 17 C1672/03 Track 2 said, ‘Hi Jeff, we’re a man short. Fancy a game?’ And we all laughed, you know, the thought of Jeff Taylor playing for the college third eleven, you know. And Jeff said, ‘Mm, yes, yes why not.’ We thought, did we hear that, did he, did he actually… Is he agreeing to play with us? And blow me, he was. It turned out to be the funniest football match I’ve, I’ve ever played in or witnessed. We won twelve-nil. It was such an eye-opener, you know, he was so fast, his skills were incredible, his stamina was extraordinary. But then when you’re watching a professional match, you, you don’t really understand what’s going on there, just how good these people are, because they’re all the same sort of standard and their skills sort of cancel each other out, sort of thing. But put one of those sharks amongst minnows like ourselves, and the difference is incredible. And, as we finished the match and the opposition were dragging themselves off the field, one of them complained and said, ‘And who the hell is he?’ And one of our number said, ‘Who, Jeff? Yeah, I suppose he was playing a bit above himself today.’ [laughs] So yes, we, we had, we, we played a lot of football. And I suppose the highlight of the year was the rag day. That was when we had a procession through London. We hired these flatbed lorries and we built floats onto these lorries. And, it was all in aid of charity, supposedly; it was actually all about making mayhem, but anyway, the excuse was, we were doing this for charity, there would be a collection. And we would parade these floats through the West End of London. And this was a regular feature. The trouble was that University College has always been locked in deadly rivalry with King’s College London, and, we knew that the King’s men would, at some stage, attack us. So we had to go with a plentiful supply of bags of flour and bags of soot. There was no shortage of soot in those days, most people had coal fires, you know. So off we went. Our floats, the physics department had a float that was a pirate ship, so we had a mast, and I had to persuade my mother to, to lend us one of the sheets for one of the, one of the sails, you know. And everything was going well, and we were crossing Westminster Bridge, when the attack came. It was, it was horrendous. Soot and flour bags were flying left, right and centre. The police were all out in force, and they got covered in this stuff, and they were furious. And at one stage there was a policeman making a beeline for me, his face was covered in flour, and I thought, oh my God. Fortunately he picked on the guy who was sitting next to me, hauled him off, arrested him. I managed to escape. The papers the next day were full of it. 196 arrests. My mother was furious because, her sheet landed up floating down the Thames. And that was the last rag day. The police banned it from, from then onwards, and, quite honestly I, I

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Russell Stannard Page 18 C1672/03 Track 2 can’t blame them. So yes, we, you know, we had a lot of student fun, in between being very serious students.

[1:03:45] So, that implies, then, that you, you’re saying that you were focused on the course, and therefore not likely to know necessarily whether your fellow undergraduates went to church or not.

Yes.

And, discussion of relations between science, in this case physics, and religion, did they come up in any way in the course among the lecturers, in the lectures…

No.

…between the students?

No, that didn’t happen at all, not at all. [pause] Whether it was the same in the biology classes, I wouldn’t know, because, well let’s face it, for most people the relationship between science and religion is one of conflict, and that is almost exclusively due to the perceived need, perceived need to choose between the Genesis account of creation and modern-day science. You, you know, was it Adam and Eve, or was it evolution? Was it six-days creation or was it Big Bang? OK. Now, for years and years now there has been terrific controversy over the Adam and Eve /evolution business. There hasn’t really been as much, or anything like as much, over Big Bang and, and six-days creation. Now you get people in the States insisting today that, or trying to insist, that the Genesis story is given equal coverage as a rival theory to evolutionary theory in biology lessons. For some reason, they don’t agitate to have six-days creation in physics lessons to do with Big Bang. So it, it’s, that in itself indicates it’s, it’s a very highly emotional situation where frankly some people just don’t like the idea of being descended from the same ancestors as monkeys. And, OK, you know, if you’ve got these religious fanatics, these fundamentalists, trying to dictate what your biology curriculum should be, then, I fully, fully understand why biology lecturers, academics, people like Richard Dawkins, get very hot under the collar about it. You know, if those same fanatics were 18

Russell Stannard Page 19 C1672/03 Track 2 trying to make me teach six-days creation along with Big Bang, I would be furious. So, I don’t know whether, when I was a student, whether science and religion came up in biology lessons, but there was no need for them to come up in physics lessons, and they never, never never did, never did, no. [1:07:16] No, the, the whole question of science and religion in my own life simply, came up simply because I, after my studying I became a research assistant and then eventually a lecturer, a lecturer at University College London, so there I was lecturing in science, I was a fully qualified scientist; at the same time I had, I had become a Reader in the Church of England. And there I was on a Sunday, preaching. And, I found people, not so much at the university but in normal everyday life, sometimes my friends at church, they, they would say, ‘Well, how can you be both, you know, how can you wear a white lab coat Monday to Friday and a white surplice in church on a Sunday? Do you need Saturday to, to make the transition?’ you know. That was the challenge which was being put to me, by various people that one met. And, and OK, you couldn’t help but think, OK, how do I marry the two, you know, is there a conflict, or are they dealing with different kinds of knowledge? Are they to be kept separate? In fact, one now recognises that there are four models, what we call the four models. One is conflict, obviously; one is independence, that they are asking different questions, and very crudely, some people sum it up by saying, well science asks questions that begin, how? How does the world work? Whereas religious questions generally begin, why? Why is there a world to start off with, sort of thing. So that’s one way of looking at it. Now this is called non-overlapping magisteria, that they, you need different techniques, different ways of thinking, for dealing with questions which don’t overlap with each other. Scientists get on with their job, theologians get on with theirs, and there doesn’t need to be any contact between the two. So that’s the second model, conflict the first one. The third model is, interaction. That there are times when science has something to say which is relevant to religion and there are times when religion has something relevant to say to science. One can point out, for example, that, when the Royal Society was set up, which is the, the leading scientific society in the UK, most of the early members were, were clergy. They had a natural interest in, not only theology but also science. What one, one argument is that, you know, why did science get going in the West? And the thought is that, OK, there comes a religious thought as to, why is there a world at all? Why is it this world, rather than some other world? And the religious answer is that, OK, it’s, it’s God that 19

Russell Stannard Page 20 C1672/03 Track 2 created the world, but, why did He decide to make it this world? He could have made other worlds. And science is therefore the investigation of, what kind of world did He make? You see prior to that, there was the thought that, and it goes back to the Greeks, that, you could work things out from first principles, from certain obvious statements that everybody could agree on, and you could work out everything from first principles, guided by principles of beauty and economy and things of that kind. But once you accept that the world could have been different, it could have been a different – well God could have made a different world, then you can’t work it out from first principles, and it becomes a bit of, you know, a hit and miss thing. So, you’ve got to actually look at it, and see which one did He decide to make? And so that is why many people think that science really got off the ground when it was urged into that way of thinking, that it’s got to be a practice which is dependent on evidence, and you’ve performed your experiments, and you are always guided by experiment, not some lofty, elegant theory that Aristotle or Plato might have, have come up with. You just look at the nitty-gritty. So, there is that sort of thing. So that would, some would argue that that is how religion has had an effect on, one of the ways religion has an effect on science. [1:13:06] The other way round, OK, science reveals that, human origins is due to evolution, and that that for a theologian is, OK, that is how God created the world, created us, that was His method of creating us. So what does that tell us about God? Why did He, why did He choose that mechanism? After all it’s a very strange mechanism, because it, it involves cruelty, death, premature death is an integral part of the evolutionary process. Those individuals who have inherited genetic material which is not very good have got to die out before they have a chance to mate and pass on that substandard genetic material. Only those who are lucky to have genetic material which includes survival value are going to be fulfilled and have offspring and so on. So, it’s cruel. So that then leads into very interesting discussions. Well, what kind of alternative did God have? You might think, well, He could have made us each individually, you know, put, got a blueprint, and He puts, that or that atom goes there, that atom goes there, and so on, and builds a… Well what, what would that end up with? It would end up with a robot. And when that robot starts saying, ‘Oh God, I do love you,’ that’s because that is what you have programmed the thing to say, and that of course is not love. And if, if the main thing about religion is to do with love, then He could not sit down at a drawing board and make us individually. He couldn’t even call upon other creators, you 20

Russell Stannard Page 21 C1672/03 Track 2 know, the creatures of other creators, and get them from their independent origins to come over and love. If you’re dealing with love, the other person has to have a measure of independence, it’s a free will sort of decision as to whether or not they’re going to enter into a loving relationship with you. They have to be independent. But if you’ve got a sole creator, how can what is created ever be independent, even gain a smidgin of independence from the source? And, it would appear that, God’s idea, and I think it’s a very clever idea, is that He incorporated chance. He didn’t specify us down to the last detail. He allowed chance to take over, and you see that chance in the mutations of the genetic code. So that in a way gave us a measure of independence, and, you know, sufficient perhaps to, to be able to make a loving relationship between creator and the thing that you are partly responsible for. That can then take on meaning. So, I don’t want to go into that, but, I’m just indicating how the scientific idea of evolution can feed in and guide theological thinking, so there’s interaction that way. [1:16:46] I should hasten to say that… Gosh, you know, there is so much misunderstanding about Adam and Eve and evolution. It’s commonly thought that, OK, everybody, every religious person, used to believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis, and they were caught out by Darwin. And since then theologians had to do some embarrassed shuffling of their feet to accommodate this new information about the way things were. It’s not like that at all. A quotation I like to make, if I can remember it, is, ‘In the beginning were created only the germs or causes of the forms of life which were afterwards to be developed in gradual course.’ It’s clearly a statement of evolution. So was that Darwin? No. That was St Augustine, St Augustine, way back in whenever it was, the fourth century. It was manifestly clear to Augustine that the Adam and Eve story was never, never meant to be taken literally true. It’s a kind of poetry. It’s, technically, in theological terms, it’s called a myth, which doesn’t mean it’s not true; it’s, it’s the way ancient civilisations, not just the Jews but all ancient civilisations, used to pass on their wisdom to future generations. They did it in story form. Why did they do it in story form? Because, most people in those days couldn’t read or write, so there was no point in writing it down as a textbook, you know. And people… It had to be passed on by word of mouth, and people, as we all know, are not very good at remembering things, you know, Chinese whispers. But one thing we are good at remembering is a story. You think of how the story began, and that reminds you of what happened next, and then, ah yes, and then he did this, and, oh and then after that she went there. Ah, but then… And, before you know what 21

Russell Stannard Page 22 C1672/03 Track 2 happens, you’ve remembered the whole story. So they would get hold of these very graphic, ingenious stories, and graft onto them the messages, the deep spiritual messages, that, the whole point of the story was to convey those. So, so for example, Eve is, is described in the myth as being made out of a rib taken from Adam’s side. Well, what more graphic poetic image can you have for how in marriage one is supposed to become one flesh? We’re supposed to become so tightly knit that it’s, you’re almost a single entity. So, it’s not talking about how women came into existence; it’s talking about the sacredness of marriage. Eve taking the fruit, the forbidden fruit, which leads to all their troubles, they’re banned from Paradise. It’s saying that basically we are disobedient to God’s will. We are selfish. He wants us to be loving; basically we are selfish, we are self-centred, we put ourselves first, we do what we want. What does evolution say? It says we are survival machines. Our ancestors put themselves first. Generally speaking… One has to qualify that, but, one would expect to find in a human being a measure of selfishness, indeed aggression if necessary. Competition. You only have to look at the world to see that we are basically selfish, we compete with each other, wars and things of that kind. We try to sublimate it through sport. What is sport all about? It’s all about competition, me against you, our team against their team and so on. So, we are like that. And that is what the eating of the forbidden fruit in disobedience to God, that is actually what that myth is saying in that bit. So that’s, that’s another profound truth. They’re banished from Paradise. What does that mean? How many attempts are made to build a paradise here on Earth? It might be, oh I’m, I’m going to go into a convent, it’s pure. It’s not pure in a convent. I’m going to send my children to a private school, you know, that’s much better than nasty secondary schools. So many people with good intentions start out that, things are going to be different. They all fall apart. And that is what that part of the Genesis story is saying, that all these attempts are doomed to failure. You’ve been banished from Paradise. You’ve got to, to repent, you’ve got to change your mind, you’ve got to change your whole attitude. So, you know, those… And, they’re put into the Garden of Eden. Why, to have a good time? Phwoah, nice garden. No, they’re put in there to till it, to look after it. Not to just simply enjoy it; they’ve got work at it. And, one can see that as being the green message. We’re not here on Earth simply to exploit it and… We’re here to look after it. Again… [1:22:50] So, I mean that’s four or five deep questions addressed in one short, vivid story. That’s what it’s about. And that, that’s not just St Augustine. You had, you had other church… The prominent… 22

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Just read the church leaders back in the third and fourth century. Who was it? Origen I think said, ‘What man of sense could believe that there could be a first and a second and a third day of creation, each with a morning and an evening, before the sun had been created?’ The sun supposedly created on the fourth day. Way back in the, in the fourth century. He thought, you’re stupid, you’re stupid if, if you took that literally true. Which of course raises the question, well, why do so many people today think that that is how you should read the Bible, when it was clear to early Christians that that wasn’t how it should be read at all? And it seems that, it all goes back to the Reformation. That was the time of course, in the fifteenth [16th] century, when Protestants were breaking away from the rule of Rome. They had their various reasons for it, but they were challenged as to what was their justification for breaking away from the rule of the Pope. And they said, ‘Our justification is the Bible. We’re not going to pay any attention to what the Popes say, that’s a load of rubbish. We are sticking to the Bible. That is God speaking to us. We will be guided by the Bible. We, we revere the Bible. That’s our authority.’ And that of course provoked a response amongst those remaining loyal to the Pope, who said, ‘OK, yah, we, we revere the Pope, but we, we also accept the Bible, you know, we live by the Bible too.’ And the Protestants said, ‘Ah yes, but you don’t revere it the way we do,’ you know. And, those remaining loyal to, to Rome, they had a big council which lasted many years, called the Council of Trent, I think it was 1542 it started, which was set up to define the Roman Church’s doctrine. And, as regards the Bible, they declared that it was written ‘at the dictation of the Holy Spirit’. It’s the actual words of God, that is what we believe. That’s how much we revere the Bible, it’s the actual words of God, dictated by the Holy Spirit to the Gospel writers. So all the Gospel writers were doing were taking down dictation. It’s down there in the decree issued by the Council of Trent, an absolute demand that you read the Bible literally, literally is the Word of God. Which was crazy, absolutely crazy, because, there are the different writing styles, there are places where one part of the Bible contradicts another. When Jesus rose from the dead, one Gospel writer has Him appearing only in Jerusalem; another has Him only appearing in Galilee; another one has Him appearing in both Jerusalem and Galilee. Come on, you know. If God had written the three Gospels, are you saying that He forgot what He wrote in one of the others, and got it wrong? I understand from Biblical scholars also that there are grammatical mistakes. Doesn’t He know his grammar? So it was a stupid thing to do, but they were manoeuvred, they were manoeuvred into it you know. Because, you know, the… 23

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[1:29:25] And of course, that then meant that Martin Luther and the leaders of the Protestant movement had to adopt the same attitude, ‘Well, yes, we think it’s the Word of God too,’ you know. And then, you know, they got themselves in the position where, there was the famous Galileo scandal, Galileo with his evidence from Copernicus that it was the Earth that went round the Sun, it wasn’t the Sun that went round the Earth. And, the argument against that was, well Joshua, when he was fighting the battle of Jericho or whatever it was, commanded the Sun to stop so he had more daylight to kill more of the enemy. He commanded the Sun to stop, not the Earth. So there you are, the Sun is obviously moving. So, that’s, that’s what you got at the time of the Reformation, and we’re still paying the price of that. And, it has to be pointed out that when the Roman Church held Vatican II, again to define doctrine, they, they changed things. The wording of their decree was that the Bible was written ‘at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’, not the dictation, at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And it specifically goes on, and the reader must go on to take into account the sort of, the views and perspective of the individual writers. So at last they got it right. But that caused so much damage, and it still causes damage, because, how many people read Vatican II, you know? And they’re still, still stuck with this, this image of having to take Genesis as literally true. And of course, this provides ammunition for what are called these days the New Atheists, although there’s nothing new about them, with Richard Dawkins, a leading biologist who, probably the, well he’s certainly the best-known atheist I think in the world, certainly in the UK, he is continually arguing against religion, but when you analyse what he’s arguing against, he’s really arguing against the literal interpretation of, of Genesis. I remember, I remember him doing a video series on Channel 4, it was called The Root of All Evil. Well, no prizes for guessing what the root of all evil was according to Richard Dawkins. And at one stage, he’s in America and he is interviewing a TV evangelist, one of the absolute fundamental, Bible-thumping, literal people. And Dawkins was confronting him with the evidence for evolution, and this evangelist would have nothing to do with it. God has spoken, you don’t need any science, it’s all down there, He’s written it. It’s all plain, it’s all plain for you, it’s all down there, you know. And, at the end of that interview, Dawkins turned to camera and says, ‘Well there you are. That’s Christianity for you.’ And I sit there watching the TV and I am furious. It is not Christianity, it’s just a sect of Christianity, and a very mistaken sect, and one where academics, academic theologians, those on a par with the academic Dawkins, I don’t think any of them would take a literal interpretation of Genesis. They would 24

Russell Stannard Page 25 C1672/03 Track 2 think that, that it was puerile, and that Dawkins’ arguments were, just so ignorant, just so ignorant as to… He’s never, never taken the trouble to find out what modern-day Christians actually think and believe, and what fellow academics in the theology area think. And, I’m afraid that that is largely how it is, the way the science and religion debate is put across in the media. The media loves the idea of conflict, you know, good for viewing figures, listening figures, good for circulation, controversy, OK. [1:32:24] And, you know, it… I think that what this raises is, is a general problem when you’re working in an interdisciplinary area, where you’re trying to bring two separate subjects together. People working in that area approach the divide from either one side or the other; you’re either, in this case, a scientist, wanting to know a bit about religion, or you’re a theologian or a religious person trying to get up to date on science. And, if you’re going to hold an academic debate between academics on one side and academics… if you’re going to hold… then you’ve got to take a lot of trouble to find out what the academics on the other side actually say is the state of their subject. I very quickly came to, to realise that I was approaching this divide between science and religion very much on the science side, and all I knew about religion was what I had picked up from the confirmation class, you know, it was, it was very little, and that, I would have to do something about this if I was seriously getting into this. And I was being forced into it, because, as I said, you know, people could not understand how I could be a scientist and a religious person. So I, I had to get my ideas clear. And I think that, a very seminal incident in my life was that, I got an invitation from the education authorities of Jersey, Channel Island. They held what was called an Oasis Day where they would get together their brightest sixth-formers, about 100 of them, for a day, with a special speaker. And they wanted me to give a talk about science and religion. The year before me it was Trevor Huddleston, who was talking about matters to do with the Third World; OK, they wanted science and religion this time. So I thought, oh my God, I’ve got to actually sort of, speak in an educational context about the relationship. So that, that got me thinking, got me thinking. So, if you like, I tried out my first ideas in that setting. And, it went down very well. The sixth- formers asked very intelligent questions, and, in fact afterwards I was told ten per cent of them bought the audio tapes of the whole day because they wanted to, to take it up further. And one of the questions they asked me is, OK, well, this is very interesting but, you know, what can we read

25

Russell Stannard Page 26 C1672/03 Track 2 on this? I thought, what can they read? Well, I only knew of one book, which was… Oh gosh, I’ve forgotten his name now. It’ll come to me. It was called Science and Christian Belief.

Was it Coulson?

Coulson, that’s right, yes. Yes, that’s right, Coulson. And that was printed back in the 1950s, you know, it was, it was out of date. And I said, well, I really couldn’t think of another one. And of course, that then made me think, well OK, you’re a lecturer, you know a bit about religion, you’ve had your, you’re a reader now, perhaps you should write it. So that’s how I came to write my first book, which was called Science and the Renewal of Belief, which was published by SCM Press. So that’s, that’s sort of, how, how I got into it sort of seriously.

[End of Track 2]

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Russell Stannard Page 1 C1672/03 Track 3

[Track 3]

At the time, then, that you were an undergraduate encountering these ideas, and particularly these uncertainties, in physics about what you might summarise as the nature of existence, to what extent were you taking those to church and talking about them at church with people at church as a sort of separate group and…?

[laughs] Ah. Well it’s interesting what people say about one’s sermons. And, I always remember someone who said, ‘Russell, your sermons are thinly disguised physics lessons.’ [laughs] Yes, when I was being trained as a reader, I had a tutor, and, he, he on one occasion, towards the end, said, ‘OK, I’ll get you to do a practice sermon,’ OK? So we went into the church, and I was up in the pulpit, and, the congregation simply consisted of my tutor. He said, ‘OK, go ahead.’ So, rather self-consciously I delivered my sermon to the, to the tutor. And afterwards he comes up to me and looking very thoughtful. He says, ‘Yes, but, oh you just sound like an academic.’ I said, ‘Mm, well what do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, you’re always qualifying everything. You say, “Most people would think so-and-so and so-and-so,” and, “Generally speaking,” so on. You’re always qualifying, you know, you seem to have got an academic, fellow academic peering over your shoulder. You’ve got to understand that, in a church things are very different, you know, people don’t take in the qualifications. When they go out through that porch door they will say to one another, “He said…” and they will say something very, very short and to the point. All the qualifications will not be there. And of course the qualifications dull the impact of what you are saying. So if they’re not going to remember them, don’t give ’em the qualifications. Just hit them between the eyes with straight statements, like that.’ So, to some extent I, I don’t give sermons quite the same way as I would a physics lesson. The other thing he taught me very strongly was that, when I preach, I decide what to preach, I ought to preach on the Gospel reading for that day. You know, each Sunday has a particular reading. And in the church of England, though, they repeat themselves every three years, so, you have all these different readings. He said, ‘It’s good practice to always preach on the Gospel. That stops people getting on their high horses, their hobbyhorses.’ And, that I think was good advice, because it, it then is a constant warning to me that, I shouldn’t be starting off on a physics point of view, or somehow getting it round to the latest 1

Russell Stannard Page 2 C1672/03 Track 3 bit of physics, you know. So, that, that means my preaching has to be, well, like anybody else’s preaching, it… And, I, OK, some of the sermons are about science and religion, but not many, not many, because, that’s not the way it has to be. I will then from time to time run a, like a, a Lenten course on science and religion, so, you know, five lectures sort of thing, and, OK, people who are interested come, and those who think, oh, he’s on about that again, you know, don’t have to be subjected to it.

[04:41] And when you were an undergraduate physicist, this would have been in the early Fifties, at UCL?

Yes.

And you were at that time going to church still at the church associated with your old school?

Yup, yes, yes, St Martin-in-the-Fields.

I wonder whether at that stage, which is an earlier stage from what you’ve just been talking about which is training to be a reader in the Church of England, whether at that earlier stage the physics was affecting your, your understanding of the theology, which was then relatively new to you?

[pause] I, I don’t know that there was any direct link between the two. I think that, my training as a physicist, you know, tidy thinking, has been absorbed into my personality, and that there probably is, is something of that betrayed in, in the sermons I give, that the sermons are tidy. You know, I will start off with a thought and then perhaps end the sermon returning to that initial thought, so that it neatly ties up with what… So, there are sort of subtle things like that which I think strike me as, as normal, but that’s simply because I’m the sort of tidy thinking person I have become, which is part of my training as a physicist but I’m not really aware of it.

And when you were at the stage of just listening to the sermons of others, attending church and listening, did being a physicist have an effect on the way you listened? So, I’m not asking about the way you later gave sermons yourself, but the way that you went to church and listened at 2

Russell Stannard Page 3 C1672/03 Track 3 church and thought about what was being said at church, was that, did the fact that you were also a student of physics have any effect on that?

[pause] It’s difficult to, difficult to, to answer, because, I suspect my training as a physicist has affected me as a person in ways I’m not aware of, that other people might be aware of. You know, another person might think, oh, that’s a scientist talking, for example, you know, and I just think, well, it’s the normal way one should think and talk, you know? So I, I think my life is very much sort of, integrated in that, that kind of way.

Were there other people in the congregation at church who were interested in what you were doing for your degree, who were curious about it, asking about it?

Are people in the congregation interested in, in science itself, sort of thing, or…?

No, when you were an undergraduate, an undergraduate physicist, were the people who were also attending the same church, on Sunday, say, were they, were they aware then of what you were doing?

Oh that… At that stage, I, talking about when I was an undergraduate going to St Martin-in-the- Fields, I had virtually no contact with other members of the congregation. All I did was to turn up at that stage at church on a Sunday morning, attend the service, and go home. Certainly in those days there was no such thing as coffee after the service where we get to know you, and I was not engaged in any of the ongoing activities or clubs associated with the church. It wasn’t practical, because, it was in a different part of London and I would have had to have got across to, to get there. These days it’s very different, you know, one’s fully integrated into the life of the church. I’m not only the preacher, I’m, I’m chairman of the Stewardship Committee, which is to do with fundraising; there is coffee after the service; there are Advent lunches; there are Harvest lunches; there are concerts; there are church fetes; I help put up the Christmas decorations along with other people. So, we’re very very much a community and we know all about each other, and, all our own foibles and things like that. And, yes, I am, I’m very much, you know, the, the weird old professor member of the congregation, so everybody knows me and I tend to know them. So, I 3

Russell Stannard Page 4 C1672/03 Track 3 keep on forgetting their names, because as I’ve said, I have a very bad memory. I could never have been a vicar. That’s another thing. Some people say, ‘OK, you’re a reader, and you do some of the things that priests do,’ and quite a number of readers use that as a jumping-off point to becoming a fully-ordained minister, and I have often been asked, you know, have I had any thoughts about becoming a priest myself? And the answer is, well I’ve had thoughts, but, no, never, never considered that at all seriously, partly because of my bad memory, and one of the things a vicar has to do is to remember the names of the members of his congregation, otherwise they would get very upset, but also I, I felt that, OK, I could become another priest, much like the other priests, but by then I, I was a scientist and a, a reader, a preacher, and I, I saw that as a kind of distinctive ministry. But yes, it would promote people thinking, well if science and religion are at loggerheads, how come this guy who’s preaching to us is a professional scientist? What’s… It provokes questions, OK. So, I felt that remaining a lay person was probably the best thing for me to do. Not only that, because, so much of my life has been that of translating to members of the public, and in some contexts children, deep questions to do with science and also religion, I felt that I needed to keep very much in touch with the normal person in the pew. And of course as soon as you become a priest, people don’t treat you normally. If you’ve got your collar round the other way and you go into a pub, that immediately changes the character of the conversation, you know, the number of swear words goes down and things of that kind. But I didn’t want that. I wanted to remain very much assimilated into the normal public so that I would keep in tune with the way they think, and therefore, it would better and more sensitive towards understanding what they’re likely to understand and what they would find difficult to understand.

[13:17] Thank you. Can you tell me the story, then, of how you moved from being an undergraduate to being a PhD student, about how you moved in the way you did?

Oh, well what happened there was, I, I was studying physics, OK, I went in for the exam, and I got First Class Honours. But not only that, I was selected as the science student of the year. So out of the whole of the science faculty of University College London I won this prize, the Rosa Morison Memorial Medal for being the most outstanding student. [laughs] Which, I suppose, it went to my head a little bit, you know, it made me think, gosh, I must be very special, you know. And I 4

Russell Stannard Page 5 C1672/03 Track 3 thought, gosh, I might, I might be the next Einstein. Now I was already so wrapped up in relativity theory, I thought, gosh, you know, wouldn’t it be wonderful to make a discovery on a par with Einstein about the nature of space and, and time, you know. Well, it didn’t work out like that, it didn’t work out. [laughs] There are very few Einsteins in the world, and I certainly wasn’t one. I was always, I think I can say, a valued member of a research team, and eventually I got to be Vice- President of the Institute of Physics, but, I was never the president, and I never made any, any big, notable discovery, I was always a member of a, of a team. So, those illusions of, of grandeur went into the same trash can as my delusions of playing for England [laughs] at cricket. And, and so I suppose, I then more and more saw myself as, as a translator of big ideas to people as a quintessential teacher. That was what my strength was, and that I ought to play to it. And I enjoyed playing, playing to it. And it was eventually rewarded when, a long time down the line, I wrote a book introducing eleven-year-olds to quantum theory, and it became the UK number one bestseller, for adults as well as children. That I think was a real accolade. And not only that, but, I did a radio series on Radio 4, BBC, called Science and Wonders, which was dealing with science and religion, and that was chosen by the Sunday Times newspaper as the radio achievement of the year, which I cherished very much. So, that was very much how I would like to be remembered, as, as a good teacher.

[16:55] In the meantime, though, you were a PhD student.

Yes, a PhD student. But anyway, having won this, this prize, one or two of the research groups were keen to have me join them as a PhD student. And, the deputy head of the department… The head of the department was Sir Harrie Massey, Professor Sir Harrie Massey, a very famous atomic physicist, and his deputy head was Dr Eric Burhop. They were both Australian, so they were buddy pals. And, Burhop got hold of me and he said, ‘Right Stannard, I want you in my research group. We are studying cosmic rays, and your first assignment will be to go to the mountain laboratory on Mount Marmolada in the Dolomites of northern Italy.’ And I thought, gosh, that sounds, wonderful. So, you know, I was going to be paid from my grant to go abroad and, go up a mountain and stuff like that, you know. So… And of course he was exercising his authority as the deputy head of the [laughs], of the department, that he, when he wanted you in his group, then, the 5

Russell Stannard Page 6 C1672/03 Track 3 other group had to, had to back off, you know. So that’s how I joined the, the high energy physics group. Cosmic rays, they are rays coming from outer space, subatomic particles, and, they’re interesting in their own right as to know where they come from and, how do they get their energy. But perhaps more important than that, in those days there were no particle accelerators. So, if you wanted to examine the collisions, the high energy collisions between subatomic particles like protons, which is the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, then you had to rely on these haphazard cosmic ray particles coming in. And the trouble is that these particles interact with the atmosphere, so all the interesting stuff is going on high up in the atmosphere. What you get down here at sea level is the debris, and you can’t make much of what was going on up there just simply by looking at the debris down here. So it means that the apparatus has to go up, it has to go up in the atmosphere. Some of the research groups in the country were flying balloons, high altitude balloons, and their equipment would go up for a few hours up there before they then brought them down by parachute. Others went up mountains. And, because the UK doesn’t have any mountains worth, worthwhile, that meant we had to borrow a foreign mountain. And so we picked on Mount Marmolada in the Dolomites of northern Italy. Mount Marmolada is, is the highest mountain in the Dolomites. And up there, there had been built this cabin, wooden cabin, as a laboratory. And it was next to a hotel, Rifugio Marmolada, which was frequented by mountaineers and skiers. There was a seggiovia, a set of chairs on a cable, going up to the top of Mount Marmolada from Rifugio Marmolada. So you got these outdoor types up there. And not only that, but up there, there was a big valley, and, there was a construction firm building a dam, the Marmolada Dam, at the end of the valley, which was then to be flooded for hydroelectric power. So you had the dam workers up there, they had their own huts where they lived, except the engineers, top engineers, they, they lived in the hotel, which is what the physicists did. [21:48] OK, I was up this mountain, and, getting there was a problem, because, there wasn’t a road up there. There is now, but in those days there wasn’t. There was a path. And at the, at the bottom of the mountain was a village called Canazei, near Bolzano, and you would, by public transport, get to Canazei. And then you had to climb, you had to climb up the mountain, took about three hours to get up there. Fortunately they had porters, these small, tough, wiry men, who carried these huge straw baskets on their backs. And their main job was taking supplies up to the hotel, food and so on. But once the lab opened up there, then they would take up our, our equipment and stuff like 6

Russell Stannard Page 7 C1672/03 Track 3 that. And I have vivid memories of my first climb up Mount Marmolada accompanied by a porter who had a, my suitcase sticking out of the top of his straw basket. [23:07] So there we were in this, this hut, along with two other groups. There was an Italian group from the University of Padua, and there was a German group from the University of Göttingen. Each of us had cloud chambers. These were wonderful devices, just magical devices. The idea is that, the subatomic particles are too small to be seen, you can’t even see them under a microscope, but the principle is similar to what might happen when you look at a high-flying aeroplane. The plane might be so high up that you don’t really see the plane; what you see is its vapour trail. So you know what it’s done and where it’s gone by examining the vapour trail. And, what happens in a cloud chamber is that, when a subatomic particle passes through, because it carries electric charge, it slightly damages the atoms in the enclosed gas inside this cloud chamber, a gas that’s saturated with a liquid alcohol. It what we call ionises the atoms, it flicks one of the electrons out of the atom, which is a very slight disturbance, but if the gas is supersaturated, it’s holding more of the liquid, more of the alcohol, than it wants to. So it wants to condense out, but it can’t just condense out, you’ve got to decide what it’s going to condense on. You know, why should a bubble – sorry, not the bubble, the droplet start there, rather than somewhere else? But if one of these cosmic rays has passed through and damaged an atom, ionised it, that is sufficient reason why the vapour then is up. That’s something different. I’ll start my droplet there. And that’s where it starts. And then, once it’s started, the droplet grows and grows until it gets to the point where it’s visible. So you get this trail of droplets tracing out where this cosmic ray particle came in, and where it went out. And once the bubbles… No, sorry, I keep on saying bubbles. I’ll explain that in a minute. Once the droplets have reached a visible size, you flash the lights, and you take your photograph of it, so you’ve got a permanent record of the track of that cosmic ray particle. Now of course, a track just going, coming in at the top and going out the bottom, is not very interesting. What you are looking for is, a track which suddenly ends, and lots of tracks come from that, that point. What that is telling you is that the cosmic ray particle has hit a bullseye on the nucleus of an atom of the gas, and has smashed it apart. So what you are seeing are the, the protons that were in the nucleus, coming out and also forming their vapour trails. So that’s obviously more interesting. What is much, much more interesting even than that is that, the cosmic rays, if they were energetic enough, they not only smashed up the nuclei into their component parts, but they also, in that collision, 7

Russell Stannard Page 8 C1672/03 Track 3 create new particles, particles that weren’t there before the collision. Now one might think, well surely I learnt in school, matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Well, that’s wrong. It can. But it can’t be created out of nothing. And here you have an insight from relativity theory. Earlier I said how energy has, has mass; that spacecraft couldn’t take on the extra energy and go faster without taking on the mass that goes with the energy. And that’s because, all mass has associated with it energy; energy is associated with mass, mass is associated with energy. So, when you look at an ordinary particle, say a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, the simplest nucleus there is, it looks like an inert piece of matter, but because it’s got mass, that mass is telling you it has energy. It is in effect a locked-up form of energy. Now if it’s locked up in a proton, you can’t get it out, you can’t get it out. But there are some, some nuclei that, if you break them apart, some of the mass that was part of the nucleus can become a particle. Or, let me put it this way. If the projectile particle comes in with sufficient extra energy, extra energy, then that extra energy might be enough to create the mass of another proton, a proton that wasn’t there before. There are all sorts of rules associated with the creation of new matter. One is, OK, you’ve got to have enough energy to provide the mass, so any particular energy, you can only produce new particles up to a certain mass. The bigger the energy, the more particles, the bigger the particle the particles you can create. So that’s one of the reasons why you want to go to higher energy particle accelerators today, we don’t rely on cosmic rays but we want to go to higher energy accelerators because that gives a greater variety of new particles that you can create. So you create these new particles, and so you think, well what, what happens to the new particles once they’re created? Well, they are unstable. In a very short time, a matter of a fraction of a second, they decay, they spontaneously break up like a, like a bomb, and they break up into ordinary particles, protons and electrons and so on. [30:13] So, after all this, you end up with just ordinary matter, but, in between you had this excitement of creating new matter. And, the new matter is of a different type to our familiar matter. They can have different properties. Now what do we mean by a different property? Well, one of the interesting things about these, creating new particles, is that, if you, if you create, say, a new proton, a proton has got an electric charge, it’s positively charged. So, you have created a positive electric charge which wasn’t there before. And there is a rigorous law of nature which is the conservation of electric charge. So how have you broken this law? Well you haven’t broken the 8

Russell Stannard Page 9 C1672/03 Track 3 law, because, at the same time you create a second particle which is negatively charged. So now you have a positive charge and a negative charge. The net charge, and that’s what matters, the net charge has not changed. So the law of conservation of energy is conserved. You haven’t got any more of the property charge than you had before. And the clue is, and the way to do it, is to produce one of each kind. Now what one discovered when one was producing these new particles is that sometimes a certain type of particle is only created in conjunction with another particle. Now you think, well OK, is that because one is positive charge, one is negative? Well that might be the case, but there are occasions when that doesn’t apply, that is not the situation. You can, you can create these particles in ways which, other ways of conserving it, but you don’t have to produce to… But they are always produced together, it’s called associated production. And so you think, well why, why are they always in pairs? And you think, well, is it the same kind of thing that happens with an electric charge? Does this particle here carry some property, a unit of some property, and the other one carries the opposite unit of that property, and that there is a law of conservation of that property? And, at first this idea appeared so strange that this property was called ‘strangeness’. So one particle had plus one unit of strangeness; another had minus one unit of strangeness. And then you discovered a particle which was only created with two of the other particles. So then you get the idea of, well this particle must have two units of positive strangeness, and these have two negative, or each of these have one each, so you’ve got two… And then you found a third one, a third particle which only came with three others, and so, three units. So gradually you, you get used to the idea that there are properties that these new particles have which ordinary matter doesn’t have. And it turns out that there are several of these properties. So, when you create these new particles, you have so much to learn about new, new properties. And, although these particles seem to be very exotic, they are actually very close cousins to normal matter, normal protons and neutrons. In fact you, you can’t fully understand what a proton and a neutron are unless you are aware of their cousins, and see how they fit in to the family. And there’s nothing special about protons. Protons and neutrons simply happen to be the least massive of these particles, so, when you create these unstable particles, they cascade down to the least massive, and it happens to be protons and neutrons. If one of these other particles had been the least massive, then the protons and neutrons will have decayed down into that one. So that is, that’s the basic motivation behind the kind of work we do. We’re not interested in the cosmic rays as such, but we use them as a tool for trying to understand the structure of matter, what matter is actually made of. 9

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So it’s a very very fundamental, there’s no more fundamental line of research than trying to understand the ultimate nature of matter. [35:30] So, we had these bubble [cloud] chambers. Why three? Well, well one of them had… All right, it’s a bit difficult to describe. You use it with other types of equipment, so, you have a Geiger counter above your cloud chamber, and that’s the first thing that registers: 'a cosmic ray has just passed through me and it’s heading for the cloud chamber'. That is the signal for you to expand the cloud chamber and suddenly throw this gas into its supersaturated state. The cosmic ray then passes through and you, you then have the vapour trail. So you have to have these other outside devices to warn you as to when is the right time to expand. Our particular characteristic was that our bubble [cloud] chamber was a high pressure cloud chamber. There weren’t many, in fact I think ours was the only one. A high pressure cloud chamber where we packed in as much gas as possible, the reason being that with more atoms in there, you had a bigger chance of the cosmic ray colliding with a nucleus of one of these atoms. It operated at seventy atmospheres, so we had seventy times the chance of seeing an interesting event than if we operated at atmospheric pressure. But the problem was of course that having the atmosphere at that colossal pressure, it, it was dangerous. It kept on blowing a gasket, it was a very temperamental piece of apparatus. She was called Susie. So she was always causing us trouble. And, it was a case of being, as a research student, thrown in at the deep end, because when anything went wrong with Susie, it was up to you and whoever might be with you, and there was usually one or two of us from the group out there at the, at the mountain station at a time, you had to find a way of putting it right yourself. You couldn’t rely on technicians back home in a well-serviced laboratory. You are up a mountain in a hut. So you had to use all sorts of skills to make do with ways of patching Susie up, you know. It was a baptism of fire for me in a different sense. I’ve said how, when the chamber expands and the tracks form you flash the lights. Well, underneath Susie was this big bank of condensers, charged up to 2,000 degrees [volts], an enormous amount of electricity, so that you got an incredibly bright flash so as to show up these tiny, tiny particles. And as I say, that condenser bank was under Susie. And one day, very very early in my days up Mount Marmolada, I dropped something on the floor, I think it was a pencil, and I went groping for it. And it had rolled under Susie. And I put my hand under, and I touched the terminals of the condenser bank. I discharged the whole lot through me. It was the equivalent of eight times the shock you get if you stick your fingers in the electric light 10

Russell Stannard Page 11 C1672/03 Track 3 bulb fixing. It completely threw me across the room, I was bodily thrown across the room. The smell of burning flesh was, revolting. My hand was in such a terrible mess. I was in fact incredibly, incredibly fortunate, because, I must have touched the earth terminal before I touched the live terminal with my hand, so most of the electricity simply passed through my hand from one terminal to the other, and that diverted electricity from going through my body and through my legs. But, you know, obviously the hand was in a, a terrible state. So, we had to call upon the, the engineers working on the dam. They had lorries that came up to the dam. This was from the opposite side from Canazei, there wasn’t any… And we couldn’t use that road because it was a dirt road which was just for construction trucks, but, but they could get down in the motorised fashion. And so we got them to, to take me down in a truck down to the nearest town that side, and, and into hospital. And, I had to get the thing dressed, and brought back. It was a frightening thing to happen, and it lived with me for a long time. I had this, this terror of electricity, absolute terror. And it wasn’t helped by the fact that, in the hotel I had to share a bedroom with the person who ought to have been supervising me, and ought to have warned me about the perils posed by that condenser bank, which had no protection around it whatsoever. In those days there was no such thing as health and safety, none whatsoever. No concern about that. Today I, I have cause many times to beef about the stupidities of ’elf and safety, you know, but, at the back of my mind I think, now hold on Russell, there is a point to all this you know. So that was that. And as I say, it wasn’t helped by the fact that I was sharing a bedroom with the supervisor, who felt very guilty, rightly so, about not looking after me. And, Norman his name was, and, oh dear, for, oh for nights after that he would have these terrible nightmares which, he would end up screaming, ‘Don’t touch Russell, don’t touch, don’t touch!’ Oh, and of course I lived the whole incident again, you know. So, that, that was my baptism in, into doing research. That was the bad side of things. [42:49] But the work was, was fascinating, absolutely fascinating, and, when we found, you know, some of these exotic particles, gosh, you know, that was, such a time of celebration. We would telephone the folks back at the college saying, ‘We’ve got another one,’ you know. And then, the, the film, the photographs of all these tracks, would then be taken back to University College where we had special scanning machines, which threw the pictures onto a screen and we would then examine and measure them up to, to find out what was going. So all the analysis was done back at the college. And, the general way in which we worked was that, you would spend a month at the, on Mount 11

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Marmolada; you then had five days off. Well you had, it took you a day to get down the mountain, and you had to allow a day to get back up again. So, you, you were allowed three days, effectively three days down in civilisation. And then you went back up the mountain again for another month; another five days off; up the mountain again for another month; and then you were allowed home, and another team took over. And then, back at the college, you would join the team that was doing the analysis. And that was the pattern. And, my times out in Italy were some of the happiest times I had had. I just grew to love Italy, really, very, so much. And when I had these days off, the pattern would be, OK, down the mountain, off, down to Canazei, across to Bolzano, train down to Verona. Once down to Verona, I had to make a decision: you either carry straight on, or you turn left and you go sightseeing. Straight on was Rome; left was Venice, which I absolutely loved; or you go to the right, to Milan, to La Scala Milan, the opera house. Now I should explain that in those days I was mad, mad keen on opera. I still am, I still am. Absolute opera fan. As an undergraduate student and as a postgrad I, I would go to Sadler’s Wells opera something like twice a week, twice a week. I belonged to a club called the Rosebery Club of similar opera fans. We used to meet in an upper room in the pub opposite Sadler’s Wells Theatre, which was in Rosebery Avenue, hence we called it the Rosebery Club, and we would get singers from Sadler’s Wells opera to come over and give us talks and, and all that sort of thing. But in those days, you know, recovering from the war, the mecca, the mecca for opera was La Scala Milan. That’s where all the great singers were. And, my friends at the Rosebery Club, they were just so green with envy at some of the performances that I was, I was seeing over there. For example, you know, the greatest singer probably of all time was Maria Callas, and the most memorable night I’ve ever spent in the opera, it was the first night of the season, which in La Scala is a big, big occasion. All the boxes were festooned with pink carnations. And Callas was singing her most famous role, Norma. It was mind-blowing, just wonderful. How I managed to get tickets, I don’t remember. I had to queue a long, long time, and I was right up in the sixth floor, the top, top gallery. But anyway, so, I, I would, I would go to the opera, and also I went to the opera Fenice in Venice, and, and at Bergamo, which is Donizetti’s home town, and to Rome. So, this really consolidated me in, in my love of opera. And I just loved Italian towns. All the towns are so different. Florence is different from Venice, is different from Rome, which is different from Perugia, and so on. So, there were endless delights. And in fact my eldest daughter, she, she married an Italian, and she lives in Trieste. So

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Russell Stannard Page 13 C1672/03 Track 3 that gives you an idea of what it was like working up the mountain and how it was a, duty was mixed up with pleasure.

[48:02] Could you describe what was involved in operating the, the cloud chamber? So, if you like, take us through a typical day in the laboratory. So once you’ve got from the hotel to the laboratory. I know one of the things you do, because you’ve described the accident, is to turn on the condensers. But, what else do you actually do, what’s around you and what are you doing?

Well much of it would be more or less automatic, because, we, we had the Geiger counters above and below the cloud chamber, so their job was to alert us to when something came in from the top, and, and you would then look at how many of the Geiger counters underneath fired. If only one fired, then you think, OK, that’s just one particle passing through. That’s not interesting. So what you were actually looking for was, one of the Geiger counters above firing, and several of those under firing, which indicates one in, several out, and that indicates that something’s interesting. So, over time you would experiment with different combinations of what was likely to give you a good, an interesting picture. But the expanding of the cloud chamber was, was automatic. And then, the chamber having expanded, I think you then had to switch on the pump and get it to pump up again and reset. And then once it was reset, you would then, have nothing to do. You, you then would have to wait something, something like twenty minutes, half an hour, on average, for the next firing. So, you were taking… It would, it would take, as I recall it would take something like, after a firing you had something like ten minutes to allow everything to settle down, because, you know, having expanded and then compressed it, you know, the gas inside would be swirling around. Well, you can’t send these particles through whilst the gas is still moving because all the tracks will be distorted, the same way as a vapour trail of an aircraft gets distorted with time because of the movement of the air. So, I think we had to leave it something like ten minutes so that it would settle down, and then you switch it back on. And then, typically, you would have to wait, on average, ten or twenty minutes for the Geiger counter to fire, and the next expansion. You then had to keep note of the, the cameras and how many pictures they had taken and whether you were coming to the end of, of a reel. And then, once you came to the end of a reel you had to take the film out. And we had to do all our processing on site, we had a darkroom there. So, it had to 13

Russell Stannard Page 14 C1672/03 Track 3 be, the film had to be developed and fixed, in the normal way, OK. And then they had to be dried. The situation was very primitive, because, I vividly remember losing a whole strip of films, because, I had them in the wash basin, and I had the cold water tap on rinsing them to get the, the fixer off ready for them later on to be dried. And, the plumbing system was so crude that someone downstairs had turned on the hot water to have a wash downstairs, and the hot water backed up through the system and came out through my tap. And so what I came back to was a whole load of jelly, gunge, and all the pictures had gone. So, we had to have a rule that, if we had reached that stage of the developing process, we had to put a notice up on the other sink to say, ‘Don’t use hot water until I tell you,’ sort of thing, you know. So, it wasn’t… OK, you then wait ten minutes again for the next firing and so on. So that, that was the sort of pattern that repeated itself. And, it was, it was quite boring, you know, quite boring. So, we, we had a gramophone there, and, we shared… The University College group was in, on the ground, well, on the ground floor, sharing the ground floor with the Padua people; the Göttingen people were down in the basement. And, the, the gramophone belonged to the Padua people, so they had the rights as to what to play. And, there was one guy there who was mad keen on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. He would play it every, every day, every day Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. And now I just can’t think of Susie without thinking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Why was the instrument called Susie, rather than anything else?

Sorry?

Why was the instrument called Susie? Do you know?

No, that, that was, that was her name when I arrived. And it just stuck. And actually, ever since, ever since I have called my car Susie, whichever car it is, she’s always Susie. Mm.

[end of session]

[End of Track 3]

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[Track 4]

I’ll ask some questions based on listening to what we recorded last time, and then I’ll, after having asked those questions, I’ll ask you to take us on through your life. We had got about to the point of your PhD research on Mount Marmolada, but no further, last time, which takes us to the early to mid-Fifties. But I’ve got some questions on things that you said last time, and then we’ll go from there, if that’s OK.

OK. The Marmolada, did I talk about the electrocution?

Yes.

I did, OK. There’s probably not a great deal more to say about that actually.

That’s OK, yes. So, when we get to that, we’ll be going straight on perhaps to research assistant days at UCL.

Yah.

And then, then on to California.

Mhm.

OK? Do you have any idea of where your father had got this view of religion and Christianity in particular of being something that women do? This seems a, a striking view, given the apparent sort of, maleness of the sort of, clergy if you like, you know. Where had he come to that view?

I really don’t know. I have to confess that, my father and I, we never had any sort of, deep discussions about anything. We, we just didn’t. [laughs] That was the way it was. So, why he 1

Russell Stannard Page 2 C1672/03 Track 4 came to that conclusion, I just don’t know. It might simply be his background in the Army, you know, sort of, a macho atmosphere about the place sort of thing.

Yes, could be, yes.

Mm.

[01:53] Could you also tell me more about two occasions when people suggested that you do something that previously you hadn’t heard of. You said that when it came to confirmation, your aunt suggested that you go for confirmation, and you said, but you didn’t know what it was at the time. And then later on in your life story, I think it was Nadkarni suggests that you train as a lay reader, and you weren’t aware of it at the time. Could you… Oh well, I suppose I wanted you to reflect on the extent to which you’ve been guided in sort of, key moments in your life up to this point by the advice of others, and, reasons why those were people who you listened to if you like.

OK. [pause] I think when I look back, I do owe much of what has happened to me to, to people who’ve made suggestions as to what would be good for me, and my aunt suggesting that I become confirmed was really, I suppose, an introduction into the Christian way of life, which of course was very important. And then, that was built upon by the Reverend Edward Nadkarni when he suggested that I become a reader at a time when I had never heard of a reader. A further example of that sort of thing was, I encountered a very famous theologian called Thomas Torrance. He was at Edinburgh University. And, at the time he was probably the leading light in the discussion of relations between science and religion. He was a very difficult man to understand, he was, [laughs] thinking very deep thoughts which others found very difficult to, to unravel. But I had a, a big admiration for him. And he, it was he who pointed out to me, at an occasion when we met, that in Princeton, in New Jersey in America, they had just set up an institution called the Center of Theological Inquiry, which was a centre primarily devoted to the study of science and religion, and he felt that I would benefit by spending some sabbatical time out there. And, that was actually a very good suggestion, because, I was interested in the relationship between science and religion, I was being constantly called upon to make, you know, lectures and give talks. And with these 2

Russell Stannard Page 3 C1672/03 Track 4 interdisciplinary areas, one is always at a disadvantage in that one’s approaching the divide between the two areas from one side or the other, and you are in danger of making a fool of yourself when you start talking about the other side. And I had felt the need, that I was OK on the science side, but I really did need to beef up the theological side. I had had this part-time training for two years as a reader, but it was a little bit desultory, and I felt that, you know, I, I needed more. And the idea of then, you know, spending a whole year in the atmosphere of theology, you know, surrounded by theologians, would be very valuable. And that’s how in fact it turned out to be. But, if Tom hadn’t mentioned that to me, then, I wouldn’t even have known that this place in America existed. So, that was another case of someone pointing me in what I believe to be the right direction.

[06:35] Thank you. I wanted you to say more, if you are OK to, about your experiences of St Martin-in-the- Fields church. What was it about that church that made you want to go to church more than once a week, whereas other church experiences hadn’t, and you say that while you were at UCL, even though you didn’t live particularly near it then, you would, you would get a bus and go to that particular church. So it seems as if, for you at this point, it’s not about going to church but going to that church. I wonder whether you could say why that one.

It’s rather difficult to say. I suppose part of the reason is that, it had a good congregation. Previously, my mother had taken me to the local church in Lambeth at Christmas time, and there were very few people in the congregation. It wasn’t very inspiring. And, to, to be in a congregation which was, you know, very healthy, you know, good numbers there, and, part of the atmosphere at St Martin’s is that it, it helps destitute people, and, whenever you go to St Martin’s you will see these destitute people sitting in the pews, because they’ve got nowhere else to go, and nobody shoos them out. They, they are happy to sit there in the warmth. And, that was a very attractive quality of the place, it just helped to indicate to me that this was a thriving, caring, loving sort of, of place. And, on going there, the, the standard of the sermons was, was very good, the preaching was very good, very interesting, you know, I felt I was getting a lot out of that. So I think that was, that was the reason.

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Did you try other churches near to UCL?

No, I didn’t, no. No.

[09:00] Thank you. I wonder whether you think that your lack of feeling able to talk to your parents about certain things explains in part the attractiveness of certain adults such as Austen Williams who seemed approachable about sort of, potentially embarrassing or deep or intellectual or personal subjects.

That’s a very interesting suggestion. I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought of that, but, thinking about it now, that, that might be that Austen Williams, and later on the Reverend Edward Nadkarni, was filling part of the role of a father that I had lacked. I hadn’t thought of that before, but, I think you’re probably right, yes.

And were you able to talk about that sort of thing with Uncle Bill?

[hesitates] Not really, no. He was very kindly but, he was very much upper class, you know, there was a, a very clear class distinction between us which at least I was aware of, because, Uncle Bill and Auntie Bea came from a totally different world to me. Absolutely, it was just an eye-opener that one could live like that, you know, and be like that. Very inspiring, I think I absorbed something of that myself, you know. [laughs] Yes.

What were things that they did or had, then, that struck you then as being different from the things that you had seen other people doing or having up to that point?

Well for example, dinner was very, very formal. They had this live-in housewife who cooked and served at table. I’ve never had someone serve me at table, you know? And, they had this sort of tradition that, Uncle Bill would carve the meat, he would be in charge of the first course, and then, Auntie Bea was in charge of the dessert. It was, a ritual. But very very, well struck me as being very odd you know. And of course, everything about the house was, was elegant, you know, all the 4

Russell Stannard Page 5 C1672/03 Track 4 cutlery was solid silver stuff, you know, it was… It was just a different environment altogether. A little bit overwhelming, you know, for someone like myself, yes.

[12:02] Thank you. As a postdoc – sorry, as a PhD student and a postdoc, did you have any contact with what was called then the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship, the group that later becomes Christians in Science?

No, I hadn’t. I hadn’t, no. No.

Did you know that it existed, or is it just that you…?

No, I didn’t, no.

OK, fine. And did you have discussions with other PhD students about relations between science and religion? You say that that kind of discussion didn’t happen as an undergraduate; did it now happen?

No, it didn’t happen at the graduate level, at the graduate level, no. No, we were scientists through and through, sort of thing, you know, and very serious-minded. [laughs]

[12:47] And, before we continue through your life story from where we got to last time, could you say a little bit more about what you mention in your autobiography as being the communist leanings of Eric Burhop, your, I suppose your PhD supervisor and then…

Yes. He, he did have these communist leanings, and… Although they didn’t interfere with work, but there was, there was one aspect where it, it did arise, and it was very interesting, because, it goes back to the development of the nuclear bomb. J Robert Oppenheimer was in charge of, of that project, and he had a brother called Frank, and Frank also worked on, on the project. At that time of course, any communist was not allowed on the project, because, you know, fears that they would 5

Russell Stannard Page 6 C1672/03 Track 4 send secrets back to, to Russia, OK. And of course, Frank Oppenheimer had at one stage been a fully signed-up Communist. So the only way he could have got on the Manhattan Project was to have lied about not having any connection with communism. Eventually he was found out, and of course he was sacked. And, and not only that, but, no other American university would have anything to do with him, because that would taint them as being, you know, communist leanings. And this was the, the McCarthy era where there was this witch hunt for, for communists. So Frank was very much out in the wilderness. And as a result of all this of course, it came to the notice of people that J Robert Oppenheimer must surely have known that his brother had been a Communist, and surely knew that he was working on the Manhattan Project. And so that was part of how Robert Oppenheimer himself was taken off the, well the development of the hydrogen bomb, he developed the, the first atomic bomb, the fission one. But the fusion one for hydrogen, he was taken off that. So Frank was partly to blame for the downfall of J Robert Oppenheimer. OK, so you had Frank Oppenheimer out in the wilderness, and it was Burhop who suggested that Frank come and work at University College London, which he did. So, Burhop, because, you know, fellow communist, gave Frank his, his entrée back into academic life; all right, it was in this country rather than in America, but that was all right. And, that got him over the hump. Frank was very nice, you know, I, I knew him. And, he was particularly interested in the teaching of science. And eventually, I forget how long he was with us, I think about, about a year, something like that, and then he went back to, to San Francisco, and there he set up the Exploratorium, which was the first sort of hands-on science museum. He didn’t like the idea of a museum where everything was tucked away in glass cabinets and you couldn’t touch them. He wanted people to learn from experience. So he devised all these wonderful devices where people could turn handles and pull levers and stuff like that. An idea which has now become very very common, you know, throughout the world, but it was Frank who started that up, at the Exploratorium. And one of the nicest memories I have is, I was going out to San Francisco, for a conference or something, and, I wrote ahead to Frank saying, ‘I would love to come and visit your Exploratorium.’ So he wrote back, enthusiastically, he said, ‘Yes OK, you come. Please arrive at half-past five.’ I thought, now that’s, that’s a bit odd. Surely half-past five is when they are packing up. I don’t just want to see him, I want to actually see the Exploratorium itself. So I got there at half-past five, and sure enough, they were packing up. But Frank then said, ‘OK, we’ve now got the place to ourselves.’ And we had the most wonderful time going round the Exploratorium, just the two of us, him 6

Russell Stannard Page 7 C1672/03 Track 4 demonstrating all the various things. And, that really was a very delightful memory for me. And I suppose it all came about because, Burhop was a communist. [laughs] Yes.

[18:44] Did either of them, in the laboratory at UCL, talk about political matters?

No.

No.

No, the… The conversation at UCL was always about work. You know, we were just very keen on, on our research.

Were there any female physicists, either academics or…?

Very, very few. When I was a student, an undergraduate student, we had a class of about thirty- five and there were just two girls. And that was, that was pretty average for, for physics throughout the country, yah, that, that sort of percentage.

Was it clear then why that was, to you as an undergraduate?

I suppose, in a very masochistic – well not masochistic, but, chauvinistic way, one just thought that women weren’t very good at physics, or just weren’t interested in physics. They were interested in other things. In those days you had pretty stereotypical views as to what men did, and what women did, and women didn’t do physics. You tended to think of them as being, you know, a little odd if, to find them in, in a physics lab. Things haven’t completely changed now. When I was Vice- President of the Institute of Physics with particular reference to education, one of the things I was trying to put forward then was to make it easier for, for women to feel comfortable about, you know, taking up physics. And there has been progress. And indeed, one of the nicest things that I can think of is the fact that, when I gave up being the head of the physics department at the Open

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University, the person who took over was Jocelyn Burnell, so, a woman took over as head of my department, which I was very very pleased about.

[21:24] Thank you. Another thing that you mention in your autobiography as having occurred at this time, in the Fifties, is that you remember hearing BBC radio programmes by Fred Hoyle in which he talks, negatively, I know he later talks less negatively, but at this time talks negatively about belief in God in relation to cosmology.

Yes.

What do you remember of those programmes? Because, I can’t find, you know, sort of transcripts and things. Do you remember anything of the content?

[pause] It was a series of programmes where he was advocating the steady state theory of cosmology. This was the idea that, the universe had always existed. OK, it was expanding, and therefore you might think, well it’ll end up with nothing, you know, everything goes away. But he had this idea that, in space new elementary particles were constantly forming, they came together to form atoms, the atoms then came together to form molecules, they then came together to form suns and stars. A whole new galaxy would then form, which in time would move away, but that’s OK because the next lot would be coming up. So it was a steady, if you looked at a particular region of space over any length of time, it would essentially look the same. And, he went on from there to, to imply that that got rid of God, because, God’s job was to create the universe. Well, OK, we don’t need a creator because it’s always been there. And, and he, he was very, very disparaging of, of religious belief. And at the time it, it caused quite a, a lot of outrage from, from believers, that he should have used the BBC for putting across those, those sorts of views. And of course, later on he, he came to change his mind. And that was in itself a very interesting story, because, what happened was that, the various elements, the various different kinds of atoms, are formed within stars, in the furnaces there you get the smaller elements like hydrogen and helium fusing together to give the, the more complicated ones. And, it turned out that there was a very special difficulty in creating carbon, because you then, to create carbon you needed to have three helium nuclei all 8

Russell Stannard Page 9 C1672/03 Track 4 collide at the same time and stick together to form the carbon nucleus. And, just as, you know, if you played snooker, it’s very easy to get two balls to collide, but to get three balls to collide at the same time is, is very very much more difficult. And so, common sense seemed to indicate that, no way could carbon form. But of course it did form, and it’s the specially sticky kind of atom which holds together the big complex molecules of biological interest, so, you have to have carbon to have, have life. So somehow carbon did form. And, it was Hoyle himself who came up with this, at the time, extraordinary idea that, he pointed out that, how big one nucleus looks to another as they approach each other can depend upon their speed. At certain speeds one nucleus can look much bigger and therefore is easier to hit, and when that is the case, it’s called a resonance, a nuclear resonance. And, he proposed that, OK, two helium nuclei come together, and you would expect would very briefly break up, but because of a nuclear resonance, it would appear so big to a third helium nucleus that it was quite possible that the three will stick together before the first two broke apart again. And he, he predicted exactly where, what energies you’re talking about to, to get that resonance. People at the time thought he was crazy, nobody had ever, ever predicted where a nuclear resonance would come from, you know, you just did your experiments and just see the way the things were. But he insisted that there would be a nuclear resonance there, and eventually he persuaded some team to actually go and look in that energy range, and sure enough, it was there. And, the chance of having that nuclear resonance is extremely remote, so remote that Hoyle later on said that, this was so extraordinary that ‘a super intellect has monkeyed with the physics.’ Now I actually met Hoyle at a meeting after he had said this, and, I approached him after he had given his talk, and I said, ‘Look, you know, way back in the 1950s you gave this series of talks about the steady state, and you were very disparaging about religion.’ He said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘But, you know, now you’re talking about a super intellect has monkeyed with the physics. Have you changed your mind that much?’ He said, ‘Well…’ He was very gruff. He said, ‘Well, I, I don’t have anything to do with organised religion.’ I said, ‘No no, OK, fair enough. Have you changed your mind?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ [pause] Mm.

Do you know whether he ever said that publicly, you know, more publicly?

Sorry?

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Did he ever say that more publicly, do you know?

Well it was pretty public, you know, he, he actually wrote it down, so, you know, yah.

Mm.

Yah.

Thank you. And how does this relate to his work, which was also contro…

Well he, he didn’t publicly say, ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ but…

No. But the monkeying with the… Yup.

Oh yeah yeah, that was very public, yes.

How does this relate to his work with Chandra, I think the surname is Wickramasinghe, on sort of, extra-terrestrial origins of life, which I think is, probably later?

I, I don’t think that… No, I don’t see any real connection with that, no. No. No.

[29:07] Thank you. Could you then now, we have you last time on Mount Marmolada, using the equipment to produce the photographs which were then brought back to UCL, and you were working at this time on your PhD. I wonder whether you could tell the sort of story of your work that would take us from there to the point where you’re going out to California, to work on a…

Yes. I don’t think there’s a great deal I can say. You know, we spent our time analysing the photographs, measuring them up. But as we were, you know, doing this, a physicist in California called Donald Glaser was inventing the bubble chamber, which if you like is, is a cloud chamber turned inside-out. With a cloud chamber you have a supersaturated gas which wants to condense 10

Russell Stannard Page 11 C1672/03 Track 4 out into droplets but doesn’t know where to start growing them, and when the charged particle passes through, it ionises the atoms along its path, in other words, it flicks off the electrons from, from their parent atoms. And that damaged atom is sufficient to be an excuse if you like for a droplet to form, so therefore you get trails of droplets in a gas. Well Donald Glaser turned the whole idea on its head and said, well suppose you started off with a liquid. And, it was a superheated liquid, in other words, a liquid that wants to boil, wants to become a gas if you like. OK, where is it going to start to boil? Normally what happens if you are boiling a kettle or something like that, its irregularities on the side of the kettle, or any bits of dust, might be an excuse for a bubble to start forming. But what he did was, he got containers which were scrupulously smooth and clean, and so, he would then throw this liquid into its superheated state, and it didn’t know where to start to form a bubble. It was a very unstable situation, but it couldn’t form a bubble because there was no excuse to form it here rather than there. OK, pass the charged particle through; you get your ionised atoms again, damaged atoms. Fire it up. Bubbles will start to form. So, with the bubble chamber you had trails of bubbles in a liquid rather than trails of droplets in the gas. Now the advantage of that is that, we’re not interested in particles just passing through the chamber; you want them actually to score a bullseye on a nucleus that’s inside that, that region. And if you’ve got a liquid that’s so much denser than a gas, that your chances of having an interesting thing happen, you know, the charged particle as it passes through has a much better chance of hitting a nucleus belonging to the liquid than it would hitting in a gas. So therefore you, you immediately had a huge improvement in the way you could accumulate material. And, this was clearly taking over from cloud chambers. And obviously, University College London wanted to, to keep abreast of this, so, they sent out somebody from the bubble chamber group, Dr Henderson, and he spent some time out at Berkeley in California, and then I went out there, I spent a year out there. This was at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, which is right next to the University of California in Berkeley. And the reason for going there was, well one of the big attractions I went there, was that they had the largest particle accelerator in the world at the time in the so-called Bevatron; they had just discovered the antiproton, which was very important. So, it was considered the, the place to be. And they had these fully-developed bubble chambers. So I was gaining expertise in operating bubble chambers, and in analysing bubble chamber pictures.

[34:33] 11

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Could you give us a, a physical description of the Lawrence radiation labs at this time? So if you could sort of take us on a tour of them, but also in your mind’s eye if you sort of, see people in different parts of the place, tell us what they’re doing, what they’re wearing, what they look like, that sort of thing. Because presumably, this was a, a new setting for science that you were encountering.

It was situated up on a hill, and, you know, the weather’s fine, it’s, it’s California. And, Berkeley is right opposite San Francisco across the Bay, so it’s a, that’s a cultural place, so that’s, that’s a very nice environment. You had to work extremely hard. People were very ambitious, very ambitious. I, and my wife, we had a flat, we had a flat, and it was on the main route, main road, which eventually led up to the Lawrence Radiation Lab. And, I would see my boss, Wilson Powell, going past in his car at seven o’clock in the morning on the way to work. I, I used to get in about eight o’clock, and, just about everybody was already at, at their desks and working by then. So, that, that was very much the ethos of the place, that, nothing mattered more than your work, essentially, essentially. Which was OK, you know, given that I was wanting a crash course on, on how to get up to speed on this new experimental technique. And you had high-powered seminars there by the leading scientists, not only the people who were working there but obviously people from other laboratories looked upon it as being, you know, a bit of an honour to be asked to give a seminar there. And, the atmosphere at those seminars was, I found, at times rather disturbing. You were very much aware of ambitious people, some of them points-scoring off, off others. So, if someone was giving a seminar and they made a mistake, or something was a little bit dodgy, someone in the audience would point this out very, very vividly, you know, in a rather put-down kind of way. And I did not like that. I did not like that. I always remember, [laughs] no I won’t mention his name, but, there was one famous Nobel Prize winning person who was present at a seminar where someone had made a really bad mistake. They were describing their experimental results, and they had overlooked something which actually negated the whole thing. And, I felt sorry for him, because, you know, people were looking at each other, and, you know, thinking, OK, he’s made a… This Nobel Prize winner went for him. It was, it was so embarrassing. He just demolished that man. It was so embarrassing. Well that was part of the atmosphere of the place. It wasn’t regarded as too surprising that he should have behaved in that way. So, yes, I, I, I made

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Russell Stannard Page 13 C1672/03 Track 4 good friends there, and… But there was this sort of edge where I, even then, felt, these guys are taking their science too seriously, you know, to the detriment of other characteristics of one’s life.

What in particular, which characteristics did you feel that they were neglecting, what other aspects of life?

Well being kind, being considerate, you know, thinking, well, suppose I was in that situation, would I want him to be saying that to me? There are, are more sort of subtle ways of letting people… And, on that occasion, everybody there knew the guy had made a mistake; he was, it was totally unnecessary, totally unnecessary. But the guy just enjoyed demolishing someone.

[40:33] How was, how was this laboratory doing in terms of the sort of, ratio of male and female scientists compared to UCL, who at the time you say…?

Oh. I can’t remember any women. There must have been some, but, there weren’t any in the group that I was working in. It was, it was all male.

And before you describe what you in particular did, could you describe what a, what this radiation laboratory looks like inside? Because, most listeners won’t have been to a, a big physics laboratory, especially not at this time, and may be, I for instance am trying to sort of imagine what it might be like, and I’m probably bringing in things from sort of James Bond films or, stereotypical photographs of what a lab is. But could you actually give us a description of what it looks like inside?

OK. Well the, the main building is, is a large building, which houses the accelerator. And this is a circular machine, it’s like a doughnut. You have a ring of magnets, and there’s a tube which runs through these magnets, a circular tube. The tube is evacuated, and that’s where you feed in these subatomic particles, the protons, whatever they might be. And then, there are, these particles are accelerated by electric forces, so they go faster and faster. And the purpose of the magnets is to, to bend those particles round into a circle so that the particles then pass through the same accelerating 13

Russell Stannard Page 14 C1672/03 Track 4 cavities a second time, a third time. So you don’t have to have lots and lots of accelerators, you just keep on making use of the same accelerating cavities again and again and again, by bringing them round this circle. But the faster these particles go, the harder they are to keep on track. So, you have to increase the magnetic field. These are electromagnets, so you increase the electric current going to the magnets, which increases the magnetic field which means that they can hold these harder particles on the same track. Eventually you get to the point where the magnets are at their fullest strength, you can’t make them any stronger, you can’t make the magnetic field any stronger. And that then sets the, the highest energy particles that you can accelerate in that machine, because if you try to accelerate them any further, they just come out of the machine. And the only way you can then go to even higher energies is to have more magnets. Well magnets take up space, so that means that the ring has to be bigger. And that has been the story of these particle accelerators, that they’ve just got bigger and bigger and bigger until eventually you get the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which is, whatever it is, seventeen miles in circumference. This, I forget what the size the Bevatron was, but it wasn’t anything like that. But, but that was the focus of the Lawrence Radiation, the accelerator. And that ring is then surrounded by other lumps of equipment, because, once the particles have got up to full speed, you then, with an electric field, deflect them out of the machine, and they then go into things like bubble chambers. And the bubble chambers themselves are quite huge things, they take up the size of a room, sort of thing. And, and other detecting devices. So you’ve got the round ring surrounded by these other lumps of equipment. And that’s where the experiments are done. So that’s that building. You then need other buildings for, engineers to repair things and that sort of thing, and build the bubble chambers and so on. So you’ve got those sort of, industrial sort of sites. And then you’ve got blocks of offices, all the physicists have their, their offices, and rooms which house the scanning machines. These, well, how big is a scanning machine? Well, it’s difficult. It’s about the size of a very small car. And so you have a number of those, and, these are housed in quite large, large rooms. And the scanning machines in the main are operated by what we call scanners, who are, who are actually usually women. [laughs] So that’s where women eventually come in. Not, not always, but, that’s where you expect to find women. And they have been instructed by, by the physicists to look for certain characteristic trails of bubbles. You know, one particle coming in and giving rise to several particles going out which shows that the nucleus has been split up and the component parts of the nucleus are now making their own tracks. And in addition you might get some particles coming 14

Russell Stannard Page 15 C1672/03 Track 4 out, which in themselves split, which might be an indication that that is a new particle which, which has decayed into some, some other particles. So they’re given various topologies to look out for. And they then draw the attention of the physicist to those particular patterns, and it’s then up to the physicist to, to check whether they are in fact the sort of things we’re looking for. And then, apart from that you’ve got a canteen, car parks. Everybody in America has a car, so you do need a, a large car park.

[47:41] Where, when you weren’t in the canteen or on a break, where in that set-up did you tend to be when you were over there?

Either in one’s office or down in, with the scanning machines.

So it’s not necessary to work in the same place as the bubble chamber?

Well, you have a run, what we call a run, where, OK, you are operating the bubble chamber, but, I suppose, you would spend something like, I don’t know, I’m just guessing, something like, a fifth or a tenth of your time actually working on the bubble chamber itself. But the bulk of your time is spent analysing the photographs that have been taken. Yes. Because much of the work on the bubble chamber itself, the operation of the bubble, can be done by engineers, who don’t actually have to know anything about particle physics, you know, they, they just, here is a piece of equipment that needs to be operated in this kind of way.

[48:50] And, in that tenth of the time that you are interacting with the bubble chamber, what do you do? Does it have buttons and things to plug in or take out, or switches? What, how do you actually operate it?

Oh, it, it’s… It largely runs itself. It’s pretty, pretty automatic. But, you are taking photographs of what’s going on, and so from time to time the films need to be changed and taken down to the, to the labs where the films are developed. But it’s just sort of, keeping a, essentially it’s keeping an 15

Russell Stannard Page 16 C1672/03 Track 4 eye on things, that things are running smoothly, and, if something goes wrong then you, you ring up an engineer. [laughs]

[49:48] What do you remember over that year of, of time spent in the canteen?

Oh, you, you tend to be talking shop. [laughs] I always remember… You get some sort of rather interesting personalities, and I always remember one person who put down his tray and he, he had got his main course, and he’s also got his dessert. And he took a bite of the main course, and put it down, and then started eating his dessert. And I said, ‘Oh, don’t you like the main course?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s fine, but it’s hot, so I’m eating the pudding first.’ And, he just took that as being quite sort of, normal, whereas I found that very odd. [laughs]

And, and what would… Just to give us a sense of it obviously, it’s difficult to remember in detail, but what would talking shop consist of, what would you be talking about?

Well you’d be talking about the interesting… You know, you, you tended to be a bit cliquey, you know, people in your team would tend to go to lunch together and sit together. So, you, you would be discussing the interesting events that had turned up and that sort of thing. And, you might be drawing their attention to scientific papers that have come out which you’ve read and the other person might not have had a chance to look at yet, so you say, OK, well, ‘There is this interesting paper that’s come out, you know, you ought to have a look at that.’ So, so that, that sort of conversation going on. But it would, it would be very much like that, with, with the occasional, well, perhaps not too occasional, mention about how the baseball is going on. San Francisco Giants were the, the local heroes, although the Oakland A’s were just down the road too. I was a Giants fan, and… I got very interested in baseball because it was America’s closest equivalent to, to cricket I suppose. It’s a poor man’s cricket. It’s all full tosses, you know. [laughs] And a silly bat.

[52:23]

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Thank you. You mentioned that you went out to America with your wife Ann. I don’t think you’ve described, well you haven’t, told the story of how you met. Could you, can we just…?

Oh how I met Ann?

Yes, can we just, do that?

Oh well, I was, I was in my mid-twenties, and, getting a bit concerned that I, I hadn’t got a girlfriend you know, and, in those days the way you met girlfriends was, you went to dances. And I couldn’t dance, I, I could never remember where to put my feet, you know. Anyway, so I thought, well I’d better take some lessons, you know, so that I get to meet girls. That was the, the sole motivation. And I joined this ballroom dance school in Knightsbridge somewhere. And Ann was, was my, my teacher, my tutor. She had herself been trained as a ballet dancer, she was with Ballet Rambert, which was a very famous ballet company. But, the trouble with ballet is that they have a very clear idea of what kind of body you should have, it has to be very, very slim, you know, almost anorexic you know. And, and Ann just simply couldn’t keep her weight down. She, she was fine looking, but you know, she wasn’t the sort of figure that would be required if she was to get to the top in, in ballet. So, she gave that up, and took up ballroom dancing. Which, in those days was, was very big business you know, you had ballroom dancing competitions – well, there is still something of that going on, but it was big business in those days. And, anybody who wanted to, to go to a dance, had to learn how to dance, and it was the foxtrot, the waltz, the quickstep, tango, samba, rumba, that sort. You couldn’t just stand up and, and jiggle about as people do now, where you don’t touch each other. You have to hold onto each other and not step on each other’s feet, you know. So, anyway, we, we met in that, that kind of way. And, I didn’t have to go to dances because I, I married my dance teacher. [laughs]

[55:43] How long had you been married by the time that you went out to America? This was 1959 that you went to America.

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It was very soon after. I think… Let’s think. We got married in ’58, and… It was a year or two after we, we got married. And we spent a year out in Berkeley. And, apart from all the work, we, we did a lot of touring around, and, we visited, oh, so many places. We particularly liked the American deserts, you know, it’s, for English people, you know, so, piled on top of each other, the idea of having these, these great open empty spaces was a bit of an eye-opener to put it mildly. So we would, we hired, well we had a car, and we would drive around there.

What did Ann do when you were at the lab?

Oh, well she just made, lots of friends, and, they did what women do. [laughs] You know, having chats and tea parties and stuff like that, and, yeah, that was the sort of… She just, she just had a very nice time, yes.

Why did you decide not to stay? I think, as I understand it, you had the opportunity to stay on there.

There was the opportunity, but then, the whole purpose really of my going out there for a year was to gain the expertise so as to bring it back to University College London so that they could set up a bubble chamber group. So there was that feeling of loyalty if you like towards, towards the college. And also at that time my father wasn’t very well, so, you know, one, that was a, an attraction. And, I have to say, I, I, you know, Ann and I wanted to have children, but we didn’t fancy the idea of them growing up as American children.

Because?

We would prefer them to be British. [laughs]

OK, so one way of investigating that would be to say, what did you perceive as the differences between British and American children?

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[pause] Oh I don’t know. I think, there was a kind of… I suppose, to some extent we were affected by the fact that it was California, and there was, there’s a kind of brashness about Californian children I suppose. Well, they just aren’t English. [laughs] I don’t know, I can’t really put a, a finger on it. I just… I suppose you, you want your children to grow up something like yourself, rather than as they would have been, looking like foreigners to us, you know.

[59:17] Did you go to church in America, while you were there for that year?

Yes, yes, yes we did. We went to the local church in, the local Anglican church in Berkeley. We were a bit concerned, I must say, by… Oh it was a very, it was very well-attended, it had a big congregation, but there was such a, a pressure to give money. This was continually being rammed down our throats, you know. Which, we, we found rather off-putting to put it mildly, you know. OK, I suppose one has to say, well perhaps they had to do that because, unlike the Church of England here, which can to some extent call upon its, its assets, you know, its previous donors, they had to completely pay their own way. So, there was a sort of justification for it, but it, it did rankle with us, you know. When you saw the sorts of cars that the clergy were driving around in, one thought, well, an English vicar wouldn’t be able to have that lifestyle, you know.

Was the, was there any difference in the content and presentation of, say, sermons that you experienced there and previously?

No. No. No they were, they were very similar. Though of course, that was because we, we chose the most English type of church there. There were other, Pentecostal churches which was all, you know, praise the Lord and, clapping and all that sort of stuff. I, I remember, on… Much, much later, much later, I was out in the States and I was invited to a Pentecostal church. Mostly black people, but by no means all, there was quite a good contingent of white people there, but it was, that sort of ethos. And the, the preacher was Jessie Jackson, who was a real firebrand preacher. And, I always remember, he had been going on for forty minutes with his sermon, and I was looking at my watch, and I turned to my companion who had taken me there and I said, ‘He’s been going on for forty minutes.’ He said, ‘Oh believe me Russell, he hasn’t started yet.’ I left. 19

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[laughs] So, there are very, very different kinds of churches out there. Yes. And, it is actually the Pentecostals who are the fastest growing wing of the Church out there.

[1:03:01 And, obviously I’ll ask you this question of every sort of, place you’re at, but, again here in California, any discussion with anyone at any level of relations between science and religion?

No, none. None whatever. No.

[1:03:21] Thank you. Could you then tell the story of the development of your career having come back from America to UCL in 1960.

Well we… Dr Henderson, who had been out there the year before me, had already got things going, and Burhop was still in charge. He had switched over to bubble chambers. And, we, the engineers at University College London, they built a bubble chamber, which was operated at the, at the Rutherford Laboratory, which is just outside Harwell, and the accelerator there was called Nimrod. And the pattern of work was very similar to what it had been in Berkeley, we had scanning machines at UCL. [pause] That’s how it went, yah.

And how was the Nimrod like or unlike the Bevatron in appearance and function?

Very similar, very very similar, yes. Yes. And, it was, after the building of Nimrod, one realised that to go to a high energy still would require the building of even larger machines, and it was getting to the point where no single country, well, perhaps with the exception of America, could afford to go it alone. And that’s when CERN was formed in Geneva, which was a central laboratory for all European countries. Each European country would pay a certain amount according to their gross national product, whatever it might be, towards the cost of the laboratory. And there they were able to build ever bigger machines which culminated in the Large Hadron Collider. And, so, we would then switch our attention away from the Rutherford Lab to CERN, and would then be getting photographs from the bubble chambers operated out there. There were 20

Russell Stannard Page 21 C1672/03 Track 4 basically two types of bubble chamber. The most popular one was a hydrogen bubble chamber where you had liquid hydrogen, and that had the great advantage that, when a particle came in and struck a nucleus, you knew it has struck a hydrogen nucleus which was just a single proton. So it made the dynamics very easy to work out. But then, to offset that, there were heavy liquid bubble chambers, which either were propane or Freon. And, OK, that made the physics more complicated, because when you struck a nucleus it was a complex nucleus, and so you, you not only had newly created particles coming out, but you also had all the debris from the components of the original nucleus. The advantage of, of such a machine, was that, it was so dense that gamma rays coming out from these collisions would give rise to what we call electron-positron pairs, they would suddenly materialise and produce a V shape where you had an electron, negative electron, and a positive electron, what we call a positron. And that V shape would indicate that it had been formed by a gamma ray coming from, from the point of interest. And, that was important, because, some of the particles that were being produced were what we call neutral pions, and these would decay into two gamma rays. And you didn’t really have any chance of seeing those gamma rays convert in a hydrogen chamber, but you could see them in a heavy liquid chamber. So, the two types of bubble chamber were, if you like, complementary, we would, one had its strengths and weaknesses, the other had its strengths and weaknesses. And we at University College London concentrated on the heavy liquid bubble chambers.

[1:09:05] Thank you.

Have I said anything about this, this creation of new particles?

I was going to ask a question now which I think will lead on to that, and that’s, could you explain, over this… well, I mean over the period we’ve been talking about, but, now, through the Sixties at UCL, why you are doing this at all, you know, to give us the sort of context for this work. So, why are you using bubble chambers to investigate what happens when particular bits of material collide, what’s the context for it. And then if you could say how in particular you, which bits of this you became particularly interested in, you know, which parts of this kind of physics you pursued in your career compared to someone else’s, or someone else. 21

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Yah. The basic goal I suppose of this kind of work is to try to understand the nature of matter. Now, one might start off by saying, well, it’s very simple, there’s… An atom is made up of a nucleus with electrons going round the outside, and the nucleus is made up of neutrons and protons. But that is a very superficial sort of understanding. What you find in high energy collisions between these nuclear particles, say two protons hitting each other, is that, sometimes you are able to create new matter, new particles which weren’t there to begin with. Now you haven’t created them out of nothing. The thing is, you brought in a great deal of energy with your projectile that you’ve accelerated in the accelerator. And matter itself is a locked-up form of energy. There are different kinds of forms of energy. There’s heat energy, light energy, and energy of motion, so on. Well, matter itself, just a lump of matter, is a form of energy. Normally that energy is locked up, you can’t get it out. But occasionally, with something like uranium, it will change its form and give you back a little bit of that energy. So, with, in fact that is what is happening in the Sun, you’ve got processes going on there where, nuclear process where some of the matter is being destroyed, and you are getting energy back as a result of that; that is the origin of solar energy. And unfortunately for us high energy physicists, the equation is, you know, works really much against us in as much as what we would, in normal everyday life, consider to be a very small amount of matter, corresponds to what we in normal everyday life would think is a lot of energy. So that’s good if you are in the business of creating energy from matter as is happening in the Sun, but it’s very bad from our point of view where we are using energy to try to create matter. So it means that our projectiles have to be at a, a very high energy, so that there is a chance that when they collide with another particle some of that energy gets transformed into matter, a new particle. So, straight away, as soon as you realise that you are able to create new particles, then, the interest is, well what kind of particles can we produce? And the first thing you notice, you can’t just produce matter in, in any sizes that you like; they come in certain set amounts. So that you, you can produce a particle of, 270 whatever it is, electron masses called a pion, but you can’t produce one of 280 or 260, it has to be 270-odd. And then, OK, there’s another one, 940, whatever it might be, K particle, and there’s nothing in between those sort of things. So you can only produce particles of given masses, and so therefore you start to name these different particles. They’re characterised by their mass; they’re also characterised by their electric charge. You can create a new charged particle, say a positively charged particle, provided at the same time you create a 22

Russell Stannard Page 23 C1672/03 Track 4 negatively charged particle. There’s a law of conservation of electric charge, which means a net electric charge. So if you start off with nothing, you can end up with a positive balanced by a negative charge. So you can create charged particles, and some particles only come negatively charged, some only come positively charged, some come, et cetera. So, at this stage it becomes a matter of, just finding out what particles you can produce, and what their properties are. [1:15:10] Now with all this going on, you might think, OK, with time you’re accumulating more and more of these exotic new particles. Well you’re not, because, all of them, all of the ones that you create are short-lived. They break up in a very short time, and I mean a fraction of a second, into other particles, and eventually they end up as protons, neutrons or electrons, the stuff that you, you see around. So you might then think, well, if they’re only going to be around for a short time, and it takes so much energy to produce them, what’s the point, you know? Well the point is that what you discover is that these new particles are all related to each other, and they are related to the proton and neutron, and to the electron. So, the proton and neutron are members of this much larger family. And, you can only really understand what a proton and neutron are when you see them in the context of their other family members. So it throws a lot of light on the way we see our ordinary matter, so that's their usefulness. And, the higher the energy you bring into these collisions, the heavier the particles you can produce. And, you know, one is always wanting to know, you know, what the heavier particles are, so there’s always this tendency to want to build bigger and bigger accelerators so as to widen your scope of the particles that you can produce, and while you’re doing that, the lower mass particles are produced in greater numbers, if you produce, if you use up more energy. And you not only look at what particles you can produce, but you also look at how they decay, what do they decay into? And, much of the work that we were doing at UCL was examining in great depth how certain particles decay, their various modes of decay. Which all carried clues as to how these particles relate to each other, and, what the family characteristics are.

[1:18:23] Thank you. That’s very clear. Within that overall picture, were there aspects of it that appealed to you in particular, that you felt that you wanted to pursue in your own research, for whatever reason? For instance, were you interested in pursuing the more massive new particles, or in…? 23

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Well, it’s the nature of the work that you, you have to, to specialise. So, you find that you’re concentrating on a particular mode of decay of a particular particle, you know, how often does this, does this happen? You can’t be asking questions of everything, you know, you just have to specialise. [pause] Which has its attractions, you know, but it, it is a case of, when you specialise you learn more and more about less and less, you know. And so, I suppose thinking about things, there was also at that time growing in me an attraction for the wider questions as, you know, how does science relate, well to religion, you know, those, where you have to take in a whole sweep of different aspects of both, which is a nice contrast to my professional work which was specialising in an incredibly small, narrow sort of area.

[1:20:27] Was there anything that you saw in your research up to this point, or learnt, that had an impact on your thoughts about belief and religion? So, I wonder whether, seeing, I suppose seeing is a metaphor here, but, witnessing the effects of new particles created by collisions, and thinking about matter at this kind of scale, and then going off to church on Sunday, does the former, in your case, affect the latter? So is your science affecting the way in which you think about spiritual questions?

[pause] Oh I think, I have to think about that. I’m not sure that it really affected the spiritual side of things, but, it did, it does raise in my mind broader issues to do with science. I mean for example, each time we, we build a bigger accelerator, OK, we build it normally with something in mind, you know, there’s a puzzle has arisen, and we need the extra energy to resolve that puzzle. OK, that, that does happen. But also one does tend to find that each time you explore an even higher range of energy, new questions are posed which you wouldn’t have thought about beforehand, and that in turn spurs you to build an even bigger one, OK? And, that does raise in my mind, it doesn’t seem to worry other people or other scientists that I know, but it does raise in my mind the question of, how big a machine are we going to need to come across what we might call the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle? Already there is the theory that the, what we’ve been calling these ultimate particles, aren’t actually particles, they’re not little bits of grit; they are vibrating strings. It’s a very attractive theory, you have this idea of a string which can vibrate in different ways, just like a normal violin string can vibrate in different ways. And these different vibrations 24

Russell Stannard Page 25 C1672/03 Track 4 give rise to the different kinds of particles. It’s a very attractive idea. But, the theory as it’s formulated at the present time seems to indicate that, in order to be able to see in detail that it actually is a string and not a little sphere, you would have to have an accelerator the size of a galaxy. Well, of course that’s totally ridiculous, you’re not going to have an accelerator the size of the Earth let alone a galaxy. [1:24:14] And that does raise in my mind the thought that, you know, why should things be so arranged that little humans on planet Earth, within their gross national product and their physical abilities, why should they be able to collect all the data that’s necessary for a complete understanding of nature? Now this is an idea which many scientists just don’t seem to go along with, you know, they, they are so wrapped up in the idea that science is always advancing, that it, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that science could come to an end without them having discovered everything that they would like to discover, because, things are just outside their control. So, you know, once I lift my head up from studying the decays of a particular particle, I do have those, those broader thoughts about, you know, where is science actually going, what is it eventually going to achieve? And it does make me realise that many of my scientific colleagues do have very naïve ideas about the power of science and, you know, there’s this talk about the ‘theory of everything’; well, come on, you know, that is a very arrogant kind of phrase, you know. Even if we did discover, have a complete understanding of the physical world, which I don’t think we are going to, but even if we did, that still leaves the question of consciousness and how do we account for that? So, surely a theory of everything needs to take that into account, but we have no idea how consciousness arrives. There’s, there’s a lot of arrogance amongst many scientists, which I find, I don’t like.

And did you experience that arrogance in scientists around you at this time, in the Sixties, working in particle physics?

Yes. Yah. No, it was, it was very exhilarating, you know, the discoveries were coming so thick and fast at that stage that it was, well as I say, a very exhilarating period to live through, you know, you were finding new particles all the time. That has now, now stopped. OK, we have had a great deal of excitement about the Higgs boson, which was recently discovered, you know, that, that was a classic example where there was a theory that there might be this particle, but the theory 25

Russell Stannard Page 26 C1672/03 Track 4 suggested that it was going to be heavier than present machines could manage, so that was a reason for building the Large Hadron Collider which… And fair enough, that particle was, was discovered, and a great fuss was made about it, quite, quite rightly so. But the discoveries are not coming thick and fast the way, the way they used to. And also, the whole character of high energy physics has now changed. One has always had to work in teams. In the Marmolada days, OK, there were something like, what was it, well something like half a dozen of us formed the team. Now you have teams of 200, 300, 400 physicists. The scope for individual ability to, you know, have a contribution which, which stands out as your contribution, is now so much less when you’re working in a huge team like that. It, it’s a very different kind of, of enterprise. And if I’m to be honest with you, if I was young now, I, I don’t think I would go into high energy physics. It is not the same sort of enterprise where, when I was involved in it.

Because of that, the larger teams, the less… So, the two things you’ve said are that, the discoveries are slower in coming now…

Yah.

…and that, you are further from the work in the sense that you’re part of a big team working on…

That’s right. You know, it’s very difficult, if a discovery is made it’s very difficult to put your finger on, well what was my contribution to that? You know, 200 people who have been contributing. There are 200 names on the paper. Whereas previously, you know, you would have, four or five names. So people would know, this is a discovery made by Joe Bloggs. Whereas now, who has made it? Well, there will be a spokesman, there will be a leader of the team, but the rest of the team are, are anonymous.

[1:30:24] What was the nature and extent of Ann’s interest in your work?

Sorry?

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I was asking, what was the extent and nature of Ann’s interest in your work?

Oh. Not a great deal. Not a great deal. Understandably so, because, you know, very quickly when you discuss this kind of work, you, you get into what can only be described as jargon, which is understandable only to the initiated, you know. [pause] I think she was much more concerned about the children we were having at that time, you know, once we’d got back from Berkeley we started having children. And, first of all we had Adrian, and then Tracy. And at that stage Ann and I were, we were concerned about the population explosion. There was a lot of talk in those days, this is the 1960s, a lot of talk about the population explosion, and we felt, well we always wanted to have four children, but we, we felt we were being a bit indulgent if we had four children of our own. So the plan was, we would have two children of our own and then we would adopt two children. And, we went ahead, and we adopted Peter. The reason he was up for adoption is that he was mixed race, he was half Iraqi, half English, and, mixed race children were, were more difficult to place than, you know, wholly English. And the plan was then to have a second adopted child, but then, Carolyn came along, so, we ended up with a rather… It wasn’t very satisfactory, you know, three of our own and only one adopted, it was, it rather left Peter a bit isolated, which couldn’t be helped, but, it was not ideal. But that’s the way it turned out to be. And so, with four children to bring up, and, not much difference in age between them, you know, we had them pretty quick, Ann was, was very much involved in, in bringing up the children, yes.

Was she still dancing, teaching dance, or…?

No she wasn’t. No, no.

[1:33:14] And what memories do you have of time spent with the children when they were young? In the same way that I asked for your memories of time spent with your parents when you were a child, what do you remember doing with your children as they, you know, turn from babies into very young children?

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Yah, I, I got on well with the kids, up to the point when Carolyn was born. Ann at that stage went into a very deep depression. At the time, the doctors said that this was simply postnatal depression, she’ll get over it. So, I went along with that. But it was incredibly debilitating for her. She was really very, very depressed. And this went on and on and on, and as it went on the doctor would say, ‘Well OK, sometimes it can take months.’ And then, it got to the point where they were saying it can take years. She was having a lot of treatment. One’s a bit horrified about it these days, but she had a lot of electric shock treatment. You know, these days, one wouldn’t dream of doing it. But at that time it was thought that it was helpful. She was on antidepressant drugs of course, and she was having psychiatric treatment. And, during this time I, I had to do an awful lot looking after the children. Ann was quite incapable of, of going on holiday with us. So, I had to take the children on holiday on my own, which, as a father with four kids was, it wasn’t easy. But we did have some wonderful times, we went onto a farm at one stage, and the kids were making hay bales, helping the farmer, which was, which was lovely. We had a, a lovely holiday on the Norfolk Broads. They thought that was terrific, being, living on a, on a ship. [laughs] We, we stayed at a lovely country house, which was in huge grounds with a great drive leading up to the thing, and, at that place we were engaged in archery. They’d never had a go at archery before. So, yeah, we, we got on, you know, wonderfully well. But then, Ann, she had to spend, I think it was three months at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, as an inpatient in the psychiatric ward then. And, as a result of that she came out convinced that the problem with her depression was the marriage. My normal doctor said, ‘Oh, don’t believe that, you know, it’s, it is just a very long form of postnatal depression.’ But Ann became more and more insistent that she wanted a divorce. Which was against my religious beliefs. I, I wouldn’t countenance it. I thought, you know, this would be absolutely terrible for the children. And… But she insisted. And eventually it got to the point where it went to lawyers, and my solicitor said, ‘Look, you’ve got to give up. These days the reason for divorce is the irretrievable breakdown of marriage. It’s got nothing to do with anybody having an affair or anything of that kind. It’s the irretrievable breakdown of marriage. And it is quite clear that your wife is convinced that the marriage is finished, and it takes two people to make a marriage. So if you insist on taking it to court, you will lose, and it will cost you a lot of money.’ So at that stage I agreed to the divorce. Then came the business about the children. Ann only wanted to take her three children; she didn’t want… She didn’t feel that she could take on Peter as well. I was against that; I thought it was terrible for the children to lose a parent, but to actually 28

Russell Stannard Page 29 C1672/03 Track 4 lose, for Peter to lose his brother and two sisters as well, but, Ann insisted she, she could not take on Peter. So we split, and I took on Peter. So I became a single-parent family. [1:39:30] At the time we were living we were living in Hatch End in a very nice mock Tudor house. Hatch End is a very desirable suburb of London. And, I had already by then joined the Open University, which was based in Milton Keynes, so, obviously we had to sell the house, and, I thought, well the simplest thing is to move up towards Milton Keynes. So, Milton Keynes itself was the new town, which was really just a pile of mud at the time, it was a building site. And close by, about eleven miles out from Milton Keynes, was Leighton Buzzard, which is a very attractive market town. So, I bought a house in Leighton Buzzard, and that’s where, where Peter and I set up home. Ann went on to, to marry somebody else, but that marriage fell apart almost before it had begun. So, that was that. After six years I met, well, I met Maggi at church, quite, almost as soon as I moved to Leighton Buzzard, and after six years we, we got married. And, we’ve been happily married ever since.

[1:41:07] What was the effect on your working life of the period when your wife was depressed and you had to take on responsibility for looking after the children? I’m thinking perhaps especially of non- holiday time, so I can see how, with your job you could have arranged for time off to have a family holiday and take the children away, and that that would have been quite difficult, especially with four children, but it would have been possible. But how could you, how did you have to change your sort of patterns of your working life at UCL because of this happening?

[pause] I don’t want to give the impression that whilst Ann was depressed the kids were essentially a one-parent family. Ann was helping with the children on a daily basis. But of course the atmosphere in the home was terrible. You know, she was so depressed, and certainly when she got this idea that, that the problem was the marriage, then things got, got very unpleasant. And in particular, Tracy, my eldest daughter, she, she knew no better, she, she sided with her mother, and, she just wouldn’t talk to me. Which, you know, the atmosphere in the home was, was awful. And of course it was very difficult to carry on work as though nothing had happened, you know, as though everything in the garden was rosy when it, it certainly wasn’t. So, they were very very 29

Russell Stannard Page 30 C1672/03 Track 4 difficult years. I hasten to say, Tracy and I get on like a house on fire now, it’s all a thing in the past, and, for, oh ages now, my relationship with the children has been fine. Ann has, she came out of her depression, sort of, you know, she has always been, since, rather subdued, sort of thing, you know. We get on well now, on a purely friendly, friendly basis, OK.

[doorbell]

[End of Track 4]

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[Track 5]

Were there colleagues in the department at UCL, when you’re still at UCL, that you are able to tell about this, tell this to, and who could sort of help you to get through it professionally if you like?

What was happening in my home?

Mm.

Not really. No, I, I think… I think they got the idea that all was not, not well, but, I think they were sort of embarrassed to ask me about any details. So, I, I did feel very much on, on my own as regards this, yes.

And at church?

[pause] Well not, not really. Well… Well… [pause] Well yeah, I did talk to the vicar, Father Nadkarni, about it, and he knew all about it. In fact I remember him, him saying to me, whilst Ann was just having the shock treatment and hadn’t gone into St Mary’s to have the psychiatrist, he said, ‘For goodness’ sake don’t let her go to a psychiatrist, because, he will persuade her that the trouble is the marriage.’ And I, I said, ‘Oh, no, there’s, there’s no chance of that.’ And I was absolutely convinced that there… No, we had been happily married for, for eleven years – no, for nine years, for nine years, and it just hadn’t crossed my mind that she could have that kind of understanding. But he warned me that, that that’s what a psychiatrist will do. It’s, it’s the easy way of indicating, how to solve this problem, you know. And, he was right. Mm.

[02:27] In a book that you write much later than this, Science and the Renewal of Belief, there’s a very detailed and interesting description of what, what prayer is really, and you talk about your approach to it. I wondered whether this was one of the things that, in the language used in the book, you could take, take to God to, to talk to Him about, and that you might either, a) get sort of, 1

Russell Stannard Page 2 C1672/03 Track 5 new ways of thinking that led on to solutions and that sort of thing, or b) even a sort of, immediate help.

Yah, and, if there was no way of avoiding the situation, you ask God to, to give you the strength to, to live through it and to make the most of what you can of it. And, I, I have taken that very much to heart. I think there’s a lot to be said for, you know, making the most of, of a bad job, you know, and being guided as to how to do that. Because, I have, I have discovered that, since I’ve been through that, in my role as a lay reader, people are much more inclined to talk to me about their own troubles, perhaps sometimes marital troubles, because they know I’ve been through it, you know. If you’re having this kind of trouble in your married life you don’t go to somebody who’s got a, a wonderfully happy marriage, because you think, oh what do they know about the situation? They’ll just think, you know, I, I’ve failed, you know. Whereas if you go to someone who has been through it, then, there’s a deeper connection between the two. So, in a rather strange way, I feel that, although I would never recommend [laughs] anybody to go through what I went through there, some good has come out of it, has come out of it. And, you know, the, the understanding I have with my children now is, is much deeper than it would otherwise have been, because, they have indicated to me that they now see things very differently to the way they saw them at the time. You know, they can see it in a better perspective. And, you know, I really do have a very, very good relationship with my children now. Only recently in fact, my son Adrian had a birthday present for me, he said, ‘Come on Dad, let’s go to the Chelsea football match, Chelsea versus Newcastle.’ And he reminded me it was forty-five years since I last took him to Chelsea, that was when he was ten. That gives you an indication of the sort of thing that we used to do. And, we, we had a wonderful time at that football match, sharing it together you know.

Are you saying that you think that your relationship with your children now has certain kinds of closeness that it wouldn’t have had if, hypothetically, you had remained married and been…?

Yes. Yes I, I, I do very much believe that to be the case. Yah. That, that we value each other that much more. Because I think that if, if you don’t have that kind of trouble, you just sail through a happy marriage, then, I imagine you’re going to be, well as I was at the time, when marriage was happy, you, you do feel a bit smug, that, you know, I’m doing things right, you know, whereas 2

Russell Stannard Page 3 C1672/03 Track 5 other people are going through all these horrible divorces, you know. One doesn’t like to say it, but, it’s difficult not to feel a little bit smug. Whereas if you have been through this, then, when you come out the other end, as, as, as we have done, you look back and you think, yes, life has been a lot richer as a result.

[07:42] How was it possible to continue as a, as a full-time, presumably, academic, when you were in the situation of being a single father living, living in, as you were, in Leighton Buzzard?

[pause] Well you just had to, teach, I had to teach Peter to, to a large extent to be independent, you know, to, to look after himself, you know, help get the meals ready, you know, and help to wash up, stuff. And, and you know, generally help around the house. I can’t do everything, sort of thing. And, after the initial trauma, and, it did take, oh, a considerable time for Peter to get over the fact that he has lost his mother and his, his siblings, for the time at any rate, and… And Peter had… He, he went against his mother very, very powerfully, you know, he really felt she had rejected him, but, but she had done, and he was, he was very bitter, very bitter about that. But which, that made him sort of, close to me. Fortunately he’s got over it, he’s got over it, and, and he, he’s, he’s got a good relationship with, with Ann now, yah, which I’m relieved about, because it’s not a good thing to be carrying that around with you, crippling you for the rest of your life. So, he has got over it, yah.

How about getting him to school and picking him up from school, and that sort of thing, in…?

Oh, well he was, oh I forget how old he was, but he was able to come home from school on his own. He did at times get into trouble at school, because he, he was very mixed up, understandably, as a result of it, but somehow we got, we got through it all right, yah. Yes.

It’s just that, I, I’m just guessing, just as a sort of sociological fact that, you were in quite an unusual position of being a, a full-time academic physicist and a single father. I mean if you had, if you, perhaps you didn’t, but if you had asked around, at UCL and at other places later, you would have found few… 3

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Oh I don’t, I don’t think I would have found anybody in that position. No. No.

Was your rate of progress in, in research slowed by all this?

I, I wouldn’t say so, no I wouldn’t say so. No. No. No. [pause] No.

[10:55] Mm. OK, thank you. Could you tell me, then, why it is that you move from UCL to the, to the Open University at the end of the decade we’ve been talking about.

Oh. OK. Hm. I think you, you have to go back to my childhood, and the fact that I came from a very working-class background. I came from South Lambeth Road School where I was the only child who had been able to go to a grammar school in years, and, there was, there was another boy there in the class called Arthur who, I think was just as clever as I was but he wasn’t backed up by his parents in the same way that I was. And, I had never forgotten Arthur, he, I, I heard that he was a petrol pump attendant, that was the last I heard of him. And, when the Open University was first mooted it was, it was called, well, it was called the University of the Air, because it was going to be using television and radio, but it was also called the University of the Second Chance, some people called it that. And the idea was that a lot of people, like Arthur, miss out at the time when they ought to be being academically involved, and only later in life discover the disadvantage of not having a good education. And the Open University was going to be an opportunity for them to, to catch up and, and get the education which they ought to have had earlier. All right, it was going to be difficult for them, because they were presumably holding down jobs at the same time. It was going to be part-time study, and that means it’s going to be drawn out over many years. So it requires a lot of self-discipline. But, at least the opportunity was there. And moreover, the university, very revolutionary, said that there would be no entry qualifications. Whereas of course with the, the normal universities, they require Advanced Level, from school, and good grades at Advanced Level so that, if you are going to study a degree in physics you already have a good grounding in physics that can then be built on at the university, that can be assumed that you know. And here we were, going, well the Open University was going to accept anybody, you know, 4

Russell Stannard Page 5 C1672/03 Track 5 without even the lowest qualification let alone asking what their, you know, their qualification was. And, so that was going to be a big challenge. And then there was the whole thing, well if you’re going to teach science, you need practical work, so how is that going to work, if they’re going to, going to be in their homes and so on. But it was, it was a very idealistic idea, and, and to be honest, I have to say that the idea of teaching through television had a certain glamour about it, which was rather attractive. So I decided to apply. [14:50] I, initially I applied to be the head of physics, which was a bit, well, presumptuous of me, because, I was only a lecturer at the time at University College London, and, you don’t normally go from lecturer to professor, you know. Lecturer to senior lecturer to reader and then professor and then perhaps a professor who is the head of department, that’s, that’s the kind of hierarchy that you’re dealing with. But anyway, I, I went along for the interview. And, afterwards they… They were only interviewing for the head of departments at that stage. But anyway, they, they said to me, ‘Well you didn’t get it,’ you know, somebody else got the post. However, they were impressed by, by me, because of my interest in the teaching of physics. That they found unusual, because usually academics are only interested in their research. Whereas the Open University was going to be putting the emphasis on teaching. All right, they made it clear that they expected their staff to do research, but the teaching was, was the number one priority. And I had by then got a good reputation as a lecturer. So they said, ‘OK, well the post of head is, is finished, but we would very much like you to join. We could make you, take you on as a reader.’ So I thought, oh, well that’s, that’s good advance anyway, that’s, that’s hopped over the senior lecturer one. So, so I joined. And I always remember, I was walking through the north cloisters at University College London, and, a friend of mine from the chemistry laboratory, a certain Bob Ross, came up to me and said, ‘Russell, what, what is this I hear you’ve done? You’ve joined this Open University outfit?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well you’re mad. Absolutely mad you know. You have a tenured job at UCL, which is one of the top universities in the world, a tenured job, and you’re throwing it up to join this fly-by-night outfit. It’s not going to last. It can’t, you know, how can it succeed? It’s a correspondence… Let’s face it, forget about the television, it’s a corres… The drop-out rate for correspondence colleges is eighty per cent. You’re taking in students with no qualifications. You’re going to have to take them all the way through O Level, through A Level. That’s years and years of study before you even start on the degree level stuff. So how on earth are you going to get 5

Russell Stannard Page 6 C1672/03 Track 5 them up to a degree level which anybody is going to recognise as being a degree?’ I said, ‘Well, we’re taking on educational technologists. We will find some way of doing this.’ And he said, ‘And how are you going to manage about practical work?’ you know. And I said, ‘Well we’re going to have summer schools, so they’ll be in labs during the summer school, and we’re sending them home experimental kits.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘chemistry kits.’ I said, ‘No, not chemistry kits; home experimental kits. We’re going to be sending them oscilloscopes and lasers and stuff like that.’ And then he said, ‘OK, so it’s a university of the second chance. You take in the people who missed out. OK, that’s it, one wave of people. Who’s going to join after that? Because, after the recent expansion of the, of the number of universities, anybody who’s any good can find a place, you know, there’s no reason for anybody to miss out any more.’ And I said… Well, that really got home to me, because that was, that was a worry I did have as to what happened after you had the first wave. I said, ‘Oh, we will, we will get over that.’ And he carried on and on, producing all these reasons why, why I shouldn’t join. And I was getting more and more cross, and we were raising our voice, and, people were walking past wondering what on earth this row was about. And eventually Bob reached his hand over and patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘Calm down Russ, calm down.’ ‘No, he said, ‘it’s just that I myself today have accepted a job with the Open University. I just needed someone to tell me I’d done the right thing.’ So that’s how it started. [20:11] And boy it was, it was very difficult in those days, because, the, the shadow, the Tory Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer was someone called Iain Macleod, and he had gone public by saying, ‘The first thing we Tories do when we get back into power is to stop that blithering nonsense called the Open University.’ So we had this Sword of Damocles hanging over our head, because it looked very likely the Tories would get in the next, you know. So that meant we, we had to get up a huge head of steam. This was October ’69, you know, when I joined, as one of the first academics. And we decided we would take in the first students in 1971. You know, we were giving ourselves just over a year to get the whole of this teaching apparatus set up, and the first courses written, the first television programmes, radio programmes, you know, home experimental kits, all sorted out in, in just, well fifteen months, you know. But we felt we had to do that, we had to get that first wave of students in quick so that it becomes difficult to stop us. And, what happened, lo and behold, was that the Conservatives did get into power, and that was before we’d taken in the students. But, one doesn’t like to say it, but, fortunately Iain Macleod died, and the Conservatives, when they came 6

Russell Stannard Page 7 C1672/03 Track 5 into power they, they had, as is usual, some economic crisis on their hands, so the Open University wasn’t its biggest priority. And so we, we managed early ’71 to get in the, the first wave of 24,000 students, and that was 24,000 voters. So, we were OK. Eventually, eventually, when it turned out that we were producing graduates at half the cost of the normal universities, that appealed to the Conservatives, so, although we were sort of tainted with the fact that it was Harold Wilson’s original idea, so it was very much a Labour Party initiated initiative, the Conservatives were happy to adopt it, because it was, it was good value for money. [23:03] When I say that we produced graduates at half the cost, that’s, that’s a rather unfair way of putting it, because, we were efficient, because we were able to use other universities’ facilities in the summer, their laboratories for example, and whereas a normal university would use its laboratories perhaps just in the afternoons during term time, the mornings being devoted to lectures, OK, that’s very, very poor occupancy rate. Whereas when we went into those, they were in the labs, the students were in the labs all day; the lectures were in the evening. So, we were using it 100 per cent, whereas other universities were using it somewhere like twenty-five per cent. So that was… But, they had to have the labs there for us to use. Not only that, but, although the university employed a smallish group of people to produce the courses at the headquarters at Milton Keynes, we relied on thousands of part-time tutors to actually tutor the students, to mark the examination papers, to mark the course assessment work. And these were mainly academics from other universities and, and other places of higher education, people who just simply wanted to earn some extra money on the side to supplement their, their salaries. And of course, what we were paying them for was teaching, whereas their host university were having to pay them mostly for their, most of their time was devoted to research. But we were just paying them for their teaching. So, that’s why we were so cost-effective. So really, what one ought to say is, not that the Open University was cheaper than the other universities; what I’m really saying is that, a situation where you have an open university overlaid on an already existing university structure, that is more efficient than either one trying to go it alone. [25:39] So we, we got started, and, it, oh it was a revelation to us academics, this new way of working, you know, people… There hadn’t been an open university before, so we had to make up everything as we went along. And, we decided, we had to start off by putting on foundation courses, a 7

Russell Stannard Page 8 C1672/03 Track 5 foundation course in science, one in arts, one in social science and one in mathematics. In the next year they added one in technology. But there were these four foundation courses. So the science foundation course, on which I was working, consisted of physics, chemistry, earth science and biology. And that meant putting together a team of people, team of academics, to work together jointly to produce this course, a course which, where the main body of the teaching was by correspondence, by the books, the educational books that we wrote, supplemented by television, BBC television, and BBC radio. And also supplemented by these home experimental kits which we sent to the students to do experiments in their homes. So we had to form a team. And, the Dean of Science, Mike Pentz, who actually was a very senior member of the CERN laboratory before he joined the Open University, he insisted that, although the individual academics would be responsible for writing different parts of the course, the course was going to be divided up into what we called thirty-two units, so each unit would have a specific author to, to see that particular unit through. He insisted that the name of that person would not be associated with that unit, and that the course would be written by the team, and he would just name the team, and you wouldn’t know who had written which particular unit. Which was very clever of him, because it meant that all of us on the team were very keen to see what the others were writing because we were going to be implicated by that. So, it meant that, you didn’t just get on with your own unit, and have your name associated with it and to hell with the other people, you had to take an interest in the whole thing that was being produced. [28:56] And, this, we had course team meetings at which the first draft of each of these units had to be discussed, and some of these discussions were, were very difficult to take, you know, people were, could be very critical of what you had written, you know. And, OK, being academics, you know, you feel a bit affronted at… You know, because academics are not used to having other academics criticise their lectures. What goes on in a lecture is between the academic and the students; other academics are not present. And to have one’s teaching strategies so exposed to other academics who perhaps see things differently and, and think that that is a bad way of describing it, there’s a better way of doing this. There was all this toing and froing going on, which could at times be very difficult to take. But, and it’s a big, big but, I found that, no matter how good I thought my first draft was, after it had been through the mill, or the course team meeting, or several course team meetings, what eventually got to the students was very much better than what I had started out 8

Russell Stannard Page 9 C1672/03 Track 5 with. It really was, it was a, a mind-blowing experience for me. And, part of the team were educational technologists. Now educational technologists talk a lot of guff. It seems to us academics, that, you know, they’re trying to justify their existence. However, however, there are pearls of wisdom in what they have to say. And what they, what they did to us, they, they said, OK, before you write a word of your unit, you must specify your objectives. Now what is this piece of learning supposed to do in the way of helping your students to do things that they couldn’t otherwise do? And it’s no good saying, ‘Oh I want them to, understand quantum physics.’ That, that doesn’t pass muster. What can they actually do? Show us some examination questions which they could answer after this particular unit which they couldn’t have answered necessarily beforehand. What are they able to do? That’s the objective, OK. So once you’ve specified the objectives, and, it’s actually very difficult, because, normally when you write a lecture you just start at the beginning and you just, wander on and, you’re not quite sure where it’s going to end up, sort of thing, you know. Whereas this is starting at the end, you know. And then they say, OK, now you must specify your ‘assumed entry behaviour’, they called it. What is it you can assume your students can know from past knowledge? And at foundation level it was very little. As a rule of thumb, they used to say, if you are using a term, and you would be surprised to hear it spoken in a supermarket, then you need to define it. So, it, it made one, very sensitive, by the time you had been through this mill several times, it made you very sensitive to your use of jargon. If someone, you know, you’d be surprised to hear someone talk about a Higgs boson in the supermarket, then, OK, [laughs] you’ve got to describe what a Higgs boson is. [33:05] So, there are your objectives. And below them you have your assumed entry behaviour. Now you chart the quickest distance from the assumed entry behaviour to those particular objectives. And that revolutionises your teaching, absolutely revolution… You find that you are able to get through to quite esoteric objectives incredibly rapidly. For example, with quantum physics, the traditional way of teaching it is that, you, you go into the history, through all the, the blind alleys and all the rest of it, they tried this, they tried that, blah blah blah blah. And eventually, eventually if you’re lucky you, you end up with where you want to be. But with this new approach, when you’re fixing on where, what do you want them to be able to do at the end, you can get there so rapidly, you just bypass, bypass this history, you go straight to it. And what it meant was that, you know, we were taking on students who had not necessarily any qualifications at all; we could get them talking 9

Russell Stannard Page 10 C1672/03 Track 5 about relativity, quantum physics and elementary particle physics by the time they ended the foundation course. And, this was regarded as being so important, because, in the teaching of physics, in schools the kind of physics you learn is, or can be regarded as, rather boring. It’s classical physics. All the exciting elements that really turn people on is relativity, it’s exploring Einstein’s ideas, not, not Newton’s, it’s Einstein’s ideas. And so here, the foundation course, the physics part of it, became a showcase for the physics, the more fundamental and classical physics lessons which were going to come later, in later courses for those who wanted to specialise in physics. [35:38] I should perhaps say that, there was a bit of an upheaval in the physics department to put it mildly, and that is that the person who had been chosen as the Head of Physics, the head of the… was not up to the job. Don’t get me wrong, he was a very fine research biophysicist, and, his priority when he joined was to set up a powerful biophysics research team. His interest really wasn’t in the teaching side of things, and, of course, at that stage of the starting up of the Open University, it was the teaching which was the absolute number one priority, we had to get stuff out for the students, OK. There was time later on to, to get back up to date with, with your research, but now you had to concentrate on all, what the educational technologists were telling you, all the time, you know, time and motion people were saying about, you’ve got to give me an answer about whether you want this in the home kit now because we’ve got to order it, you know. And you know, we… It was absolutely frantic. And, this just passed this guy over, you know. And the Dean of Science, Mike Pentz, was just tearing his hair out. He said, ‘This is, this is just not going to work you know, not with him in…’ And he went to the Vice-Chancellor and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to put Stannard in charge of, of the department, you know, we’ve got to have this change.’ And, it was rushed through. And so, I, I became the head of the department. Not the most satisfactory way of it happening, but, it was absolutely necessary, it was absolutely necessary, there was no doubt about that. And the former head happily went on with doing his research. He was more or less sidelined, and, OK, that was one man short as far as the teaching is concerned, but, OK, we, he was no longer the bottleneck that, that he had been. OK. [38:36] So, we, we went ahead and we wrote these units, we devised the, our home experimental kit. Everything was done on the hoof at that stage. Like for example, I wanted, I insisted that some 10

Russell Stannard Page 11 C1672/03 Track 5 elementary particle physics should be included in that foundation course, and I happened to come across a stereoscopic viewer with some bubble chamber photographs, and you saw these wonderful bubble chamber tracks in three dimensions. And, I thought, gosh, this is so attractive, so beautiful you know, to see all this in three dimensions. This will really motivate the students. So I said, OK, we’ll have a stereoscopic viewer in the home kit, you know? Well it took me about, twenty minutes to make that decision, OK? Some months later I was, happened to be in the warehouse where they were putting together the home experimental kits, and I came across this huge, huge pile of cardboard boxes. It was about the size of a small room you know. And, there was a guy there with a clipboard, you know, a warehouse man. And I said, ‘What’s all that lot?’ And he looked at his clipboard and he said, ‘Oh, it’s stereoscopic viewers for the foundation course.’ And I looked at this mountain of boxes. I thought, my God, is that what 7,000 stereoscopic viewers look like? And it only took me twenty minutes to decide that that is what should appear here in the warehouse. In those days you were able to make decisions like that, snap decisions like that. The way the university eventually developed, years and years later, is that, committees proliferated, decisions like that would have to be considered at various levels, and all the rest of it. It would take months to come to a decision that, yes, on balance we will include stereoscopic viewers in the… Yah. It was a great time to be involved in all this, it was, it was so exciting, you know, things were happening at such, such a rate. [41:07] But then, we, we got to the, the point where… Well, I should explain that, you had the central team working on the production of the courses, and not only that but devising the exam questions, marking schemes for exam questions. You had assessment, ongoing assessment, you had to devise those questions, and again the marking schemes that the part-time tutors were going to work to. But beyond Milton Keynes, there… Well the country had been divided up into, I think it was eleven regions. Each region had a regional centre, which was responsible for the students in their particular region, for recruiting the part-time tutors, for setting up study centres, there had to be 300 study centres, usually rooms in a university, or it could be in a school, or inside the institution, where the part-time tutors could meet up with the students. The students didn’t have to go there, because, this was distance teaching, but, if they wanted that extra experience, then, OK, they could meet up with the tutors and discuss their, their difficulties. So you had to set up all this regional structure before it could get going. And then it came to taking in the first wave of students, 24,000. 11

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And then just as, it was February 1971, just as we were about to start up, the Post Office went on strike. Here we are, essentially a correspondence university, and the Post office went on, they went on strike for six weeks. So, it all meant that we had to devise ways of, of getting the stuff out from Milton Keynes to the regions ourselves. We had to hire lorries which would come, and we would… The academic staff, having spent all day preparing courses, would then get these SOS’s. ‘You can’t go home yet, you’ve got to spend the evening helping to pack things up and get them into these lorries,’ which were then sent out to the rest of the country, to the regional centres; the regional centres then had to arrange for distribution centres so that the stuff could be got to the students. It, it couldn’t have been a worse start, but somehow, we, we managed to overcome that. And, and so, we went ahead. And we thought, phew! that’s, that’s that. And then of course we suddenly thought, my God, it’s, the summer schools. The summer schools are going to last for seven weeks in something like, fourteen other universities. So all that had to be arranged, tutors hired for the summer schools. And, the academic staff had to attend summer schools. All right, you only had to do two weeks, but this was obligatory, because this was the only chance we had of actually meeting face-to-face with our students, and finding out from the ground level how things were going down, and how things might be improved, and, and so on. So, not only were the summer schools valuable for the students but they were also valuable for the central staff to, to keep us grounded, you know. And that was, that also immediately raised difficulties, because, with normal academics, you don’t expect to be doing teaching during the summer vacation. Now that is a time for you to, to concentrate on your research. And here we found that our summers were being broken up by having to go and teach, you know. So, the idea was put forward that, OK, we would be… And not only did we have to, to go to summer school, but, with all the pressure of writing the later units of the courses, we often were having to work throughout the summer writing and preparing, you know, the next set of courses, because once the foundation course got out, it then suddenly struck you, my God, at the second level they’re going to want a course in physics, another course in chemistry, another course in, in earth science, another course in biology, to follow up. So, you know, you start off with one course, but the next year it’s four courses and, and so on. So, the whole of the summer period, it just, inclined to get absolutely taken up with teaching. So, the decision was made quite early on that we would be entitled to two months’ sabbatical per year, to be taken at a time which fitted in with your teaching obligations, and that period could be accumulated up to a year, so that as of want, you could take a year’s sabbatical, 12

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OK, for an approved reason, you know, you had to show that, OK, I was going to concentrate on this particular kind of research, OK, that sort of thing. So that was another way of, in which we differed from the, from the normal universities.

So that you could accumulate a series of two months and make it up…

Sorry?

You could accumulate your sabbatical leave of two months to a year.

Yes, I did. And, and later on I, I used one sabbatical year to go to Princeton, to the Center of Theological Inquiry.

[48:12] Could you describe in more detail the, the package, the home kits that were sent home to students? Describe what they looked like, what they consisted of, and then talk about why they had those things in rather than anything else. So…

Oh, they were, they were quite big boxes. You knew the home kit had arrived when it turned up, you know, it was a huge box plonked on your doorstep. And, what was included was, was, oh I forget the details now because it was a long time ago. But it, it, for chemistry for example, there were all sorts of chemicals. And, in fact I’m not sure one would have been allowed to get away with it now, in terms of health and safety, you know, but there were all sorts of chemicals included there. There was a microscope. What else was there? Oh there was an oscilloscope. I’m not, I don’t think a laser was included in that, in the home, in the foundation course, but in an optics course later on, you know, there was a laser included. The geology people included geological specimens. And, and stuff of that kind, you know. It was, it was a mini laboratory that they had, it was, it was certainly not what people thought at first was going to be just a chemistry set, you know, a school kids’ chemistry. It was actually quite, quite sophisticated. And, they were able to do, well I suppose, simple experiments like that to get used to the idea of doing practical work. But

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Russell Stannard Page 14 C1672/03 Track 5 then, when they got to the university, you know, summer school, then, you could use bigger equipment and stuff, more specialised equipment, yah.

[50:52] Can you remember what in the introductory…

Oh, I should also say that…

Yes.

As regards the practical work, some of the television programmes, or a lot of the television programmes, were, were devoted to demonstrating experiments of one kind or another. And, with some of the programmes the students were involved in that they had to take readings down from the dials that they saw displayed. And based on the readings they took down, they had, as part of their continuous assessment, to draw graphs and draw conclusions and make calculations based on what they, the readings they had taken. So this was practical work in, you know, at a distance.

[51:52] Can you remember in the introductory course what experiments you were asking the students to do with the kits?

Quite frankly, no, I, I can’t. This was, this was, this was forty years ago. And I, I can’t remember the details, no.

And can you say something about your first experiences of producing the television lectures?

Oh. Yes. Yah. I… We had, in science… Each, each faculty had its own BBC producer, someone very very experienced. And the producer for science was someone called James McCloy. And, we had to undergo screen tests, so we, we were given some equipment which we had to demonstrate. And, this was quite, quite a traumatic experience for certain of the academics, to see themselves on television. I always remember there was, there was one mathematics lecturer that I knew who was 14

Russell Stannard Page 15 C1672/03 Track 5 having his screen test at the same time as me, and, he was a foreigner, I forget where he came from, I think it was Czechoslovakia. And, he, he had a, a thick Czechoslovak accent you know. And, so he, he did his demonstration, or his teaching of some mathematics, you know. And then he was shown the results. And he was horrified. He said, [with accent] ‘But I have such sticking-out ears, and I have an accent!’ We thought, well of course you’ve got an accent. [laughs] It takes you to, to see yourself on television to recognise that you don’t speak like us you know. And, and he, he cried off, you know, some of the academics cried off, once they saw themselves, they realised this, this was not… And, in science, James McCloy refused to allow us to use autocue, you know, the writing that appears over the camera lens so that you can just read it off and you don’t have to remember your lines. He refused to allow us to use autocue, and his reason was that, being science, you are almost certain to be involved with some equipment, or you are engaged with something you’ve written on the board, and that’s where your attention should be. That if you know that your words are up there on the camera, the temptation is to look at the camera, and to read them off the camera whilst you are fiddling with equipment that you’re not actually looking at because you are looking at the camera, you know. He, ‘I want you to be involved with, with your equipment, and so you will learn your lines.’ We thought this was being very unkind to us. But, in the arts faculty they had a different producer, who allowed them to use autocue. And the arts programmes were just so wooden, you know, you could see these people reading off, their lines from, you know… Whereas, with the science programmes, there was a sort of spontaneity about it, you know. So, so that was that. [56:15] There was certainly tension, because, not only were there some of the unsuitable academics, you know, not only did they not want to do television, but there were unsuitable academics who did want to do television, but, they weren’t any good at it, you know. And, the BBC producers were, were very concerned about being lumbered with these academics who insisted on doing the television programme, because it was based on their unit, you know. So, some of the television programmes were not good, and, some of them, you know, rather got sort of, made fun of in… Because they were also black and white in those days. And we had long sideburns and wide trouser bottoms. Because the thing was that the, having written the course, and made the television programmes, then, it was so expensive to, to produce this, that you had to have these going out year after year after year after year, and after a while of course they began to look, you know, pretty 15

Russell Stannard Page 16 C1672/03 Track 5 dated. So that was, that was one of the problems. I myself got on well with television. I, I took to it quite easily, and producers were quite happy when they knew that I had been assigned to, to their television programme. Radio was a totally different story for me. [laughs] How can I put it? I… With radio, it’s a, it’s a very different medium from television. With television, you don’t have to be all that accurate with what you are saying, because, the viewer has got the visuals to see, so that tells part of the story. They can see your face, your, your attitude, they can lip read if you’re a bit, not a very good pronouncer. So, television allows you to be a little, a little bit sloppy shall we say. Radio is quite different, because all the listener has to go on is the sound of your voice. And, so you’ve got to be very careful, you’ve got to, you have to structure a radio programme, because, what happens is that, people from time to time go, listeners go drifting off, not necessarily because they’re bored, you know, you might say something interesting, and they think, oh yeah, that’s interesting, and, so-and-so and so-and-so. And there they are, thinking about what you’ve said, and whilst they’re thinking that, you’ve been saying other things which they haven’t been listening to because, they were intrigued by what you’ve said earlier. So, you have to be aware with a radio programme that if you say something interesting, then you must build in redundancy. So what happens next is, is just a, a further embellishment if you like of what, of the important thing you have said, because, odds are, they’re not actually paying much attention to what you are now saying, because, you already hit them with what you said first. Then comes the point where you want to draw back their attention because you are going to say something more which is important, and at that stage you don’t raise your voice, you…… pause. And it’s the pause that gets their attention. So, a radio script is highly structured, a good radio script is highly structured in that kind, in that kind of way. So it has to be read. You can’t just make it up as you go along; you’ve got to follow, this. So you’re reading off a script. And I was terrible, absolutely terrible. It was flat, boring. You knew I was reading it, you know? It was… I got to the point where, I thought, OK, I’m one of those who’s got to volunteer out of this, because, I’m just no good at this. But then one day the normal producer I was supposed to have was off sick, and as a stopgap they got in an old guy, an old radio producer. I forget his name, I, I do wish I remembered his name because I owe him so much. But I can’t remember his name. But he was an old guy who just, had retired, but they’d brought him in just to, to do my programme. So, I started off, I started reading from the top of the script. And, he was in the recording studio with the engineer, and I could see them through the glass. And, he called out through the intercom, ‘OK, stop there, stop there.’ And he 16

Russell Stannard Page 17 C1672/03 Track 5 came into the studio, and he looked at me, and he thought. And then he went and stood right in the far corner of the studio, way, way away from me. He said, ‘OK, from the top, take it again.’ So I started off again. And he said, ‘Stop there. Sorry, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you.’ And I thought, well of course you can’t hear me. I am talking to this microscope – microphone, sorry, which is, you know, what is it, nine inches away from me, and he is way over there at the far end of the studio. So he said, ‘Take it from the top. Speak up please.’ So, I took it from the top, I spoke up. He stopped me again. ‘Sorry, I can’t hear you.’ And this kept on going… In the end I thought, oh, I’ll get him, you know, I’ll shout. And so, from the top. OK, I shouted, shouted, shouted, shouted, shouted, shouted, shouted the script. And he said, ‘OK, stop there. Play that one back please.’ And, the engineer played it back into the studio. And it was wonderful. I was staggered. I said, ‘But, I was shouting.’ He said, ‘Well that’s what you call it; we call it “lifting it off the page”. When you were putting that effort in, it came to life. You were lifting it off the page, you, there was life in it. Whereas previously, it was lifeless. So,’ he said, ‘whenever you do a programme, shout it, if that’s what you think you’re doing.’ And I did. And, not only did I, was then OK with radio programmes for the OU, but eventually I was to go on to, to do ‘Thought for the Day’, I did fifty programmes of Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’. I did a radio series called Science and Wonders where I was interviewing scientists and religious people, believers and atheists, over a five-programme series, which was voted by the Sunday Times as the number one radio achievement of the year, which, I think was probably the, the most satisfying thing I, I have ever done, to have made that radio programme, having started off thinking I was a total failure. And as I say, I owe it all to that wisdom that that producer showed.

[end of session]

[End of Track 5]

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[Track 6]

I’ve got one specific thing to ask and then we’ll continue from where we got to in the sort of, chronology, and that’s whether at any point you developed relations with something that was called the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship. It wasn’t till the 1980s that it was called Christians in Science. I had already asked you during your PhD if you had any links with it, and you didn’t seem, it didn’t appear as though…

No. There were, there were two rather similar organisations, there was Christians in Science, Sam Berry was quite a, a big figure in that, and then there was Science and Religion Forum. I attached myself to, to the latter. In fact I was Chairman and then President of Science and Religion Forum. Very similar organisations. Science and Religion Forum run a magazine where they, which is devoted to reviews of articles – sorry, reviews of books that are to do with science and religion. And they hold an annual conference. So, I was involved in that. Well I didn’t see it was necessary to belong to the other one as well.

Did they have common members that you…

Mm?

Did they have common members?

Common… You…

Across the two.

Yes. Yes, there would have, but I, I can’t remember…

Mm. And did they… You said they were similar. Were there any differences between the two in, in outlook on this question of relations between religion and science? 1

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I, I don’t think so, I don’t think so. It was… No, it would… They were rather similar, yes.

And, at one point at least in your autobiography you talk about God as upholding everything, and that led me to want to ask whether you had taken any interest in the works of Donald MacKay, who was prominent in popularising that view of the way God works in general.

Yes. Yes, yes. Yes.

[02:29] OK. Could you then take us on from where we got to, which was the early 1970s, you’re at the Open University. Perhaps we could start with the development of your scientific work, and then, go on from there.

Mhm.

So this is your work in physics at the OU.

When I joined the Open University, the priority to begin with was the teaching side of things. We had this task of producing all the, the courses that were going to be needed, and, and because we were the first university of this type, we were making things up as we were going along, and we didn’t know, for example, how many staff we actually needed to do this, and we kept on underestimating how many staff were required. So, it was very hard work, we were just, the whole time concentrating on producing these, these courses. But always at the back of our mind was the, the promise that had been given to us when we were originally appointed that this was not going to be just a teaching ghetto; that we realised that other universities pay perhaps even more attention to the research side of things, and therefore research was to be encouraged at the Open University in order to attract further academics to come and join us, and also to allow for the flexibility of our staff going back into ordinary, conventional universities. So, research took a back seat to begin with, but, gradually things eased off a bit and we could start thinking more in terms of research. And, I was going to use my connections with University College London where I came from, and, 2

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UCL physics department were using the nuclear emulsion technique where all you actually need at, at home, at the university, was microscopes for looking at these emulsions, which was, you know, comparatively cheap to buy. So, I was able to set up a nuclear emulsion group at the OU, and we worked in collaboration with University College London. And in particular I, we got involved in a project for, searching for a subatomic particle which was expected to be created in these collisions between high energy particles, and it would carry a new property of matter. When you have these collisions, some of the energy gets transformed into matter, and you get a variety of different kinds of particles, some, well all of them carrying normal kinds of properties, like mass and electric charge, but they also, some of them have properties which ordinary matter, neutrons, protons, electrons, don’t have, and that’s, that’s their fascination. The theorists were trying to make sense of all this, and they produced a very beautiful theory as to how all these new properties could be understood and fitted into a nice scheme. Except that, the numbers didn’t balance. There was, there was something missing. They said, look, our equations would be so much more elegant if there was this other property of matter. And we said, well, you know, too bad [laughs], you know, we, we haven’t come across anything. Tell us a bit more as to what you expect it to be like. And, they said, well, it’s got to be very short-lived. Well, we thought, well, yeah, we’re used to that. It’s going to, once it’s been created, it will decay into ordinary particles in ten to the minus thirteenth of a second. So that’s one over one with thirteen noughts, you know. So we said, well, of course we haven’t seen it, you know. Because up to that time we had been concentrating on using bubble chambers where the tracks of particles are bubbles. Well something which decayed at, at that speed, and was, even though it was travelling at the speed of light, the distances travelled would be less than the diameter of a bubble. So we wouldn’t see it. All we would see is the decayed products coming out, which we would assume came from the original collision; we wouldn’t know that in between, this particle, had existed. And the theorists said, well, we want you to find this, because, it would fit in so… In fact they called this new property charm, because, they found it so charming, you know. Well we thought, well OK, nuclear emulsions might be the answer, because, with the nuclear emulsion, the tracks show up as tiny, tiny grains of silver bromide, very tiny, that’s why you have to have a microscope to, a powerful microscope, to see them. And that way we were in with a fighting chance that we might see the, the difference between where the charm particle was produced and where it decayed, you know, a track, or, something like that. And, so we went searching for charm particles. And, it was an international collaboration, and there was great 3

Russell Stannard Page 4 C1672/03 Track 6 excitement when one of our collaborators found the first example. And then I think about a year later at the OU we found our first example, and that was incredibly exciting. I think that was probably the, the highlight of my, my scientific research career, the discovery of charm, you know.

[09:35] Could you say more about the moment when that happened? Who, who and how did you know that…

Well, you must understand that, with the, the search for these particles, the search of the bubble chamber pictures and the search of the emulsions, most of it was not done by the physicists. It was, well quite frankly it was quite a routine kind of job, so we used to hire scanners, who tended to be girls, not all of them but most of them were girls. And I think, at that time I had three scanners. And what you do is, you brief the scanners as to what they’re looking for. You draw pictures of what you are hoping it’s going to look like, and, you set them to work. And whenever they come cross something which they think might be it, then they, they call me over and I study it, and say yes or no. So, it was one of the scanners who, who told me, you know, called me over, ‘I think I’ve got something here.’ So I had a look. Oh, my God, yes, you have! [laughs] This is exactly, exactly what, what we’re looking for.’ And, I don’t think we had champagne, but, you know, we, we, we were absolutely delighted, we were dancing around the room sort of thing.

What was the background of the, of, say, those three scanners, those three girls who were working in your…?

Oh. [pause] You mean apart from them being attractive? [laughs]

I wondered what they…

In fact that was quite a serious thing, because, quite a number of physicists eventually ended up marrying their scanners. No, well, we weren’t looking for… We wanted just, people who gave evidence of being intelligent, because, there wasn’t any special skill or qualification required for, you know, recognising these patterns, we just had to go on them having got good results at school, 4

Russell Stannard Page 5 C1672/03 Track 6 you know, in a sort of, tended to be a scientific area, you know, so that they were, tidy thinkers, you know.

And did you know anything about… I mean, did you know their… Presumably at the time you knew their names. I don’t know whether you can remember them now, but did you know anything about their sort of, life outside of work, that sort of thing?

Oh, you know, we would, you know, have the usual sort of, conversations over coffee breaks and things of that kind, yeah. Yeah.

And when you were drawing, to show what this, you might be expecting, or you might be hoping for, what, for the non-scientist outsider, what were you drawing, what was the shape or pattern that you were…?

Oh. OK. These subatomic particles, as they pass through the emulsion they activate the silver bromide crystals. Nuclear emulsion is, was a form of photographic emulsion. Normally, in the old days when you didn’t have digital cameras and things like that, the pictures were taken on a sheet of celluloid covered with a coating of this silver bromide. And what happened was that when the light hit a silver bromide crystal it would activate it, it would knock an electron off from its parent, and that was a sufficient reason for, when the emulsion was then developed, it would show up black. So, with a normal photograph, it’s a series of black dots where the light has fallen. OK, now with nuclear emulsion, what we did was, we got Ilford’s, the manufacturers, to create layers of thick emulsion with a very, very heavy concentration of silver bromide. And they would produce these layers, and we would stack them on top of each other like a stack of slices of cheese. And that would be exposed to the beam from the accelerator, without it ever being exposed to light. So the particles would go in, and they would activate the silver bromide crystals along the path that they moved. So, when you looked at the developed emulsion down the microscope, what you see is a trail of dots, those dots being the developed silver bromide. So that is how you recognise particles passing through. So it’s a line of dots. It then will come along to a point where it suddenly splits up into a whole series of lines. Now that represents all the particles that are coming away from the collision of the bullet particle with one of the nuclei in the emulsion. And, so 5

Russell Stannard Page 6 C1672/03 Track 6 you’ve got those trails coming out. And then, if a trail came out, and itself very rapidly split up into other tracks, that was usually the decay of the particles, the particles created in the first collision moved to the second spreading out of things, and what you are now looking at are the decay products. So we were looking for very very short tracks. Only particles with electric charge could activate the silver bromide crystals. If a particle was uncharged, then it didn’t leave any track. So, also what one’s looking for is, again, a particle coming in from the accelerator, giving rise to tracks, but then, at a certain distance from that, you suddenly got a V shape pointing back to the collision point. Now that would indicate that, between the collision point and the apex of that V a neutral particle has come, and has then split up into those two particles that now form the V. So, you look out for that topology as well, yes.

Thank you. So you would have been drawing…

A series of dots.

…dots, and then the gap, and then the V.

That’s right, yah, that’s right, yah.

[16:46] What did the scanners say about the work, assuming that they were free to sort of be honest, what would they say about the process of doing it, of looking and looking and looking and looking?

Oh. The usual complaints, you know, it’s boring. [laughs] But then, when they, when they would find a candidate, you know, yeah, they, they would get, generally excited, because, you know, this is, what it’s about you know. So, no, you have to encourage them, to say, ‘OK, well that’s, that’s very close to, to what we’re looking for, but, it’s not quite right,’ for whatever, whatever reason. And, it was, it was a skilful job, because, these, although these were thick layers of emulsion, I think, well it would be about, well I think about three millimetres thick, these particles, these tracks, would very quickly go out of the layer that you’re looking at. So now, you’ve got to get hold of the next layer, the next layer that was under that one, and put that on the microscope, and 6

Russell Stannard Page 7 C1672/03 Track 6 you then have to try to find where that track entered the second layer, and so on. So quite a lot of the work was this very painstaking business of tracing tracks through one layer after another after another after another. And that was very, that required a lot of concentration. Yah.

[18:31] How did the conversation, if that’s the right word, with the theorists take place? So, you are doing the experimental physics to attempt to find a particle which, in the context of a mathematical calculation seems likely or desirable, but how did that… I suppose the question is, how did you know to work on that, how often and how were you talking to the theoretical people?

Oh, well, well first of all you read the literature, you know, that the theorists publish, their theories, and, and also, you went along to conferences, and the conferences were, were usually a mixture of theorists and experimentalists. So you, you would get presentations by the theorists, and, and then this would lead into discussions as to, well, you know, how are we going to be able to find something that, that only lives for that length of time? And then, what’s become, became clear that, for example, the emulsion was going to be the right way for looking for this particular type of thing. You then got laboratories with experience of using emulsion getting together, saying, well shall we form a collaboration? Yes. OK, what kind of beam do we need to put into the emulsion that has a good chance of producing this sort of thing according to what the theorists tell us? And, and then, you have to go to the laboratories where the accelerators are, the particle accelerators are, and find out what beams are available, at what particular time, you know, so can we get on the schedule? And so, it was quite, quite complicated, setting up these collaborations, and finding an accelerator which has a suitable beam for producing what you particularly, particularly want, yah.

Which one were you using in the Seventies on this work with the emulsion?

I think that was, that was a CERN, a CERN beam, yah. But, we had also used beams from Berkeley in California, and, when we were doing the bubble chamber work we also used a beam at the Rutherford Laboratory which is near Harwell, you know.

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And other than this work using the nuclear emulsion to investigate the particle charm, what else were you… I know you say this is, this is perhaps the highlight of your career in physics, but what else were you working on at this time, in the 1970s at the OU? Or perhaps there wasn’t time for…

Oh, it’s, we were looking at, oh, it’s actually very detailed, the particular decay schemes of these new particles, the new particles, the first lot of new particles we found with an extra kind of property, the property was called strangeness. It was because, well, as far as we were concerned the particles were behaving strangely. But when we talk about a new property, it’s… Let me try to explain it this way. What we, what we find in these collisions is, for example, that, you can create a new particle with, say, positive electric charge. Now there is a law of conservation of electric charge, so you then say, well come on, how can you create something with a positive charge if the positive charge wasn’t there to begin with? Well, the answer is, well, at the same time you create a negatively charged particle. So, when we say conservation of electric charge, what we mean is, conservation of net electric charge. Yes, you can produce a positively charged new particle, provided at the same time you produce a negative one. So we were familiar with that. Well then we discovered that, two particles would be produced at the same time, two unstable particles would be produced at the same time. They were never produced alone. And, even if the particle, one of these particles had no charge, you could never produce it on its own, despite the fact that you were not going to violate the conservation of electric charge, you weren’t going to violate conservation of, of energy or anything of that kind, that you could never produce this new particle on its own; it always had to be accompanied by another. And then we twigged the idea, OK, well perhaps this is pointing to a new property, which also has to be conserved. And, the particle we’d been looking at has got, well let’s say, plus one unit of this, and it can’t be produced on its own unless you also produce another new particle which has got minus one unit of this new property. As I said, because, the whole thing had seemed strange, the property was called strangeness. So that, that was how we identified. And charm is a similar sort of property like that. You can’t produce a charmed particle without producing at the same time a charm particle with the opposite unit of charm, yah? And sometimes these particles carry two units. So for example, there’s a particle which carries two [negative] units of strangeness; you can only ever produce it in collaboration with two other particles which have got positive strangeness in. So that’s roughly how, how to identify these. So you get all these particles with strangeness and charm and, other properties 8

Russell Stannard Page 9 C1672/03 Track 6 called beauty… well, top and bottom and… And then, they don’t, having produced them, they don’t just lie around forever; they are all unstable, they all eventually decay down to familiar matter of neutrons, protons, electrons, neutrinos. So, the next fascinating thing is, OK, how do they decay? What are the different modes of decay? And that of course is also of great interest to theorists, as to why they decay this way whereas they don’t decay that way, and so on. So, identifying all the different ways in which they decay, and what proportion go that way, what proportion go the other way. So, most, most of the work that was done then was this cataloguing of, of properties. You know, you’ve got this whole menagerie and, and you just have to fill in all the gaps as to how these things behave, having established that they do exist.

And so, cataloguing the different kinds of decay, was this again a matter of observing the effect of decay on, say, the nuclear emulsion? So, looking for the kind of, the physical form of it, or inferring the paths of things?

That’s right, yes. Yes. Yes. Once the particle has decayed into these other tracks, tracks of the decay products, you follow those through to see what they do. And, by seeing how much they deviate and how far they go, and how many grains per millimetre, you can work out fast the thing is going, you are able to work out the mass of each of these particles which come out. And if you’re using a bubble chamber you have a magnetic field on, and that curves the tracks of the bubbles, and the amount of curvature tells you what the momentum is. So, that gives you a further handle on deciding what these products are, yah.

[27:59] Thank you. How was your, your interest in science and religion relations expressed while at the OU? I mean, you know, while actually at the OU in that post, in the environment of it.

How was what, sorry?

Well, how was, how was your… If I had been a member of staff, say, in your department, would your interest in science and religion relations have been evident to me, at the OU?

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Oh I didn’t, I didn’t make any secret of the fact that, you know, and throughout all this time I, I, well since 1966, I became a Reader in the Church of England, which means a licensed lay minister, so, I would be, on a Sunday I would be preaching. So, it was a case of, swapping one’s white lab coat Monday to Friday to a white surplice on a Sunday. So… But it, it didn’t come into our work at all, you know, it was just a straightforward secular kind of relationship with my, my work colleagues, but, you know, they, they knew what I did at weekends, just as I knew something about what, what they did at weekends and so on, yah.

Did you have colleagues there who also were Christians?

Oh yes, certainly. You know, the idea that, you know, scientists aren’t religious is, is nonsense. I think a survey showed, not so long ago, that something like forty per cent of scientists are, are religious, well they believe in God. So, yes, that, that wasn’t unusual at all, no.

[29:49] And, in physics more generally, you mentioned conferences for example that you went to, was the question of the relationship between physics and faith talked about at conferences, even talked about as an aside in papers that were given, that sort of thing? The reason I ask is that, I’ve read the book called Rochester Roundabout, which is where John Polkinghorne, where he describes the Rochester conferences, and just occasionally you have physicists standing up and talking in some way, sometimes not very seriously but in some way talking about God because the questions that physics seems to be dealing with at the time are so sort of fundamental about matter and about origins and that sort of thing. So I wonder to what extent at these conferences God or other kinds of faith are talked about, in your memory.

In my experience, I did not come across that. You know, scientific conferences were about science, OK. OK, I’ve been to many other conferences which were overtly about science and religion, and, and there have been at least a couple of occasions where an organisation which was purely scientific did make an exception and ask me to, to give a talk on science and religion. For example, the Royal Institution in London, that was an organisation for doing research. Michael Faraday was a big figure, Michael Faraday being the physicist who did very important experiments 10

Russell Stannard Page 11 C1672/03 Track 6 into electricity and magnetism, and our whole understanding of electromagnetism is based on Faraday’s experiments, and Clerk Maxwell’s theories based on Faraday’s experiments. Well anyway, he set up the Royal Institution, and, because he was interested in conveying the findings of scientists to the public, he inaugurated what came to be known as the Friday Evening Discourses, which is occasions for leading scientists to talk to the public about, about the nature of their, their research. And this is a long, long tradition, goes back over 100 years. And, I was rather surprised when they contacted me and said, you know, ‘Would you like to do a Friday Evening Discourse?’ I said, ‘You want me to talk about the bubble chamber work and stuff?’ ‘No no. We would like you to talk about how you see the relationship between science and religion. You know, it’s a break from tradition, but, you know, we, thought that it would be interesting.’ So, so I, I did a Friday Evening Discourse. I don’t know if you know about Friday Evening Discourses, but [laughs], they are very formal occasions. So, the speaker has to be in evening dress, and not only that, the whole audience has to be in evening dress . It’s held in the lecture, big lecture theatre at the Royal Institution, which features on television every Christmas, it’s where the famous Christmas Lectures are given to children, OK. And it’s a very imposing lecture theatre, it’s, the ranks of seats go right up to the ceiling on three sides, you know. Well anyway, everybody has to be in evening dress. And, before the talk there’s a dinner for the president, the speaker and invited guests. So, we had the, the dinner. Well at least we had the main course, and, I was looking forward to the dessert, because I, I am a pudding man, and as the dessert was being served, a flunky, I can only describe him as a flunky, in a red uniform, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘We need to be going sir.’ I thought, oh crikey, I’m missing out on the pud. Only me. And I thought, oh, obviously, the lecture theatre technician wants to discuss microphones and technicalities like that. So, I followed the flunky, and he showed me into a room. And no sooner was I in the room, he shut the door, and locked it. And there I was, locked in this room on my own. Actually I, I had been warned that this was likely to happen. It’s because, 140 years ago a physicist called Wheatstone was due to give the Friday Evening Discourse, and apparently he was a very shy man, and he entered the lecture theatre, was confronted by all these hundreds of people in evening dress. He took fright, and fled the building. So the Royal Institution said, we’re not going to have this happening ever again. So for the last 145 years they lock the lecturer up in this room. It’s actually a very interesting room, because, it has some of Faraday’s original experiments, you know, experimental set-ups there. But what really took my interest was, was not Faraday’s experiments, 11

Russell Stannard Page 12 C1672/03 Track 6 but a large, a very large oil painting on the wall, which depicted a Friday Evening Discourse taking place, but the audience are in a total state of panic and, and shock. The lecturer is, is cowering, he’s got a terrible look on his expression. Flunkies are converging upon him. And the title of this painting is, ‘He began his Friday Evening Discourse with the words “Ladies and gentlemen”.’ I thought, what on earth is that about? Well eventually the door was unlocked and the flunky came. I said, ‘Before we go, what is that about?’ And he looked at it, he said, ‘Well, you mustn’t begin by saying “Ladies and gentlemen”.’ I said, ‘Well, why not?’ He said, ‘You are giving a performance. An actor wouldn’t go on the stage acting Hamlet and begin by saying, “Oh, ladies and gentlemen…” He just gets straight on with it. And, for the same reason, you will not be introduced when you enter the lecture theatre. You go straight to the podium, and you begin. We all know who you are, and why you’re here. So, you get on with it.’ I thought, oh, OK, thanks for telling me. I was then escorted… The, the lecture was due to start at nine o’clock, and, I think they have to, the audience have to be in place by five to nine and the doors are closed. So I am stood by the flunky, he’s not allowing me to get away, outside this door. And what you then do is… In the lecture theatre there is a clock which chimes the hour. And so what you do is, you listen for nine o’clock to start chiming, and it’s with the first ding of the clock, the doors are flung open, and you march in, and you begin your, your lecture. The lecture is to last until ten o’clock. And when they say ten ‘clock, they mean ten o’clock. They do not mean 9.59; they do not mean 10.01. They mean ten o’clock, when the clock starts chiming again. Well I knew about this, and, I, I had been through my talk so many times, and down the script I’d got all these timings. So I was continually keeping an eye on the clock, which is directly opposite you, you can’t miss it, you know. And I’m happy to say that, I was actually in the middle of my last sentence when the, the clock started chiming. Afterwards, there is tea and nibbles for everybody, you know. And, it’s the, it’s the chance then for the audience to ask the speaker questions. They’re not allowed to ask them in the lecture theatre. And, and someone came up to me and was talking to me, and, and said, ‘Oh, as regards the timing, not bad.’ [laughs] So that was, that was an occasion when I was, I was asked to talk about science and religion. [40:00] An even more interesting, or worrying, kind of invitation, came from the Royal Society, that was about, I think about a year after the Royal Institution one. The Royal Society is, of course, the society of leading scientists. And, I had a telephone call, I think it was from the secretary of the 12

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Council, who said that they would like to issue me an invitation to give a public, one of their public lectures, on the subject of how I see the relationship between science and religion. So I thought, oh crikey, you know. Yes, I said, ‘Yes, certainly.’ He said, ‘Oh well, hold on, before, before you agree, there is something I need to tell you, and that is that quite a number of the members on the Council are very much opposed to us inviting you to give this talk. The reason being, it is actually down in our charter that the public lectures must not talk about politics or religion.’ So I said, ‘Well, in that case, why are you asking me?’ you know. He said, ‘Well it’s just that we have had so many requests for a talk on such a subject that the majority of us on the council think that we should make an exception. But if you don’t want to get involved in this, we fully understand.’ So I thought for a moment, and said, ‘Well, yes, I, I’ll do it,’ but, [laughs] I think I had my fingers crossed at the time that it wasn’t going to lead to some, you know, nasty demonstration or something of that kind. Actually, I didn’t have anything actually to worry about, because, when the occasion came the lecture theatre was absolutely packed, they were standing at the back, they were standing down the sides, and, and I think it was the secretary of the Council who was the chairman for the occasion, he was introducing me, and, he laid his cards on the table, he said, ‘Look, you know, this is a very exceptional occasion, you know, we are not supposed to be devoting public lectures to topics to do with religion. However, we have had so many requests that we felt that there was sufficient interest that we should make an exception. And as I look around this lecture theatre, I think you will see that we were right.’ And the talk went off OK. So, those were a couple of occasions where organisations which, on the face of it have nothing to do with religion, did make exceptions.

[43:17] Roughly when were these two invitations? We can obviously find the exact dates easily, but…

Oh. I can’t remember. I think it was about the 1990s, something like that. Yes.

Did you have any sense then, or have you reflected on it since, of why you were being asked to do these things then, why those organisations, at that time rather than earlier, had decided?

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Well, I think that… You see when I, when I first got into this science and religion stuff, there wasn’t much in the way of books on the subject. In fact, the way I got into it I suppose as that, when I became a reader in the Church of England the people already knew I was a scientist and now I was something in the Church, sort of thing. People got a bit confused as to how I managed the two, because, whether one likes it or not, a very common understanding is that science and religion are at loggerheads with each other. It’s ridiculous, but anyway, that’s, that’s the common perception, and it is one that is fostered by people like Richard Dawkins who are very newsworthy people and they make their views known. I was invited to, by the education authorities of the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands, to conduct something called Oasis Day. It’s a day where they choose something like 150 sixth formers to gather together in one place and spend a day with a speaker. The year before me it was Trevor Huddleston talking about the Third World. Anyway, they wanted me to be the leader of this Oasis Day, talking about science and religion. And, that was fascinating, because I had to get clear in my own mind, what am I going to say to these very intelligent sixth formers? So I gave talks and, and then there was lots of discussions going on throughout the day. Broke them up into groups to discuss things, then we’d come back together. That, that sort of thing. And, they seemed very keen. In fact the whole proceedings were, were recorded, and I understand that ten per cent of the students bought the recordings of the whole proceedings. And, and they asked me, well, you know, ‘We’d like to follow this up, you know, what books can we read?’ And I thought, well, there’s only actually one book, Coulson’s Science and Christianity, or Christians and… Science and Christianity. But that went back to the early 1950s, and was, was out of date. And that was how I got the idea, well, you know, perhaps I ought to, to write a book. I had had quite a bit of experience of writing Open University courses and trying to explain things simply, and so I thought, OK, I am a writer as well as just a verbal lecturer, you know. So that’s how I came to write Science and the Renewal of Belief, which was my first book. It was published by the Student Christian Movement, SCM Press. That was 1982. And, that was, it was very well received, I was very pleased about that. And I think, that’s when I first came to be known as someone who would talk about science and religion. And I, oh I got asked to give so many talks, you know, I could have spent a whole week just going from one place to another talking about science and religion, but obviously I couldn’t, I had to, I had to be very choosy. So I think that that was, was how I, you know, built up a, a reputation as someone who could talk on this subject, and that’s how I got invited to the Royal Institution. And I, I suspect, I suspect that the 14

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Royal Society invitation came because they had heard of what I had done at the Royal Institution. That was about a year before, yes.

[48:20] What do you remember of the questioning that took place after the public lecture at the Royal Society?

Oh, well mostly you see, most people’s problems with relating the two, science and religion, is that, as far as the religion is concerned, they, they have a very literalistic understanding as to how the Bible should be read, you know, the Bible says, everything began with Adam and Eve. Well, Darwin says it’s evolution. OK? Who is right, you know? If you work out when Adam and Eve were supposed to be there, it, whatever it is, 6000 years ago. Well, Big Bang cosmology is talking about billions of years you know. Who is right, you know? So it’s a simple, that’s the, that’s the contrast. So what one has to do is to try to explain that, the people who were writing the Bible were not scientifically-minded, they weren’t interested in science. You know, this interest in science has only come about in, whatever it is, the last 400 years. People didn’t think like that. So they were very free and easy about… They had other ways of, of talking, and they used storytelling to a great extent. Why stories? Well, again, you have to realise that in those days most people could not read or write. So it was a question of remembering what you were told. And we’re not good at remembering what we are just told, you know. We like to write it down, and remind ourselves with memos and things of that kind. But one thing these ancient people did recognise was that, we are very good at remembering stories. There’s something about a storyline, you know how the story begins and that reminds you of… Oh yes, and then after that he did that. Oh and then on comes so-and-so, and the… And then of course she belongs to so-and-so. Before you know what you’ve done, you’ve remembered the whole of the storyline. Our minds are just wired that way, to remember storylines. So what these ancient people did was, they took a storyline and they grafted it on to the storyline, the profound messages and wisdom of their civilisations so that wisdom would be carried on for future generations. But it was relayed in the form of a story. So you get the story of Adam and Eve. And, for example, Eve is described as being made from a rib taken from the side of Adam. Does that mean he’s one, one short? No. No. What that is saying, in a very poetical way, a beautiful way, is that man is not complete without a 15

Russell Stannard Page 16 C1672/03 Track 6 woman; woman is not complete without man. It’s talking about marriage. Two people becoming one flesh, is another way of putting it. So, that is a very deep understanding, you know, that, the importance of the marriage unit, and that is how it’s described. They are put in this garden, not to sit around and enjoy themselves, but they have to look after it. The green message today? They are forbidden to take fruit from one of the trees, it doesn’t belong to them, and what do they do? They’re disobedient, and they take it. And, because of that, they and their descendants, which is you and me, are banished from Paradise. What is that saying? It is saying that basically we are disobedient to God, we are selfish, we are self-centred, we want things for ourselves. It is saying that, even if you try to create a paradise here on Earth, whether you join a monastery, or you send your children to a private school, you know, you try to sort of, isolate yourself into a nice little para… it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because, all right, you gathered apples in a barrel, but, the apples themselves go rotten, because, basically, they decay. Well, people have a basic tendency to be selfish and self-centred. Theologically that’s called original sin. It’s not a popular understanding of human nature, but that is what the ancient people believed. And lo and behold, on comes a theory of evolution which talks about survival of the fittest, that sort of thing. In other words, it’s… And genetically-influenced behaviour patterns. We are genetically inclined to be selfish, which is what evolution is saying. And you go back to Adam and Eve and say well that’s, that’s what the Adam and Eve story was saying. It was right. But it expresses that truth in a completely different way, a way which, which they could understand. So, that is… So, trying to get people to take a more sort of, enlightened understanding of the way people thought in the days when they were writing the Bible, allows you to understand that, that there isn’t a clash. And OK, I think you have to take… Well, one has to, to recognise that people in those days took a, a positive delight in tales of wondrous happenings, which is rather fun. Well, you can see that sort of thing today when you have people interpreting crop circles and abduction of aliens, you know, it’s all rather sort of, fancy stuff. Well, that tendency was very much at the fore in those days, so, they would very easily talk about, well, miracles, what we would call miracles, signs and that sort of thing. Whereas today, we look on things in a very much more pragmatic way. Were, were ancient people therefore lying when they talked about these miraculous things? Well not really. They were just trying… Like with, with someone like Jesus, they were trying to say, look, this man was so absolutely incredible, so they would build these stories around Him. Not to try to sort of, force you into belief, but to get you to understand just how remarkable this, this man was. And until one 16

Russell Stannard Page 17 C1672/03 Track 6 started thinking scientifically, that was OK, that was OK, people didn’t, didn’t mind. You knew it was going on, the people in those days knew it was going on, that that was the, the flowery storytelling type of conversations that they would have.

So the question is one of, therefore, the problem is one of, almost reading skills not matching the…

Sorry?

So, the problem then is one of modern reading skills, or, or reading awareness, not matching the kind of text that’s being read.

Yah. Yah. That’s right. Yes, it’s, it’s like, it’s like going into, into a library. You pick up a book, and it talks about this tiger on fire. And you think, a tiger on fire, but, no no, this is, this is a poem. You know, the, the poet is, is trying to get across the idea that, the fierceness of the tiger’s eye is like fire, you know. It’s very, very dramatic. And when you think of a tiger’s face, it’s right to… it’s almost like tongues of, of, of fire. But the poet doesn’t say, ‘Oh, the tiger is like… It looks a bit like a fire.’ He talks about, ‘Tiger tiger burning bright’. But you know, it would be ridiculous to pick up a book of poetry and read it as though it was a science book. It’s not a science book. You have to think, OK, in what style is this man writing? And in the same way you can pick up a, a book about, Lord of the Flies, William Golding, and, it doesn’t matter it didn’t actually happen, but, boy can you learn a lot about human nature by reading a story.

[58:13] Thank you. Now by the end of the 1980s you publish your first book for children. Could you tell us the story of how you got to that point? So you’re a lecturer at the Open University, working with educational technologists some of the time, also broadcasting, you’re producing material that can be broadcast for the OU. How is it by the late Eighties you’re publishing a children’s book?

I think you, first of all, must understand that, I, I really sort of, got fired with enthusiasm for physics when I was introduced to Einstein’s theory of relativity. That really blew my mind, and, made me quite indignant that I hadn’t been told about this at school, even though I had studied 17

Russell Stannard Page 18 C1672/03 Track 6 physics at the highest level at school, and got a Distinction and all the rest of it. No one had mentioned Einstein’s theory of relativity. But it was, for me that, that was far more interesting than anything, any other kind of physics I had been taught. And I thought this was a pity, you know, and if I could do something about it, then, I ought to at some stage. Of course I didn’t do anything about it for a long long time because I was busy carving out a career as, as a professional physicist, and you don’t get Brownie points for, [laughs] for doing that sort of thing. You have to get on with your research. But anyway, I started to have a go at making Einstein’s ideas more widely available when I got to the Open University by insisting that the science foundation course, which all science students had to take, you know, biologists, earth scientists, chemists, as well as physicists, that the physics component of that would have an introduction to relativity. And I was greatly helped in that respect by the way the educational technologists that the Open University employed right from the very beginning trained us academics into how to teach. And essentially they, they first of all got us to identify our objectives, which was, you know, what do you expect your students to be able to, to do at the end of this teaching passage which they probably couldn’t have done beforehand? Not just simply say, ‘Oh, I, I, I want them to understand,’ something or other. No, how would they demonstrate that they understand it? OK, so you’ve got that objective in mind. Now you must identify ‘assumed entry behaviour’ they called it, you know, what can you assume your student already understands before you start teaching them, what, what basis can you start building from, OK? And, [laughs] they, they had us on a rule of thumb that, if you use a term which you would be surprised to hear mentioned in a supermarket, then that is probably a term you need to define, OK? You mustn’t assume that someone knows that. So, having defined the final objective and the initial assumed entry behaviour foundation, you then chart the quickest route from one to the other. It, it’s quite difficult to be specific about your final objectives and your initial, but once you’ve done that, it becomes amazingly simple to chart very quick routes from where you start off to where you want to end. It becomes a very efficient way of teaching. And that was how we were able to introduce relativity, quantum theory, and high energy physics into the science foundation course. Even before we taught them Ohm’s law, you know. You don’t have to go through all the basic sort of physics in order to get to the plums, if you like, at the end. And I think it’s important to get to plums quickly as an enticement for them to, to then go back and fill in the background of the more basic sort of physics. So that was a kind of crusade I had, and, it

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Russell Stannard Page 19 C1672/03 Track 6 seemed to go down well with the students. And so that had made relativity rather more accessible than had been the case before. [1:03:31] But then, my wife, Maggi, was taking a degree in education, I hasten to say as a mature student [laughs], she had always been a schoolteacher but she wanted to get official qualifications. And, one day she came to me and said, ‘Russell, I think you might be interested in what I’ve just been reading.’ And it was something about an American child psychologist called Jerome Bruner. And he wrote, ‘It is possible to teach any subject to any child at any age, in a respectable way’ or something like that, or meaningful way. ‘It’s all a matter of finding a courteous translation.’ And I thought, good Lord, you know, any child? Any subject? Relativity? What does he mean by courteous translation, you know? And that was really the trigger point for my writing a whole series of books for children. I, I had to think, well, what… A courteous translation. Well what kind of books do, do children read? Well, I’ve had four children of my own, but I, you know, this was, that was quite a long time ago and I can’t remember what they read. So I thought, well, well I’d better find out what kind of books children do read. And I was thinking in terms of eleven- and twelve-year-olds, that, that sort of thing. So I went along to the local library in Leighton Buzzard, went to the children’s section, and I got out, or I took down from the shelves, a whole pile of books, and I looked inside the cover. And those were the days where you had a sheet of paper there, and when you borrowed the book the date stamp was, was stamped there. So, you very quickly could pick out which books were popular, you know, which books got taken out and borrowed many many times. So I, I got this pile of books that had been obviously very popular, and, I sat down on the floor, well, the chairs in that part of the library were too small for me to sit on [laughs], it was more comfortable sitting on the floor, and I started going through these books to see what common ingredients there might be. The kids thought this was a bit odd, you know, this grown-up reading their books, sitting on the floor. But by the second week word seemed to have got round that I was a professor, and, professors are expected to be a little bit, odd, you know, so that was all right. Harmless but odd. What did I find out? Well I found out, well in the first place, there had to be illustrations. Because I used to watch the children, and they would take a book down and they would open it, flick through it. No pictures? The book goes back on the shelf. So, OK, illustrations. Humour. Short chapters. Even, even now I still get a feeling of achievement at completing a chapter. Lots of conversation, because that breaks up the page, and you get to the 19

Russell Stannard Page 20 C1672/03 Track 6 bottom of the page quicker, so again, it, it’s, it’s rewarding, you know? There had to be a character with whom the reader could identify, so there had to be a young character who was someone that they could identify with. And, it had to be written from a child’s point of view, and not from an adult’s point of view. You know, a child’s point of view, looking up at the adult world and not really understanding something, or what’s going on up there, rather than a condescending adult view of what’s going on. So that was that. I also combined that with trying to find out how children’s minds work. So I went first of all to the work of Piaget, the child psychologist, and also people who built up on the work of Piaget. The essential things one learns there is that one starts off as what he called a concrete thinker, so, one is looking out at the world. Understanding is, for a concrete thinker, is knowing what’s going to happen if you do something. So if I do this, if I touch that kettle, fff! ooh, I’m going to, I’m going to get hurt. So, I understand what that’s about, you know. Or, if I eat this Mars bar, I’m going to be - and that's good. So you’re always thinking about yourself looking out at the world. And, later on one gets to the formal operations situation where, where you start to see things from other people’s points of view. You’re beginning to take a sort of, an aerial view of, of how you fit in with other, other people. At that stage, you are beginning to understand in a different kind of way. You can formulate a theory out there, and you can see how it relates to the physical world, the real world. If the match isn’t very good, OK, lay that theory aside, produce another theory. Does that theory match reality better? OK, so you are taking this bird’s eye view of theories interacting with reality. So the question… And, when, when teaching relativity for example, you usually start off with two what are called axioms, one is that the laws of nature are the same for everybody in uniform relative motion, and the other is that the speed of light is the same for everybody. So you start off with that theory, and you work out the consequences and see how that relates to reality. It’s very much formal operations, OK. So the question then is, when do people go from concrete to formal thinking, you know, have they done that by age eleven or twelve, my target audience? Well Piaget thought that, yes, people did make that transition round about eleven, twelve, that sort of thing. Other workers said, oh no, actually, that’s a bit too restrictive. It’s between sort of, ten and fourteen. But then, along came other workers, people like Adey, Wylam and Shayer, who did surveys of large numbers of people, and they showed that by the age of sixteen only thirty-five per cent of boys had made the transition to formal operations, and thirty per cent of girls, even by the age of sixteen. And what’s more, the curves were flattening out. And nowadays it’s believed as much as sixty per cent of adults never 20

Russell Stannard Page 21 C1672/03 Track 6 make it to formal operations. So what that means is that sixty per cent of adults haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of understanding relativity if it’s taught in the normal way, starting off with the axioms. Because that is formal operations. And it’s interesting because, you can take them step by step, logically, from those axioms to the consequences, and they will nod and say, ‘Yes, OK, yes.’ Do you agree about that? ‘Yes.’ Do you agree about…? ‘Yes.’ And you get to the end. Well there you are, you understand relativity. And they say, ‘No, I, I don’t understand it.’ And what they mean is that, their thinking processes just cannot take on board that kind of understanding. So what that meant for me, addressing eleven- and twelve-year-olds, is that, I had to recognise that they were concrete thinkers, they think outwards from their own experience. [1:13:32] So, I thought, OK, I’ve got to write a story incorporating humour and character and all the rest of it that I had discovered in Leighton Buzzard library, but also had to bear in mind this concrete business. And, that’s why, for example… Well there are two characters. Uncle Albert, who is based on Einstein, roughly. He plays the violin, he doesn’t wear socks. That sort of thing, you know. He loves boating. And he thinks, he thinks a great deal: a theoretical experiment, er, physicist. And, in the story he thinks so hard that he produces a thought bubble over his head, and whatever he thinks about, becomes real in the thought bubble. And he has a niece called Gedanken, and if he thinks about a spacecraft, a spacecraft appears in the thought bubble, and if he thinks about Gedanken he can transport her up into the thought bubble, and she becomes the astronaut, all ready then to, to do wonderful discoveries. I… Although Einstein is – no, sorry, Uncle Albert, is, is the one who’s got all the clever thinking, I had to bear in mind that my reader was not identifying with Einstein. My reader was identifying with Gedanken, the girl. The choice of a girl was also deliberate, because, I had, when I was Vice-President of the Institute of Physics I was very concerned about the lack of women in, as physicists, so I thought, well let’s try to break this stereotype. If my reader is identifying with a child character, let’s make the child character a girl rather than, than a boy. After all, the boys have already got a male role model if you like in Uncle Albert. After I had written the book, someone said to me, ‘Oh. You made the child a girl. You do realise, don’t you, Russell, that whereas girls will read stories about boys, boys will not read stories about girls.’ And I thought, oh Lord, is that true? Well, later research showed that that was not true, that boys do read my books just as much as girls do. [1:16:42] 21

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Bearing in mind that the reader is identifying with Gedanken, she has to be a very feisty character. She mustn’t just simply be saying, ‘Oh, Uncle Albert, aren’t you clever. Oh thank you Uncle Albert, I didn’t understand that.’ No. He has got to depend on her. So he beams her up into the spacecraft, for her to go and make explorations which she then brings back to him, and he has to work out what they mean. But he is wholly dependent on her and her expeditions. So that makes her very important. And her first job is to go chasing after a light beam. And that is actually how Einstein got into relativity. He realised that the laws of physics are the same for everybody in uniform relative motion. So in other words, if you’re flying in an aircraft at 500 miles an hour, you don’t need a physics book to say, ‘Oh, how do I live at 500 miles an hour?’ You just live as normal. OK. He also recognised that amongst the laws of physics were Clerk Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism. And electromagnetism laws allow you to calculate the speed of light, you know, from the strengths of electric and magnetic fields you can work out what the speed of light is going to be, because light is simply a whole succession of electrical and magnetic pulses going through space, so their speed depends on the strengths of those pulses. And, the answer comes out at 300,000 kilometres per second. His genius was to recognise that, OK, everybody knew about Clerk Maxwell’s equations, everybody knew about the laws of nature being the same for everybody, uniform for everybody, but nobody had put the two together. He said, ‘Well OK, suppose for example you’re in a, in a car, and you’re travelling at thirty miles an hour, and it’s night time and the headlights are on, how fast is the light going from the headlights? 300,000 kilometres per second, that’s what the law says. Someone standing by the side of the road watches that car coming towards you. How fast is light going relative to him? Well you might think, well, 300,000 kilometres per second relative to the car, but the car was coming towards him at thirty-two miles per hour. So you add the two together, in the same way as a, a cricketer, fast bowler, comes running in in order to put his own speed onto the speed at which he releases the ball. But that can’t be right. Because the laws of nature, Maxwell’s laws, apply to the person that’s standing by the road just as much as it does to the motorist. So he must see that the speed of light is 300,000 kilometres per second. So how do you reconcile the two? There’s something wrong with our understanding of speed, and speed is simply distance travelled in a given time, so therefore there must be something wrong with our ideas about distance or space, or there’s something wrong with our ideas about time, or there’s something wrong with both, space and time. And it turns out that there’s something wrong with both space and time. And that’s how he gets into relativity. 22

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[1:20:24] So, what Gedanken does in her, her first adventure, is to chase after a light beam, thinking she’s going to catch up with it. But it keeps on going away from her at exactly the same speed, no matter how fast she goes. And she brings this discovery back to Uncle Albert, who then has to start working out what it means. So that’s the kind of… So what the girl is doing is actually living out Einstein’s thought experiments, or in German, Gedanken. Gedanken experiments. So that’s why she’s called Gedanken. So, I came to write The Time and Space of Uncle Albert, which deals with what we call special relativity, which is the effects on space and time of motion, of uniform motion. And at the end of the book there is a little appendix, a postscript, which points out that although you’ve been reading a story, actually, the science is true. It was discovered by Albert Einstein. And, so that makes it clear that, what is fictional and, and what is, what is fact, OK? [1:21:43] So there it was, I, I wrote it, and then I thought, OK, now, am I being stupid, you know? Are kids really going to be interested in this? Are they actually going to understand it? So, I recruited a local school, who supplied me with thirty children. I produced typescripts of the book. My wife Maggi, she’s an artist, so, she, she did some quick sketches so that there would be illustrations, which are important, you know. And, this was given to the children, and they had to read it within a month. And at the end of the month I set them an exam. And, yes, they understood it. They understood it, and they enjoyed it, and they found it interesting. I thought, good, great, so it works, you know. All I have to do now is find a, a publisher. Well I started off by sending it to a, an academic publisher. They wrote back a long letter saying, ‘Gosh, this is amazing,’ you know. ‘You really have explained it, you know, extremely well. But, you’ve done it in the form of a, of a story? We don’t publish stories. We, we publish textbooks. Can’t you just drop the story business and just explain the science?’ I said, ‘Nnn… no. No. My research indicates that part of the success of this is that it’s in the form of a story.’ So they said, ‘Well, in that case, you, you probably want to go to a normal children’s storytelling publisher,’ you know. So I did that, and they wrote back saying, ‘Gosh, it’s a very, very good story, you know, very funny, interesting. Good characterisation. But do we have to have all this science?’ I wrote back saying, ‘Well, of course, that’s the whole point of the book, is to get across the science,’ you know. So, they said, ‘Well, if that’s the case, then, probably you will, you ought to contact a, a textbook publisher.’ So I thought, I’ve already done that, you know. So, this kept on, I kept on sending the manuscript out; it 23

Russell Stannard Page 24 C1672/03 Track 6 kept on coming back with all these sort of, remarks. And I was getting, you know, very downhearted. And… But then I happened, you know, purely by chance, to hear a radio programme about William Golding, and how he had Lord of the Flies turned down by seventeen publishers. He was lucky at the eighteenth attempt. So I thought, well crikey, if the Nobel Prize winner for literature has to send a manuscript out eighteen times before it gets published, I shouldn’t give up too, too soon. So, eventually I got rejection letter number seventeen, and I said to Maggi, I said, ‘Look, you know, rejection letter number seventeen. I said I would send out the same number of times as, as William Golding. So that means I’m sending it out one more time, and when that comes back, I’m tearing the whole thing up and forgetting the whole thing.’ So, last time, who should I send it to? And Maggi said, ‘Well, who did William Golding send Lord of the Flies to?’ I said, ‘Well, I think it was Faber and Faber.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well send it to Faber and Faber.’ I thought, oh come on, you know, Faber and Faber, you know, Nobel Prize winners and all that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be interested in this. But I thought, well it’s going to get rejected anyway, so, I sent it off. And, the children’s editor, Janice Thompson at the time, wrote back saying, ‘Yes, I’ll accept it.’ I, I did not tell her that it had been rejected by all these others, because I thought, that would make her have cold feet. So it wasn’t until the book was safely on the shelves, and it was sold out within three months, that I was able to say, ‘Well actually, you were number eighteen on my list.’ And she said, ‘Well, now, Russell, I am able to tell you something. That of the unsolicited manuscripts I get, like yours, I accept one out of every 2,000.’ So it was a very, very close call for, for Uncle Albert. I later on asked her, you know, why did she accept it? And she said, well, she had herself always been sort of interested in science, but frankly had been put off it because, girls were not supposed to be interested in science. And she said, ‘What triggered me off was, you chose a girl.’ So there we are, that’s how the first Uncle Albert book got published. It went into twenty translations. [1:27:40] And then, [laughs] what then happened was, Janice, the editor at Faber, one day came back to me and said, ‘Russell, did Einstein discover anything else?’ [laughs] And, I said, ‘Well, yes, yes of course he did. All that book discusses is Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which is the effects on space and time of uniform relative motion. But he then went on to incorporate the effects on space and time of gravity and of acceleration.’ So she said, ‘Well, come on, how about Uncle Albert 2?’ So I thought, oh crikey, general relatively, that’s, that really is a bit tough, you know. 24

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But again, I thought, OK, Jerome Bruner said you can teach anything to any child, so, let’s, I said, ‘Let’s have a go.’ And that gave rise to the second Uncle Albert book, which was Black Holes and Uncle Albert. Again that, that was successful. But while this was going on, my colleagues at the Open University, you know, knew what I was doing with this sideline, you know, and they said, ‘OK, relativity, that’s, that’s rather simple, you know. How about quantum theory?’ you know. And I thought, oh my God, no, not quantum theory. You know, what was it, Feynman once said, anybody who thinks they understand quantum theory clearly doesn’t understand quantum theory. You know, it really is very very difficult. But I got thinking about it, you know, and, with the educational technologist training I had, you know, what do I actually want them to understand about quantum theory? Well I don’t have to go through all the, the history of the subject, which is very convoluted. No. This is what they start off by understanding, and that’s what I want out there to, them to get to. Yeah, there are actually quick ways of doing that, you know. So I then wrote Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest. Again, I, I tested it out, like the black holes book, and long before that on schools, and yes, they understood it, and they enjoyed it. In writing that, I, I wondered whether I dared go as far as introducing them to what was called the Bohr-Einstein debate. Niels Bohr, famous Danish physicist, and Albert Einstein, they had a big, big debate about what quantum theory was all about. And, sort of, in a nutshell, the problem is that, if you ask the question, what is, say, an electron, there are some experiments you do where the answer is, it’s a particle, it’s a particle with a certain mass and it has a certain electric charge. But in other experiments you carry out, it appears as a wave, a long, undulating wave. So the question is, well how can something be both a tiny, tiny little particle and at the same time a long, undulating wave? It’s called the wave-particle paradox. And, quantum theory is full of that sort of paradox, which is why it is so difficult to understand it. What Niels Bohr said was, what it is telling us is this: that, we were under the impression that the goal of science was to describe the physical world. All right, in order to do that, you have to take a look at it, you have to do experiments. But once you’ve looked at it, and done your experiments, what you write down in the physics textbook is a description of the way the world is, and whether or not you’re looking at it. What we discover from quantum theory is that what we have written down in the textbooks is not a description of the world. It is in effect a description of you observing the world. If you observe the world in a certain way, it comes up with the answer, electron is a particle. If you observe it in a different way, it comes up with the answer, the electron is a wave. You can’t do both experiments at the same time. 25

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And therefore there is no need to talk about, is it a particle or is it a wave? The answer is, which experiment, which observation, are you making? And I will then answer it. But I will not answer that question if you don’t specify how you are observing it. You’ve got to include yourself. Now Einstein did not go along with that. He remained absolutely adamant that the goal of science – all right, we hadn’t got there yet – the goal of science remains what we expect it always to be, which is the description of the world as it is in itself. Bohr said, no, it’s the description of you looking at the world, and that is all you are ever going to get. Get used to the idea, you know. And physicists sort of lined up one side or the other, and, there was never any resolution, although, I suppose the majority of physicists side with Bohr, because… This, this was a debate which was carried out in 1927. Well already we’re, you know, we’re almost 100 years on, and there’s been no progress, no progress in describing the world as it is in itself. [1:34:23] Now I in writing Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest, I thought, dare I include the essence of that discussion? And I did. The, the format of that final book is… I wanted to convey the, the magical side of quantum theory, so, when Uncle Albert uses his thought bubble to transport Gedanken, he transports her into the world of Alice in Wonderland. She meets up with the white rabbit and, and Gedanken and the white rabbit explore the quantum world together. And, she drinks the bottle, which makes her very small, so she goes down to the size of, of atoms. So she’s experiencing once again concrete thinking, she’s experiencing the behaviour of atoms behaving in their very strange quantum way, and reporting that back out. So, that, that is the context, that she is, she is in, in Wonderland, but it’s a Wonderland which is even smaller than Alice’s one. And, the final chapter of the book is based on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It’s called ‘The Mad Scientists’ Tea Party’. And it has Uncle Albert, his friend Niels Bohr, and others. Uncle Niels and other friends, and Gedanken, discussing quantum theory. Gedanken, putting in her two pennyworth, you know, she’s not sitting there thinking, ‘Oh aren’t you all clever.’ No, she, they’re having to pay attention to what Gedanken says, you know. So that’s, that’s the final chapter, and I thought, am I being stupid, you know? The previous book ends with Gedanken almost sucked into a black hole, it’s all very exciting, and rescuing her and all the rest of it. Here is a debate around a tea party. And that’s how the book is going to end. So I tried it out, as I say, on local schools. And one of the questions in the questionnaire was, ‘What was your favourite chapter?’ And to my total astonishment, their favourite chapter was ‘The Mad Scientists’ Tea Party’. [vocal sound] So, I went into the schools, 26

Russell Stannard Page 27 C1672/03 Track 6 having got these, I said, ‘Can you please explain, why did you like that last chapter?’ And the answer was, they never knew that scientists could disagree. And in the final postscript, I asked the reader, ‘Who do you side with, Uncle Niels or Uncle Albert?’ And they just loved the idea that they were being asked whether they thought Einstein was wrong. [1:38:00] That then became the most popular of the Uncle Albert trilogy. I was reading the Observer, and, they had a table of bestsellers, the week’s bestsellers, OK. And, I looked, and there was Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest, number five in the children’s list. I thought, oh, wonderful, you know, number five in the children’s list. And then I looked closer, I thought, John Updike, Joanna Trollope? I didn’t know they wrote for children. And then I suddenly realised, this was not the children’s list. This was the adult paperback bestsellers list. And my book for children, my physics book for children, was number five in the adult paperback bestsellers list. And then I just, by the five, you know, in brackets there was one, a number one. And I thought, well what are these numbers in brackets? That was the ranking of the book in the previous week. The previous week it had been the UK’s number one bestseller. Which, well, obviously I, no one had anticipated that. But I think it, it showed that, you know, adults can be interested in science, but they’re frightened of it. Produce a book which is supposed to be explaining Einstein’s theories to children of eleven and twelve, they must think, oh, surely I am in there with a chance. And, because it was written from the concrete operational point of view, and we now know sixty per cent of adults never make it to formal operations, they are concrete thinkers, and latest research shows that even if you made the transition to formal operations, if you are confronted with a new subject it’s probably best to approach it first time from a concrete point of view. That is the secret of, of that success. I was then asked, you know, OK, that’s, that’s three books, Uncle Albert, they’re getting better. How about number four? And the answer was, no. I said, no, my Uncle Albert character is based on Einstein. It would, it would not be honest to attribute to my Uncle Albert discoveries that Einstein had not made. So no, there will not be any more Uncle Albert books. That was a little bit premature, because, I, I got lots of letters from child readers, and they in themselves were, were very interesting, because, they ask questions about everything under the sun. And I thought, well this is strange, because, you know, the books are science books, so, OK, ask me science questions, but, why, why all these other questions, you know? Other questions, well in fact the most common subject was God. Well these kids didn’t know I was interested in God or anything of that kind. 27

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You know, is God left-handed or right-handed? You know, questions of that kind, you know. How old is God? you know. When God dies, who is going to be the next one? You know, questions like that. And then there was questions like, how do police dogs know which people are breaking the law? When I shut the fridge door, how do I know the light’s gone out? Why do people die in graveyards? You know… [laughs] You get a picture of elephants knowing they’re about to die so they go to a particular place and… And so on. And obviously, there were lots of questions on, on science. I… And, religiously, I, I replied to all these, all these letters, it was the only courteous thing to do. Although it took up an awful lot of time, I enjoyed doing it. And on one occasion, I forget what it was but, the question, and my answer, I thought was, was really funny, so I, I wrote off to the editor at Faber’s and, ‘You might be interested to see this letter and my reply.’ She immediately wrote back and said, ‘Have you got any more of these letters?’ I said, ‘Any more? I’ve got, I’ve got hundreds of them.’ She said, ‘A book, Letters to Uncle Albert. And your replies.’ So, we produced that. On one page you had a reproduction of the child’s letter, with inkblots and spelling mistakes and, drawings and things like that. And then on the other page was my answer to, to the question. And then… That was quite successful. So, that then gave rise to More Letters to Uncle Albert. And these were just a random selection of letters on, on all subjects, you know. And then, Janice suggested, well, why not have a book which is based solely on, on scientific questions, so, a more sort of serious book. So that gave rise to Ask Uncle Albert: 100½ Scientific Questions Answered. The half question being, why is there gravity? That allowed me to say, well, that actually isn’t a scientific question. The job of scientists is to describe the world as it is; we can’t explain why it is this world rather than some other world. So that was the half question. And Ask Uncle Albert was, was actually the most popular of, of the letters books.

[1:45:24] How many letters would you get a week from children?

Oh I can’t remember now. I was, it was over such a long period of time, but, it added up to, oh to several hundred I think, yah.

I was just wanting to, see if we could get a sense of what proportion of the total are reproduced in the two books. 28

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Oh. [pause] Well, all three books… Well for example, Ask Uncle Albert is 100 letters for a start, you know, there are 100 questions, yes. And the other two books would be about the same. So it’s 300. Oh gosh, I suppose… Hm. Six or seven hundred, something like that. Something like that. Mm.

[1:46:23] Could you say more about how, the decisions you made in designing the character of Gedanken?

The character of Gedanken?

Mm.

[pause] Well she, she had to be a very strong character. And, you know, she had to be intelligent, and very probing, wouldn’t let Uncle Albert pass her off with an offhand remark, you know. [pause] Essentially a, a character that, at least a girl would feel, oh yah, yah, she represents my, my sex very well, you know, sort of thing. And that a boy would feel that, yeah, she was, a bit of a tomboy. That, I think, I would describe her as a bit of a tomboy. So, she, she wasn’t sort of overly effeminate, sort of thing, you know, so that, she would have appealed to boys as well as, as girls.

Did the editor, it was Janice Thompson, did she have views on the character of Gedanken on…?

No.

No.

No. She, [laughs] she did have her views. Yes I had forgotten. When we came to discuss The Time and Space of Uncle Albert, the script, she said, yes, you know, she liked it, but, she said, ‘I don’t like the beginning. Which, rather upset me, because, I had spent so, so long writing and rewriting and rewriting the beginning, you know, because I realised how important it was, you know, the beginning. And, the beginning explained, you know, how there was this scientist, Uncle 29

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Albert, and how he had his niece, Gedanken, and, you know, all the rest of it, blah blah blah, and how they used to meet up and discuss. And she said, ‘No no no. No, no. Ah,’ she said, ‘I’ve got it. Throw away the first page. Start on page two.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘Start on page two. So it starts off, “’Turnip wants us to do a project,’ said Gedanken.”’ I thought, you can’t start off like that. Turnip? Who’s Gedanken? And then she’d talk about Uncle Albert. Who is Uncle Albert? You know, who are these people, and what, what is the context, you know? And, and Janice said, ‘You create tension, and then you release it. The reward is in the releasing of the tension you have created.’ Who are these people? Eventually you find out. Ah, they’re so-and-so. What’s…? Ah, this, that. And sure enough, if you read novels, most of them do, they do start in the middle, you know, in the middle of something, and then… So that creates tension, it’s got your attention. And then you get the reward of finding, oh, he’s so-and-so. Oh yes, oh he’s… Oh he’s related to so-and-so, I didn’t realise that, yeah. Yeah, OK, so that’s… So that’s how, that’s how it began.

And why Uncle?

Oh, and then the other thing…

Oh sorry, go on.

Another thing was that, the way I had got that… Yes, the way I got the original script of Time and Space of Uncle Albert was that, in addition to having the postscript explaining the science, I also had an appendix which was a quiz, to test whether they had understood it. And, Janice said, ‘I don’t like…’ She said, ‘I understand why you want the quiz, but it’s, it’s not right the way you have got it. It reads as a story, it’s a story; then to have a quiz, that sounds a bit, schoolish, you know. It’s not right.’ So I said, ‘Well, what do you have in mind?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know. Would you go away and think about it? I understand why you want it, but it’s not right the way you’ve got it.’ So I thought about it, and then it came to me. Gedanken, when she’s made all her discoveries, has to explain it to her teacher, Mr Turner, Turnip, OK, and she sets him an examination, to test whether he, the teacher, has understood what she, the pupil, has been teaching him. So it’s incorporated… Or… And, here is the, the question. And I also included, ‘But don’t 30

Russell Stannard Page 31 C1672/03 Track 6 look at the answers before you’ve answered the questions, Mr Turner,’ you know. So, the quiz gets incorporated into the story. And it also enhances the, the feistiness of, of Gedanken, that she has the cheek to test her teacher, which, again, goes down well with a young readership.

[1:52:44] Thank you. And, why uncle, who not, why isn’t this person a neighbour or, you know, or another kind of relation, why uncle in particular?

Sorry?

Why uncle for the relationship between Gedanken and…?

Oh, I just thought it was a, a nice sort of… Yah, you… Well, you… It just seemed a natural sort of relationship. Rather than having with her father, that they would have, have these sessions together. Well, if it was the father, you know, you, you wouldn’t have sessions. Oh it’s Friday night, we’ll have, we’ll have our science talk. Whereas, oh it’s Friday night, you know, I’m off to see Uncle Albert, you know? He’s expecting me, you know?

[1:53:36] Thank you. And, the questions concerning God that you got from the children, what did they tend to focus on?

Oh, oh they, they were very concrete sort of things, you know, what stops God falling out of Heaven? You know, that, that was one of them, you know. Yeah, the… They were the sort of questions that you, you would expect young children to come up with. You know, He being very much a man in the sky, sort of thing, you know.

[1:54:15] How difficult was it not to include God in the writing of the books in the first place?

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Oh, oh very easy. I… I try to keep… Actually I’ve written books about science, I’ve written books about science and religion, and in my mind I, I keep a pretty clear distinction between the two. Because I, I am conscious of the fact that, if I am, if the, if the aim of the book is to explain the science itself, then I am fully aware that it would be very off-putting for many of the readers who are atheists if I was dragging God into it. For that sort of book, you know, belief in God is, is irrelevant, and therefore it’s, it’s not included. There are other books I’ve written where, you know, God is, is very much part of, part of it. There is, for example, a book I wrote for children called Here I Am, where you have a child called Sam, and you never get to know whether it’s a Samuel or a Samantha, so that gets over the, the gender business. So, again, the child reader can identify quite easily with, with Sam. And, they are, oh Sam is, yah, has a computer, goes on the Internet, and comes across God’s website by mistake, yah? So this voice comes out saying, ‘OK, what’s your problem?’ you know. And, Sam doesn’t believe in God. But does believe in hackers and, people playing tricks with, with websites. So decides to, to play along with this, this character, find out who he really is, sort of thing. And they, they start, you know, discussing deep questions, the sort of questions you would ask God, you know. And, it’s a very advanced computer with a very realistic screen, so that, this God character, when he shows a scene of a certain situation, Sam feels drawn into it. So, this again is concrete thinking being, experiencing being involved in, in what, in what’s going on. And, and so, you know, they, they discuss all the big questions through the medium of this, this sort of thing. And, yah, that’s about it. And, just as you never find out whether Sam is a boy or a girl, you never find out whether the god is actually God or someone who is, having a joke, or… And in fact, the character says, ‘Well, does it actually matter whether I am running this website by some supernatural means? Because, I make use of people. It’s me talking through people. So, even if I’m a hacker, so what?’ So we did that. And, [laughs] it went into an American version, and, it was slightly rewritten for the American market. [laughs] And we made the mistake of putting a website address. And it was only after it was published, we thought, oh my God, they’re going to go to this website address.’ [laughs] So, we thought, we’ll have to create an address, God’s website address, you know. And, so we discovered that we, we would have to actually create God’s website address for them, you know. And then man it. And, oh crikey, we then got all these questions coming through, and discussions and… And, I always had to start off by saying, ‘I’m awfully sorry but God is rather busy at the moment. [laughs] He has asked me sort of, to stand in for Him,’ you know. [laughs] Yeah, it was, it was, it was quite a 32

Russell Stannard Page 33 C1672/03 Track 6 lot of fun, you know, talking with people on, on the Internet. But it, as you can imagine, it got out of hand; in the end we had to close it down, because it was, it was just taking up all my time. It was taking all my time playing God. [laughs] Yes.

Did you, were the, were the questions and comments always in the right sort of spirit, in the sort of, child-friendly spirit of it, or did you ever have questions that you felt were sort of, not really understanding? I mean were all the questions sort of, clearly from children and…?

Oh, I think they were, they were all, they were all honest questions. You know, people, youngsters, you know, generally, genuinely wanting to know the answers. They weren’t being, you know, clever, or trying to score points, or, or anything of sort of, of that kind. No, they… I can’t think of any exceptions actually. I think, I think, just about all of them were, entered into the spirit, you know. They obviously knew it was a kind of a joke, you know, the whole set-up, but it was their opportunity to ask questions which did genuinely concern them, yes.

Thank you. Oh, I wondered, are you able to remember whether any of the questions asked of God through that website concerned evolution?

Oh yes. Oh yes. The Adam and Eve business, and, versus evolution, was, was a regular, a regular one, yah.

And any other questions concerning the relation between God and science?

Oh, concern about miracles, you know, did they really happen, sort of thing, you know. That sort of thing. And of course, you know, why is there evil and suffering in the world, if God is supposed to be such a kind bloke, you know. So that, that is… In fact I had to write a book about that, that was called Why?: Why Evil? Why Suffering? Why Death? That was published by Lion. That wasn’t aimed particularly at children. It was, you know, a popular book, you know. Quite a small one, but it was trying to give some guidance as to how one might approach what is a very complicated subject, yes. So that, so that was an example of a book which was purely religious, it

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Russell Stannard Page 34 C1672/03 Track 6 wasn’t… All right, there were allusions from time to time to, to science, but it, that was a religious book, yes, from a religious publisher.

[2:02:59] When and how did you first become involved with the, the Templeton Foundation?

Ah. When the, when the first book I wrote was published, Science and Renewal of Belief, that caused quite a stir, because it, it had been the first book for, oh, many years on the subject of science and religion. So it came to the attention of the Templeton Foundation. And, the Templeton Foundation has always had a big prize, the Templeton Prize, which these days is worth a million pounds. That was not what I won, although some people think that I, I didn’t win that one. I didn’t. There was another one called the Templeton UK Project Award. Sir John Templeton was American by birth, born in Tennessee. I’m not sure, I think his mother might have been English, I don’t know, but anyway, he was very much an anglophile, very much an anglophile. And, you know, for example, he gave Westminster Abbey something like a million pounds to replace one of the stained-glass windows that were damaged during the war. And, because of his, his good works over here in Britain as well as in America, that, he was knighted, an honorary knight, OK. So he became Sir John Templeton. And he, as part of his links with the UK he created this award, which was only open to UK people. And, it was, I think, based mainly on the strength of that book that I won this prize. It doesn’t compare with ‘the’ Templeton Prize. I think the prize money was £3,000. [laughs] But, it was a very nice thing to get, yes.

And then, I, I understand that you worked then…

And I first met him when he came over, he came over here to, to present me with the prize. And, very soon after that, he wrote to me to say, ‘Look, you know, I have this foundation that I founded, the John Templeton Foundation, and, I would like you to join the Board of Advisors.’ So that’s how I came to get involved with the, with the working of the foundation. They had two boards of advisers, there was an American board and a European board. Each of those boards would meet once a year, and then there would, in addition, be a combined meeting of both the American and the European board. And that would be held in a variety of locations throughout the world. From 34

Russell Stannard Page 35 C1672/03 Track 6 that… And what they would do is, they would, the people who worked for the foundation, the officers, would explain what they were interested in, what they were interested in, in funding; they would give an account of what grants they had been making; and they would seek the advice of these people who were interested, mostly in the relationship between science and religion but, they were, they were interested in the big questions. So, there were philosophers there; they were also interested in character development, so people involved in some, developing children’s sense of right and wrong, that sort of thing. They were also interested in cultivating gifted children. So that was another of the projects they were concerned about. And they wanted to do research that nobody else would fund, like, research into the effects of forgiveness, you know. So that… And, acts of love, you know, research into that, why do people get involved in that sort of thing, and what are the effects of…? That sort of thing. That’s the sort of thing they were interested in. [2:08:11] Eventually, I was asked to become a trustee of the foundation. There were twelve trustees and I was the first non-American to be invited to be a trustee. I served for three years, then, that was renewed for a further three years. Then I had to come off for a year, because they have a rule that you can’t serve for more than six years in one go, you have to come off for at least a year. I came off for a year and then went back on again for a further series of six years. And currently I am on a small committee, a very influential committee called the Strategic Planning Sub-Committee, which has, overlooks what the foundation has been doing, assesses its effectiveness, and charts out how the, the foundation should develop in the future. For example, the first president was Sir John Templeton; it was pretty obvious that his successor was going to be his son, Jack Templeton; but then comes the question, well, OK, perhaps, you’re not always going to have a family member who is going to be suitable as the president, so you hire a non-family member. How do you go about recruiting such a person? Bearing in mind that this is not just someone clever at running an organisation, because for example, with the Templeton Foundation all meetings begin with prayer. Well, there are many high-flying people, businesspeople, who would feel very uncomfortable about starting a meeting with prayer. So, you know, how do you go… So, looking really into the future, how are things going to develop? And, Sir John was very canny. He was, he made his money through being a financial adviser, you know, he advised people on how to invest their money and, obviously would take a raking from the profits. And he was incredibly good at this. Currently the foundation has an endowment of something like £3 billion, and – $3 billion, American dollars, and 35

Russell Stannard Page 36 C1672/03 Track 6 makes grants of well over $100 million per year. So it, it’s a big organisation. And, it comes… Well, the John Templeton Foundation comes under the jurisdiction of the American government and their tax laws, and one of their laws is that, a charity must, in each year, give away something like five, well five per cent of its assets. OK, that’s averaged over a five-year period, it must average out at five per cent per year. And Sir John, looking ahead, thought, well, OK, at the present time there’s no shortage of good proposals coming through, there’s no, no problem in getting rid of five per cent per year. But the time might come when the proposals are not very good. And he said, ‘I don’t want my foundation to be forced into funding projects which aren’t very good, simply to meet the American taxpayers’ requirements, tax people’s requirements.’ So, what he has done is, he, he divided up the, the foundation into three foundations. There’s the John Templeton Foundation in Philadelphia, which comes under American law; there is the Templeton World Charity Foundation based in the Bahamas; and Templeton Religion Trust based in the Cayman Islands. So the other two trusts come under different jurisdictions. So that’s one of the things he does. [2:12:57] Another thing is that, Sir John was a very humble man, and, he always flew economy, or coach. Never first class or business class. Which, you think, gosh, you know, for a billionaire, that’s, that’s quite something. But of course it’s very canny. Because, if the president of the foundation is flying economy, it means that all his staff have to fly economy. So he’s not only saving the business class of his ticket, but all the other tickets who would otherwise, he would have to be paying. So he was very canny that way. And, when it came to investing his money, when he stopped being a financial investor himself, he appointed three financial advisers to invest the foundation’s money in future, and he would give a third of the money to each of these investors and say, ‘OK, you go off and see what you can do with it. And at the end of five years we will see how you get on, and whoever raises the least money will be sacked. It doesn’t matter how much you… The one who raises the least will be sacked.’ So that was quite a, an incentive. [laughs] So, you know, he, he was a curious mixture of, of a very humble and a very lovable person, but at the same time there was this, hard core, you know, there was no messing about with him, you know.

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On that occasion when you first met him, what was your, what were your sort of initial impressions of him, of his sort of, I’m getting here just sort of… A description of his appearance, and his sort of immediate character.

Oh. He was quite elderly then. He must have been in his seventies when I first met him. Because my association with the Templeton Foundation goes back, oh, something like twenty years now. I’m now one of the few people who, at the foundation who remember him, you know, and worked with him. My first impression was, a very nice, ordinary, well very ordinary sort of chap, you know, no airs and graces, you know, just a very, ordinary kind of person. Very nice. You know, he wasn’t, you know, he didn’t give any impression of being a high-flying financier, yah. There was just nothing about him at all which would indicate that here was a… Here was a very, very shrewd man. But a very, a very godly person, very very godly. You know, he would very easily talk about God, yes. Yes.

[2:16:34] How did, how did the way he would talk and think about God differ from the way you yourself might talk with him about…?

Oh very little. He was someone himself who very very much embraced evolution and, all scientific developments. He, he was extremely keen on, on science and wanting to advance science, especially if they were dealing with, with big questions which might have some knock-on effect as to how one might perceive the creator, the heavenly creator. Yah, he was, he was very forward- looking, and, you know, he had no time for people who would want to interpret the Bible literally. Which, which is actually quite amazing, because, he came from Tennessee, and Tennessee is, is not noted for its forward-thinking on religious matters, you know, there are, there are just so many Americans who adopt this literalistic approach to the Bible, and, and states like Tennessee are really hotbeds for that kind of fundamentalism, which he has no, no truck with at all, no truck with at all. So it was very easy to get on with him, you know. And he used to like what I wrote and, and what other members of the foundation were writing in similar vein. Mm.

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Did you get a sense of why he wanted you to join the Board of Advisors for Europe, what it was about you?

He, he just liked what I, I wrote in, in that book Science and Religion and Belief. It obviously rang bells with him. And, right from the start he, he sort of… And also, you know, I would speak up at Board of Advisors meetings, and quite often he would come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Thanks, thanks for saying that, that needed to be said.’ And so he, he very much thought that I was very much on the same wavelength as, as him, as far as that sort of thing was concerned. And it all came to a head when, when he was setting up those other two foundations in order to avoid putting all his eggs in one basket. When he set up the Templeton World Charity Foundation based in the Bahamas, he had to take legal advice. He said, ‘OK, I want to be absolutely sure that the American government can’t get their hands on that money,’ OK? So he took legal advice, and the legal advice came back to him, which really stunned him, it was to say, well, the only way you can be sure that they won’t think that it’s just a, an offshore bank of what is really the, you know, American thing, is if it has a different president, and a different board of trustees. You are to have nothing to do with it.

[telephone ringing]

[End of Track 6]

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[Track 7]

Well, the legal advice came back to him, and it was, it was very serious. In order to be absolutely sure that TWCF would not come under American jurisdiction, it would have to have its own president and its own board of trustees. He was to have nothing to do with it. Well you can just imagine how he felt, you know. [laughs] He was going to hand a billion dollars to somebody else, and he would have no say over it. Well, I got a message, I was at a Board of Advisors meeting, and I got a message that Sir John wanted to see me in private. And, I went to see him, and he explained the situation. And he said that, he wanted me to be the president of TWCF. That he felt that we were sufficiently on the same wavelength that he could trust me to, to carry out his wishes and not do anything that, that he wouldn’t approve of. I was very touched, obviously, and, you know, it was a big thing for him to decide to do. So I said, ‘OK, I’ll, I’ll think about it, but I am inclined to say yes.’ [laughs] But then we got thinking, and, in the days that followed I, I was talking to one of the lawyers, and I said, ‘Well, it’s based in the Bahamas. I don’t want to go and live in the Bahamas.’ You know, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a cultural desert. I’ve got family over, over here in Britain, I mean, you know, I, I don’t want to live over there. So, I would have to have an office over here. OK, several times during the year I will go to the Bahamas office, OK, and do what’s necessary over there, but, my main base must be some place like London. Well they came back and said, ‘Oh, that’s not very good. We’ve talked to Sir John about that, and, if that was to happen then, TWCF would probably come under UK law, and we don’t like UK law as far as charities are concerned any more than the American one; we want the, the freedom of the Bahamas, you know.’ So that, that got me really concerned. But fortunately, they took further legal advice, which indicated that they had in fact been too drastic in their first advice, that Sir John could remain president, and indeed they could still have the same trustees. The important thing was that all the decisions relating to TWCF would have to be made in the Bahamas. To the extent that, if someone in America wanted to join a meeting by conference call because they couldn’t physically get to the Bahamas, they had physically to be using a telephone that was not in America. They would have to go across the border into Mexico, across the border into Canada. Which is rather funny, but anyway, that’s… So that actually sort of, let me off the hook. So, afterwards it allowed me to say I became a billionaire, almost. [laughs] 1

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[04:21 Thank you. And, could you… Obviously it’s very, very difficult from the outside to sort of see what’s going on, but the Board of Advisors for example, the European Board of Advisors, if you are sitting in the room with the Board of Advisors, can you just give a sense of how many there are, who they are, what their background is, and what they are talking about.

Yah. I think the Board of Advisors would have something like, thirty people. So it was quite a big meeting. And then there would be additional people, guests, for that particular occasion, because of the particular topics that had come up. The Board of Advisors didn’t really work very well, and it was acknowledged that it was not working very well, because, when you have such a large number of people, you know, by the time you’ve added in the, the project leaders and, and officers belonging to the foundation itself, there would be something like fifty, perhaps sixty people in this big room. The table would be in a square. Well, it was a huge, huge square. It would always be held in a, a big, posh hotel where they’d have a… This would take over the ballroom or something of that kind. And there would be a projector at one end, and, formal presentations made as to how the foundation was doing, how much it had given that year. Different officers would give reports as to how their particular section was going, what particular important projects they had agreed to fund, what were the results of other projects they had in the past funded which, where the results had come through. So it tended to be a case of the foundation telling the advisers what they had been doing and what they planned to do. But when it came to what they planned to do, then, then it would be opened up to questions, you know, do you think that this is a sensible thing for us to be doing, you know, have we got the emphasis right, or, should we be concentrating on, some other field altogether, you know, have we worked this particular one to death, sort of thing? And, and then, OK, you, you did get people speaking up in this big number. But then, that had to change. And so, the format changed from being entirely a plenary series of sessions to some plenary and one where you break up into groups. And, the emphasis now, I’m not on the Board of Advisors now, but, the emphasis now is very much on group work. So, the people on the Advisors Board who are particularly interested in the physical sciences, they will get together and discuss those particular grants, and where that department should be going; then there’s the life sciences, so that

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Russell Stannard Page 3 C1672/03 Track 7 they will have a go. And so on. So, it’s taken quite a long time to, to get the thing to work properly. [08:00] And, and one suspects that, the main decisions all along have been made outside of those sort of meetings, OK, somewhat advised by what is heard at the meetings, but, outside, in, for example, what I’m now on, which is the Strategic Planning Sub-Committee, that, that really does make, make decisions. Because it involved the President as well as two or three other top foundation officials, and then there are five or six of us outsiders.

[08:41] What… I mean, what impression did you get of the, perhaps even better than an impression, of the kind of work that the foundation was supporting through service on the Board of Advisors? Because you were getting sort of, these reviews of projects and discussions of prospective projects. What were they at the time that you were on the board tending to support, what sort of work were they tending to support?

[pause] Well, it would, a lot of the work is setting up conferences, that sort of thing, in different parts of the world on different subjects. Sometimes they would subsidise the writing of a book, if someone, a sabbatical year, that they would write a book on a subject that they, that they felt needed to be written, and the person concerned was an expert in that field, but had so many other obligations that, they would essentially buy them out for a while. Running competitions for schoolchildren, getting them to write essays on what are called the laws of life, you know, what makes for ultimate fulfilment and happiness is not good looks or money, that sort of thing; it’s, it’s other things. And, those competitions have been held all over the world, all over. They’re quite expensive to run. But, that’s all part of the character development. And then there’s the research projects, like into forgiveness and that sort of thing, doing literature research, anything that anybody has ever written about forgiveness, and, again, holding conferences on that sort of subject to, to see if one can formulate something concrete to, to indicate, for example, that, what situations, who would benefit from people forgiving rather than trying to get their own back or whatever it might be. That sort of situation. One of the interesting projects and one of the most controversial projects they funded was a project trying to look at the efficacy of intercessory prayer, you know, 3

Russell Stannard Page 4 C1672/03 Track 7 does, when you pray to God for something, does it work? You know. What… You know, there had been quite a lot of research projects where people, what one group of people would be prayed for, you know, some kind of circumstances, and another group suffering from the same kind of circumstances would not be prayed for. You know, did it make a difference? The bulk of those surveys seemed to indicate, yes, those prayed for did do better. But the statistics weren’t very good, and, you could criticise the way the statistics were used. So the foundation decided, look, this is, it’s, it’s a strange sort of subject to be getting involved in. After all, it does say in the Bible, thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test, you know, and these people putting the Lord thy God to the test you know. But, you know, there’s so much of this going on, the question needs to be settled one way or the other. And what that means is that you need a big statistical experiment, expensive because it’s big. And, you need really good statisticians to be involved in making sure that the data is not biased in any, any kind of way. And the foundation was the only organisation which was in a position to, to fund such a big project. And it was a big project. They, they got three lots of 600 people, all of whom were going in for the same operation, coronary bypass surgery. Involves so many hospitals, you know? 600 of these patients were going to be prayed for by teams of intercessors. 600 would be told – would not be prayed for. And each of those groups, the people in them would be told, ‘You might be prayed for, or you might not be prayed for, and that’s all we’re telling you.’ The doctors and nurses and anybody who had anything to do with these patients had no idea whether they were being prayed for or not. It was a blind experiment. In addition, there was a third group of 600 who were told, you will be prayed for. And they were prayed for. So that was to see whether there might be some, shall we say, placebo effect, OK. That caused a lot of controversy when it was known that they were putting all this money into this monster prayer business. I, I felt very uncomfortable about it, and so did quite a number of the advisers. But it… Because, you know, the interpretation was inevitably put on it by outsiders, oh, you’re trying to prove the existence of God. That was never, never the, the aim. It was to see whether all these other surveys had come across something or not. We didn’t mind one way or the other what the result was going to be. [15:55] I, I myself was known over here to, to be a member of the Templeton Foundation, so, when this hit the news, that this was going on, I was asked to take part in a broadcast on BBC radio, the Newsnight broadcast, and, to explain what was going on. So I had no alternative but to agree to do 4

Russell Stannard Page 5 C1672/03 Track 7 this. The BBC sent a car for me. And we were driving into London. And, I asked the driver, you know, did he know who was going to be the interviewer. He said, ‘Oh yes, it’s going to be Jeremy Paxman.’ Well Jeremy Paxman had this reputation for being an absolute Rottweiler of, of an interviewer. He would reduce politicians to gibbering idiots, you know. He was an incredibly, incredibly aggressive interviewer. I thought, oh my God, what have I got myself into, you know. Anyway, we got to the studio, and I was put in the green room. The door flung open, in comes Lewis Wolpert, who is a professor at University College London, my old college, an atheist. I, I get on well with Lewis, despite the fact that, you know, we have these arguments about religion. And he, he swept in, and, [laughs] in his very extrovert way, he, he flung his arms round me, ‘Russell, Russell, my dear boy, what have you got yourself into now with this experiment of yours?’ I said, ‘Lewis, it’s not my experiment.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘thank God for that.’ [laughs] I explained, you know, what my connection was, that it was just something one, connected with a foundation that had agreed to fund the… It’s not my experiment. Well then in comes Jeremy Paxman, and, ‘Oh,’ he says to me, he says, ‘you’re… I’m told that you’re, you’re a reader in the Church of England? Which church?’ And I said, ‘Oh, St Barnabas Church, it’s in, it’s in Leighton Buzzard.’ ‘Leighton Buzzard. Oh, would that come under the Diocese of Oxford? Bishop Richard?’ I said, ‘Yes, yes that is, that is.’ I thought, oh crikey, fancy him knowing that, you know. Anyway, we went into the studio, and, and we recorded the programme. It, it went fine, you know, he wasn’t at all vicious or anything of that kind. You know, I had, I had to explain that, you know, it’s not actually our idea but we’re just trying to, to clear up once and for all, this one way or the other, and we, we don’t care twopence which way it comes out. I said, in fact, you know, it could be embarrassing if it comes out as being positive, because, you know, it could well be that it then turns out to be cheaper for the National Health Service to hire vicars to pray for people, and, and sack a few doctors, you know, I’m not sure that one wants that to happen. And I said, and not only that, but it also means that, if prayer does work, it’s likely to foster rivalry, you know, are Catholics more effective at praying than, than Protestants, and, and stuff like that, you know, and, do we really want to go down that path? And, and as I said, you know, it does say in the Bible, you’re not supposed to put God to the test anyway, so, I can well imagine God’s just not going to play ball. So anyway, that was that. And, we got back into the green room afterwards, and, Paxman said, ‘[exhales] I think that went very well.’ He said, ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘there’s only one group of people I prefer interviewing than academics, it’s bishops. You always get your 5

Russell Stannard Page 6 C1672/03 Track 7 money’s worth with bishops.’ [laughs] Which I thought was rather funny, and, I think Paxman’s reputation really comes from the fact that so often he’s called upon to interview politicians, and politicians never answer his questions, and that just annoys him so much. Whereas academics and, and bishops, if you’re asked a question, you, you try to answer it, you know. So that was that. And the final end point of that was that the, the experiment turned out to be a non-result, there was no difference between being prayed for and not being prayed for, under those circumstances. But, it, it really doesn’t answer any questions really, because, when we say that they were being prayed for, all the prayers, intercessors, were given the names of the people they had to pray for, and what their condition was. Well, you know, one can well imagine God not really paying much attention to someone who doesn’t even know who they’re praying for, and comparing that with the prayers of a loved one, you know. The heartfelt prayers of a loved one could be something quite, quite different, yah? So, I’m glad that the whole thing ended up as a non-result and we can forget about that sort of project. And the foundation has not funded anything like that since. It was just a one- off, that one.

[22:22] Did you, on the Board of Advisors, voice your concerns about that project as well as experiencing concern?

Not, not sure whether I did it at the board. I certainly, because of my connections with the people working in the foundation, I certainly let them know that I felt very uncomfortable about this, and, and we did have many discussions about how to handle this. And in particular, we decided to put up on the website before the results came out saying, ‘Look, we are not looking for a positive result. This is our motivation for doing so, OK? So, it’s not an attempt to try to prove God exists, that’s not it at all.’ So we had that up on our website so that, if afterwards people started saying, ‘Ha ha ha, you were proved wrong,’ we could say, ‘Look at the website,’ OK. So, we had to have discussions about that.

And was Lewis involved in the debate with Paxman? He was in the green room. Lewis Wolpert, was in the green room; was he actually, as part of the broadcast?

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Oh yes he, yes, yes the broadcast was between Paxman, Wolpert and myself, yah, it was a three- way discussion, yah.

And do you remember what his position on it was?

No, no I don’t really, except, you know, he… Well, I think he just thought the whole thing was a joke. [laughs] ‘I’m amazed that someone’s prepared to spend money on something like this,’ that, that was, you know, the sort of attitude he took, yes. Yes.

[end of session]

[End of Track 7]

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Russell Stannard Page 1 C1672/03 Track 8

[Track 8]

Could you start today by telling me the story of your Gifford Lectures, focusing if you could on those things not apparent from your autobiography, in particular, this was the first time the Gifford Lectures had agreed to really open up to the public by the timing of the event, wasn’t it, and I wondered what you remembered in particular of the public response to the lectures, the sort of questions afterwards, that sort of thing.

Yes. Yes, I was very pleased to be invited to, to give a Gifford Lecture.

[telephone call]

[End of Track 8]

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Russell Stannard Page 1 C1672/03 Track 9

[Track 9]

Yes, I was very pleased to be invited to, to give the Gifford Lectures, because it’s, you know, quite an honour. They, [laughs] they gave me six years’ notice. So, you’d got no excuse for not preparing properly for it. And when I discussed with the people, this was in Aberdeen, what I might be talking about, and, I said that… I had, as part of my preparation, gone back to Lord Gifford’s will where he set up these lectures, and, he made it clear that, much to my surprise that, these lectures were supposed to be open to the public, to those ‘without matriculation’ he said. Which surprised me, because, the Gifford Lectures, that I knew about, were extremely sort of academic, they were an academic, the sort of, towards the end of his life would sort of, be summing up his life’s work sort of thing for fellow academics. So, I said to the Aberdeen authorities that I would like to get back to Lord Gifford’s original intention, that I should speak at a level that was understandable for members of the general public. And they said, OK, that, that’s fine. So I then said, ‘OK, well, in that case presumably the lectures will take place something like, seven o’clock in the evening?’ And they said, ‘Oh no, oh no no. No, the Gifford Lectures always take place at five o’clock.’ And I said, ‘Well, members of the public won’t be coming at five o’clock, they’re still at work, they’re still, have their evening meal. No, it has to be in the evening.’ And, they said to me, ‘Well, the trouble is that, you have to face the fact that the Gifford Lectures are, have a reputation for being impenetrable,’ that’s, [laughs] that’s the word that was used, that they are very high-flown. ‘And you are unlikely to get members of the public coming; you know, your audience is likely to be the usual one of academics, and, once the academics go home at the end of the day, it’s difficult to expect them, you know, to come back again to the university in the evening. So it has to be at five o’clock.’ And I said, ‘Well, look, I, I am willing to risk talking to myself, you know, if the academics don’t come back, then, OK, they don’t come back, and if the public don’t turn up, the public don’t turn up.’ These lectures are split up over two years; I think I gave six lectures each year. I said, ‘For the first year, let’s, let’s make it seven o’clock, and if you are right and nobody turns up, then OK, for the second year we’ll go back to five o’clock.’ So, somewhat reluctantly I think, they, they agreed to that. And I realised of course I was going out on a limb. Anyway, when the first night came along, I was very, very anxious as to how many people would come. Well in fact a lot of people did come, members of the public and, and also some, some 1

Russell Stannard Page 2 C1672/03 Track 9 academics. And, I’m happy to say that by lecture number six people were getting there half an hour before the lecture was due, and, it ended up standing room only. So, I’m glad that I, I stuck to that original intention, yes.

How did you, given that you were interested in giving public lectures, lectures that could be understood by people outside of any particular field, how did you go about making them appealing, or making them understandable, in the way that you chose what to talk about and how to talk about it?

Well I did have a lot of experience of giving lectures on that subject, to church gatherings, to schools, conferences. And of course I by then had already written quite a bit for the public. And, I had also written books for children, which you might think, well, what’s that got to do with it? Well, it has a lot to do with it, because, when I started writing for children, I looked up quite a bit to do with educational psychology, you know, how people organise their thinking, or children do. But the thing is that, later research shows that adults, a considerable proportion of adults, organise their thinking very much like, like children, what we call concrete thinkers, rather than formal thinkers. And so, when I structured my books for children, the principles I was using were going to be suitable for, in fact, the majority of adults as well. So, some of that background thinking is always there when I’m addressing adults; the assumption that most of my audience are probably going to be what we call concrete thinkers rather than formal thinkers. So, I think, I think that helps.

[06:51] Thank you. And what do you remember of the, there’s questioning presumably after the lectures, questioning…?

Yes. Yes.

What do you remember of what the, the public, the audience, on these occasions were interested to ask you?

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[pause] I can’t remember any of the, the actual questions. I think, one of the main problems people have is a lack of understanding as to how one understands the Bible. For many people, when they think about the word ‘science’ and the word ‘religion’, they put them together, the next word that comes to mind is ‘conflict’. And, this is an attitude which is fostered by what today we call the New Atheists, although in fact there’s nothing new about what they’re saying. It’s a movement which is, I suppose led by Richard Dawkins. And, the way Richard Dawkins attacks religion is, he focuses on a particular kind of religion which is fundamentalist, a very literalistic approach to the Bible, and he attacks that, in the belief that he is attacking Christianity in general. OK, he’s certainly attacking a certain branch of Christianity which is particularly prevalent in the United States, where a lot of people there believe in the literal interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, six-days creation, that sort of thing, to the extent in the States you have some people trying to get education authorities to teach the Adam and Eve story as a viable alternative to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. And, I, I can well appreciate, and sympathise, with Dawkins over this, because, it is, I think, quite ridiculous to, to put up the Adam and Eve story as an alternative to evolution. I think to myself, you know, suppose these same people were to try to insist, in my physics and astronomy lectures, I was to give six-days creation as much time as the Big Bang theory. And in fact it’s, it’s quite interesting that there is not that pressure to, to teach six-days creation instead of Big Bang as there is to teach Adam and Eve rather than evolution. I think that that in itself indicates that these arguments are, are very emotional; people, some people don’t like the idea that they are descended from the same ancestors as, as monkeys, whereas, they don’t feel so threatened by Big Bang theory. [10:34] So, yes I, I can understand Dawkins getting upset. Where he goes wrong is, assuming that, having shot down the literal interpretation of Adam and Eve, that he has therefore discredited religion in general. What he doesn’t realise is that, with Genesis you are dealing with a particular kind of literature. Theologian and biblical scholars call the Adam and Eve story an example of myth. Now of course with the word myth, you have to be very careful because, today if I call something a myth, I mean it’s not true. Here we’re using the word myth in its strictly technical sense, that it refers to an ancient narration which, although, fair enough, it describes something that didn’t actually happen as such, but that wasn’t the point. It’s, it’s a story which encapsulates deep timeless truths, and that was the means by which ancient civilisations, not just the Jews but most 3

Russell Stannard Page 4 C1672/03 Track 9 ancient civilisations, would pass on the fruits of their wisdom to future generations. They did it in story form. Why? Well I suppose it’s got a lot to do with the fact that in those ancient times most people couldn’t read or write, so they had to rely on what they were told. Now we’re not, we’re not very good at remembering what we have been told, you know, verbal things. So, the ancient people were actually very clever, they, they did recognise that we were not good at remembering what we’d been told, but there is one sort of thing that we are good at remembering, and that is a story. You remember how a story began, and then, that triggers off the memory as to, oh, then, what happened after that? Oh, and then after that she said this; and then so-and-so came in; and, oh and then after that… Before you know what’s happened, you have remembered the whole of the storyline. So they would take a storyline, very rich in its imagery, you know, ribs being taken out of someone’s side, sort of thing, serpents talking and that sort of thing, and they would graft onto this vivid storyline the timeless messages that they were wanting to pass on. So for example, Eve being made out of a rib taken from Adam’s side. Well what that means is that man is not complete without woman, woman is not complete without man. It is talking about marriage, how in an ideal marriage you are sort of one flesh, you know? The taking of the forbidden fruit. That’s saying that basically, deep inside us we are basically selfish and self-centred, we want to do what we want to do and not what we’re told to do. We’re disobedient. And that is a fundamental trait in human nature which one has to recognise and deal with. Now, that actually is borne out by the theory of evolution, you know, the survival of the fittest, so, certainly an element of selfishness, indeed aggression, we would expect to find there in our DNA, and, these ancient writers knew that we were basically selfish. Which is, which is, you know, I think a big insight, because when you, when you look at a baby in a cot, you know, you think, oh, how, how innocent it is, and, how it’s going to be unfortunately corrupted by society. And the ancient wise people said, no, it’s not like that. This tendency is there in the baby, you know. Doesn’t matter how well you bring it up, how well you try to insulate it from bad, evil, outside influence. It’s in there already, you know. So, those are the kinds of… And the whole idea that, you know, God created the world is, is an indication that, we have no right to this life, you know, it’s a gift, and having been given this life, we owe it to somebody, we owe it to God, we, we owe it to, to live it the way it was intended to be lived. So those are the sorts of deep timeless truths that are, are contained in the Adam and Eve story. It was never meant to be a literal account of how we came about physically. [15:29] 4

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In fact the… This is, this is not a new interpretation, I hasten to say, it is not theologians having been faced with Darwin’s theory thinking, oh crikey, you know, how do we respond to this? Oh, I know, we’ll, we’ll say that… It’s not like that at all. I can illustrate that by saying, who do you think said the following words? ‘In the beginning were created only the germs or causes of the forms of life which were afterwards to be developed in gradual course’? Clearly a statement of evolution of some kind or other. But that was not Darwin. That was St Augustine, St Augustine. And he was not alone in regarding Genesis as having to be read as analogy. If you look at the writings of other early church fathers, hardly any of them spoke as though it was literally to… Origen said, for example, ‘What man of sense could believe that there could have been a first and a second and a third day of creation, each with a morning and an evening, before the Sun had been created?’ The Sun supposedly created on the fourth day, you know. The literal interpretation of the Bible in fact only came about at the time of the Reformation in the, what was it, fifteenth century. What happened there was that the Protestants were breaking away from the rule of Rome, the Pope, and they were challenged as to what was their authority for doing this. And they said, the Bible. That’s, that’s what we’re sticking to. We’re not paying any more attention to the Pope, that’s all very corrupt. No, the Bible is what we go back to, that’s our authority for what we’re doing. And those who remained loyal to Rome said, well, OK, yes, we accept the Pope as an authority, but we too accept the Bible as an authority. Protestants said, ah, but you don’t, you don’t revere it the way we do. And they said, yes, we do. And, eventually the Council of Trent, what was that, 1542, something like that, that was the council that the Roman Church put together to define what their attitude was vis-à-vis the Protestants, and it was that which declared that the Bible was written at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. That’s how much they revered the Bible. It was actually the word of God. All Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were doing was just taking down dictation like secretaries. Which was crazy, because, as you go through the Bible there, there are changes of writing style. There are inconsistences, one part doesn’t agree with another part, over certain kinds of details. And so you think, God didn’t remember what He had said earlier, sort of thing? It didn’t make sense. And it wasn’t until Vatican II that the Roman Church eventually got around to modifying that and, and declaring that the Bible was written at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Not, not the dictation, the inspiration. And it specifically said how there was room for the writers of the Bible to have their own influence on, on what, on what they wrote, which of course was much more sensible. So, this conflict between science and religion, on that sort of basis, you 5

Russell Stannard Page 6 C1672/03 Track 9 know, that you’ve got to accept the theory of evolution and therefore jettison religion, that is all false, it’s just totally false, and so… It actually takes quite a bit of time to sort of, get people to sort that out in their minds. [19:43] And I suppose another strand of difficulty is that, the Bible is full of accounts of, of miracles, you know, Jesus walking on water and, feeding of the five thousand, and, miraculous healing, miracles and that sort of thing. And, these days it’s natural for people to, shall we say, be unsure about all this because, certainly, although there are claims of miracles these days, they don’t seem to be happening anything like as frequently as, as they did in biblical times. And at this… Well I think one has to accept that, people in general in those days, they did not think scientifically. You know, this sort of scientific attitude that we have, you know, where you say, ‘OK, I’m prepared to believe something, but show me the evidence,’ it’s a fairly recent phenomenon, the last three or four hundred years. And, prior to that time, people had a much more sort of free and easy attitude as to what could and couldn’t happen. And, ancient people actually took a positive delight in tales of wondrous happenings, they weren’t cynical, they weren’t sceptical. They thought, oh, that’s a wonderful story, I like that, I like that, you know. And you can see that, if you look at the, the writings that did not get into the Bible, what we call the apocryphal writings, you know, the Bible didn’t come down from Heaven as a, a book, you know; the various councils, church councils, had a lot of discussion and argument as to which books ought to be included in the Bible, and often it was, it was touch and go as to whether one got in or not. And when you look at the ones that didn’t get in, they are full of extraordinary stories, like for example, Mary placing the infant Jesus on, on a donkey, and the donkey was some, someone who had been turned into a donkey. And by placing Jesus on the donkey’s back the donkey transformed back into the person. Crazy. The stories about Jesus as a schoolboy, making a clay model of a bird which was so good that it flew out of the window. You know, to our thinking, you know, one thinks, oh this is so stupid, you know. Why would anybody think up something like that? Although of course we do have science fiction, you know, we adopt a different frame of mind if we’re, if we go to a film which we know is science fiction. And, there is the worry that, when we see all this blatant story making up happening in the books that didn’t get into the Bible, it does raise the question, well, has some of this got into the Bible, you know? So that’s one worry. Another is that, today we might have some more commonplace explanations of the so-called miracles. You know, the casting-out of demons might 6

Russell Stannard Page 7 C1672/03 Track 9 be regarded as the work today of a good psychiatrist. The parting of the Red Sea, some people put that down to a strong wind which blew the sea, sea apart sort of thing. The feeding of the Israelites in the desert on manna; well we now know that, manna is actually a syrupy secretion given out by an insect called Trabutina mannipara. It’s, it’s, in season it’s the, it’s a part of the diet of Bedouin Arabs, so, it doesn’t come down from Heaven, it’s, you know, secreted by insects. So, there is a, an ordinary explanation for that. So, the fact that… Oh, and then another thing is, you know, Jesus walking on water. Well if you, if you go back to the original Greek, there is… Well there were two stories. There’s Jesus walking on the water, with the Disciplines in a boat, and, Peter gets out of the boat to go to Jesus, trying to walk on water himself, and ends up in the water. Then there’s another story soon after the Resurrection where Jesus is walking on the beach and the disciples are in the boat, and Peter gets, and he’s impatient, he gets out of the boat to swim to Jesus. So the stories are very similar, except that on one occasion Jesus is walking on the water, and on the other He is walking on the seashore. Well if you go back to the original Greek, you will find that there is confusion between the phrase ‘walking on’ and ‘walking by’. If you’re walking by the water, you are on the seashore. So, some biblical scholars think that what happened is that there was a single story, Jesus was actually on the seashore, and someone mistranslated, invented this story about walking on the water. So I think that, that that is, you know, the whole sort of, ethos of a plethora of miracles is something that, you know, some people thinks discredits those accounts. Mind you, one has also to bear in mind that, if Christians are right and Jesus was the Son of God, and this was a unique period in the history of the world, then, you know, perhaps more unusual things might happen then. And, if, if God created the world, and He created the laws of nature, then they’re His laws, so, He can do what He likes with them, you know, if, if He feels that a situation merits it. But, there’s no doubt that, that for some people this is a stumbling block, OK?

[27:32] Thank you. Could you tell the story, in as much detail as you can remember, especially details of, sort of, how practically it came to, to be, that is the making of ‘The Question Is…’ TV series for young people, in fact for schools?

Yah. Yah. [pause] I, I had already written my first science and religion book, Science and the Renewal of Belief, OK, so I’d got used to the idea of trying to explain how I saw relationships 7

Russell Stannard Page 8 C1672/03 Track 9 between science and religion. That was in written form. But, I was, I was aware that, you know, children do spend a lot of time watching television and videos and things of that kind, so… And I also knew that, with my work at the Open University, I have been trained to, to use television, to be a presenter. So I was, I was quite familiar with the video medium, and so that gave me the idea that perhaps one could put across the same ideas in video format as well as written format. And, here in the United Kingdom, religious education in schools is, is compulsory, which is not to say it’s, you know, trying to make converts. It’s, it’s not religious instruction, it’s religious education. It’s education about religion, OK? And, I have always thought that one ought to include in those, those lessons a discussion about the relationship between science and religion, because that’s what people think about. But you’ve then got the problem that, how are the teachers of religious education, how are they going to teach it? Because, they’re not trained in science, or most of them aren’t, and they certainly aren’t trained in the relationship between science and religion. Indeed, because of the difficulty of finding teachers to teach RE, or religious studies, RS, some of the teachers of RE aren’t actually very good at teaching religion let alone science and the relationship between science and religion. So the problem was, how to get the relevant information into the classroom if you couldn’t rely on it coming through the teacher? And so it seemed that providing a video resource would, would be the way to go. And, I applied to the John Templeton Foundation for, for money to make such a video, and, they agreed to fund it. And, I got in touch with David Poyser, who was a BBC producer, and together we made The Question Is, which was a series of short videos dealing with different aspects of, of the relationship between science and religion. And, I’m happy to say that forty per cent of all UK secondary schools bought a copy of that video series. Which just went to show that there was a need for something like that. And, this continued to be used in many schools ten, fifteen years after. After about seventeen years I think it was I realised that it looked a bit sort of, out of date obviously. And so, I put it to the Templeton Foundation that we should remake it in a, in a different format, one which would be more appealing to a modern child. And so, that gave rise to another video series called Science and Belief: the Big Issues, where each… Well, with most… It was ten episodes; I think seven of them were built on the same format, which was, you start off with rapid statements by sixth formers of how they see things, very contrasting, from devout believers to out-and-out atheists. And the point of that was to indicate the wide range of viewpoints that there were on this. And then, I come along and I, I provide the information that I think people need to know in order to make an 8

Russell Stannard Page 9 C1672/03 Track 9 informed judgement as to what they actually think is the situation. None of these episodes ends with any conclusion; in fact they end with two or three questions, to reconsider in the light of what you have now been told, OK? And then there are three other episodes where I actually meet up with the young people who have made those statements at the beginning. By now they have had a chance to hear and see what I have said, and then they, they respond to that, and re-engage in a round-table discussion. So that’s the format. And that is now in forty percent of UK secondary schools. [34:14] So that was two video series. Then there was another one, called Tackling Tough Questions, which is a video series which looks at the question of evil and, and suffering. And for that we engaged two actors, a boy and a girl. The girl was the atheist, the boy was a believer. And, that, that series was bought by twenty per cent of UK secondary schools. So, so that’s me and my relationship with schools. [35:02] Then there was another video series I made called Boundaries of the Knowable, which was not aimed at schools, just the general public. And it’s up on YouTube, so anybody can access it through their computers. And that was a series which, in which I draw attention to some of the deepest questions facing science today, and in fact speculating as to whether these questions are so deep that they will never be answered. Like for example, the question of consciousness. This is something which has eluded people for, well, forever I suppose. Sometimes you get a claim, like for example the philosopher Dan Dennett wrote a book called Consciousness Explained. Well, it does nothing of the sort. So that is… It’s been around for so long that you begin to think, well perhaps there is no way of solving that. And then there’s the question of free will, do we have free will if, if our description of the physical world is all in terms of the deterministic following of the laws of nature? That’s another problem. The reasons for thinking that science might be limited, well there… You have to think of, what are we doing our science with? Well we’re doing it with our brain. Well what is the brain? Well it’s something which has evolved. It’s all to do with survival, survival and self-replication. It’s part of our survival kit. And so you think, well, if that’s what it’s actually all about, what makes you think that something like that is going to have the power to understand everything? So that’s one reason for being a bit modest. Another is, is practical reasons. You know, we are dependent on gaining evidence. Recently, we made the 9

Russell Stannard Page 10 C1672/03 Track 9 discovery of the Higgs boson. It’s a fundamental particle which plays a special role in providing mass for all the other fundamental particles. It was a very attractive theory, and scientists wanted to believe in it, but, being scientists they couldn’t believe in it until there was evidence. So, a machine was built, the Large Hadron Collider, circular machine, seventeen miles in circumference. Incredibly expensive. But it was necessary to build something that big and that powerful in order to be able to convert the energy generated into mass, into the mass of a Higgs boson. And, at the time that we’re speaking now, the Higgs boson has been discovered, and so now we can all believe in the Higgs boson. But, you then say, well, how big a machine are you actually going to need in order to, if you like, come across the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle? For example, there is currently a, a very, very attractive theory called string theory, which regards the fundamental particles as not little bits of dirt, but as tiny vibrating strings, and it’s the different modes of vibration of the string which give rise to the different kinds of particles that we identify. A very attractive idea. The only trouble with it is that, it is anticipated that if these strings exist, they would be so small that you would need a Large Hadron Collider the size of the galaxy to be able to see that they are indeed tiny strings. You see there is, there’s no reason at all why the physical means of gaining all the evidence you need should happen to be geared to the gross national product of planet Earth and human beings. So that’s another reason for, for being cautious.

[40:33] In the first series of videos you said that, having got the Templeton funding, you got in touch with David Poyser. How did you know he was the person to get in touch with?

Oh, because he, he made television programmes for the Open University. Because the Open University operates in collaboration with the BBC, and when we started up we… All the programmes were produced by BBC producers who were assigned to the Open University. So, I had already forged good relations with certain BBC producers, so, that was an entrée into it.

Did he have a particular interest in science or in religion or in both?

No no no no. No. No, no he, he had himself no, no particular interest in that. But, you know, you, he was a good TV producer, which is all I was wanting, you know. 10

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[41:44] And, when you said that you felt that the RE teaching in schools should include science and religion, I think you said because that’s what people think about, what was your evidence for that, that…? I know this is a deliberately naïve question, but from where were you getting the impression that when schoolchildren think about religion, they also would naturally think about science and its relation with religion?

Well, I suppose once that first book of mine, Science and the Renewal of Belief, came out, I then started to get requests from, well churches and schools to come and talk to their children. I suppose the RE teachers realised they, they weren’t themselves qualified, and they, so they invited me. And so I, I would go and give a talk. And then of course, there would be questions afterwards. And it was from the questions I was getting that I realised that, you know, these kids, you know, really are puzzling over these matters. So, that was… In fact the whole, the whole business of me getting into this was started off by, I don’t know whether I talked about this before, but I was invited to go to the island of Jersey, to…

Yes.

I’ve already been through that, yes, OK.

Yes. Yes.

So it was meeting up with those sixth formers in Jersey, 150 of them, and the questions they fired at me, made me realise that, you know, these young people really do think about such matters. And that was then confirmed when I was invited to give talks to schools in, throughout the UK. So, it’s from their feedback that I, I know that, they do want answers to their questions.

I wonder whether they were asking you questions about relations between science and religion because you were a scientist who was talking about religion.

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Well yah, because I think you see that, the media, the media gives the impression that science and religion are at loggerheads, and you can understand why, you know, it, it sells newspapers, it makes for good viewing figures, you know. God is dead. Oh, I must, must watch that. A programme called God is Alive and Still in Charge is, is not going to attract much of an audience. So, the media have a vested interest in stoking up controversy, controversy in all walks of life, so, science and religion is, is as good a one as, as anything else. So, when these young people have had it banged into their heads, oh, you know, Richard Dawkins says that religion’s a load of rubbish, so, hold on, how, how can a professional scientist like Stannard, he’s also a preacher, how does he… what’s that about? So I think it’s the fact that I, and, and so many others, you know, scientists and, manage to be scientists and also religious, does then make them say, well, how does he, how do they manage to do this?

[45:38] Who were the contributors to the, the first The Question Is…videos? Because you had, it includes other scientists talking on the videos as I understand it, there’s a list for example in your autobiography that includes Richard Harries, Arthur Peacocke, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and also Richard Dawkins, Peter Atkins and people like that.

Yes.

So, what do you remember of who you chose and why they were the people you chose?

With the, with The Question Is…, I chose a whole range of, of academics to give their views. Certainly there were people who were very prominent in religion, like the Bishop of Oxford, but there were also people who were atheists. So, you got the full, you got the full spectrum. And I thought that was the right thing to do, to let the young people see, you know, top academics disagreeing with each other. But, there is a, there’s a drawback over that, because, many academics are not good at explaining things to the public, talking at the right, appropriate level. So, there was, if you like, something of a distance between the academics and the children in the classroom. So when I came to, to do the second of those science and religion videos, the Science and Belief: the Big Issues, I dispensed with the other academics, and I brought in young people to express their 12

Russell Stannard Page 13 C1672/03 Track 9 views in a way that the kids in a class would immediately identify with. So I think that that was, that was an improvement. Because, I knew that I myself was perfectly capable of explaining the pros and cons, giving both sides of the thing. And, and indeed, with that second video series, it was, it was subject to an external review, people who, who carried out a survey of the children’s reactions to it, and one of the questions was, do you consider that Stannard was biased towards religion, or what? And the answer was, no, they did not, they did not think it was… The atheists, the children who were atheists, felt that their views had been fairly portrayed. So, so that was OK. I didn’t need to, to get other academics to take part, you know.

Were all three published, I’m thinking, the third being Tackling Tough Questions, were all three funded by the Templeton?

Yes. Yah.

[49:23] Were there, at any point, we’re in the 1990s at the moment though, TV or radio projects that you wanted to do, applied for funding for, say, to the Templeton or anyone else, but couldn’t get made?

No. No, that hasn’t happened. [pause] Talking about radio. I, I was, I was invited to give ‘Thought for the Day’. This is, well early in the morning, between sort of seven and eight, there is a programme on BBC Radio 4 called the Today programme, it’s a current affairs programme, politicians love to get on it because they can use it as a platform. Huge listening figures. And, there has always been this tradition that, a short section of it should be devoted to what’s called ‘Thought for the Day’, where you get a religious person come in and, you know, talk on, on a religious theme but, but not to push it too hard, but you know, give a bit of a reflection. I, I don’t quite know how I was initially invited to do this, but anyway I was invited. And, in the end I gave fifty, just about fifty broadcasts in the ‘Thought for the Day’ series. You had two minutes forty- five seconds to, to make your point. And, I think it was out of that that I was invited to make a series of radio programmes, which we called Science and Wonders. It was about science and religion. There were to be five programmes, and I was… They took the form of me interviewing academics, theologians, believers, atheists, the whole, the whole mix, not just in this country, we 13

Russell Stannard Page 14 C1672/03 Track 9 went to America and recorded them over there. And, that, that proved to be very successful. There were five programmes, and there were four that were of this me interviewing them format. But then, the commissioning editor for Radio 4 said that for the fifth programme, he wanted a different format. He wanted a round-table discussion of the other four programmes, and he himself would choose who would be on that round-table discussion, to sit with me. And so that’s what happened. He brought in a spectrum of people to look back over the four and discuss possible bias, that sort of thing. Afterwards, people said to me, ‘Oh, I enjoyed your series, but, not sure about that last programme. I would have liked some more of it.’ I said, ‘Well, that wasn’t what I was allowed. I could only get the first four, if I was prepared to…’ Because, the commissioning editor was, was terribly, terribly concerned about it not being biased, the whole thing would, you know, was, was not too slanted in, in a particular way, which is fair enough. But anyway, despite the reservations about that last programme, I’m happy to say that the Sunday Times selected that as the number one radio achievement of the year, which I was very pleased about.

[54:02] When you say that the commissioning editor was concerned about bias in, in any direction, was he in fact concerned about bias in one direction in particular?

Well, he, he knew that I was a religious person, so he was a bit concerned that, that with my selection of people I was going to interview, I would be pushing things in that direction. But the fact that I, I chose the most vitriolic atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins and Will Provine in the States and Dan Dannett, you know, there’s a whole ra… You know, if you were asked to name prominent atheists, they were all in that programme, they were all in that programme, and, and delivering their message the way they wanted to, yes.

Who was the commissioning editor?

I, I can’t remember.

And did he have a particular interest in this, in this…

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Sorry?

Did he have a particular interest in the, the subject of the programme?

No. No.

No.

No. No.

He was commissioning other programmes too.

Mm.

[55:15] Could you tell me about your experience of interviewing these people?

Yah. I, I was assigned the BBC radio producer, Norman Winter, and, I explained to him, OK, what the position was, that I had to interview these people. So he said, ‘Right, OK, we must go on location.’ I said, ‘On location? But, this, this is radio, you know, surely, you know, we can get them in the studio, and, have a studio discussion.’ ‘Oh no no,’ he said, ‘we have to open the programme out.’ I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. Anyway, the first programme, we went to the National History Museum, and, I started off by interviewing children who belonged to a school party, they’d just been to a display of, to do with evolution by natural selection. And I asked them about, well, ‘What do you make of Adam and Eve?’ you know, it was that sort of conversation. And, then, OK, we had that, and then, after that I interviewed the, the head of the Natural History Museum. And then other people. But when you eventually listen to the programme, and you hear the noise of school parties going round, the whole thing just came alive. We then, for example when I wanted to talk about Freud and contrast Freud’s rubbishing of religion with Carl Jung’s very much more positive approach to religion, I had to interview a psychologist. Oh gosh, I’ve forgotten his name. And Norman, the producer, said, ‘OK, well we 15

Russell Stannard Page 16 C1672/03 Track 9 will go to Freud’s house, and we will record that at Freud’s house.’ And there, there we ended up sitting on Freud’s couch discussing where Freud might have gone wrong. [laughs] And just, just the knowledge that we were actually sitting on his couch doing that was wonderful. And then, discussing the theory of evolution, that was with the biologist Sam Berry, and, when I was interviewing him, Sam, we went to Darwin’s house, and Sam was sitting in Darwin’s chair. It’s… We, we describe the scene, we describe… It’s a black leather chair, the arms are worn, because there is this board covered in cloth which rests on the arms, and it’s on this board that Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species you know. And, we described how there is this hook, sort of long hook, and, with that, if he wanted a specimen in one of the drawers he would just hook it on a corner and… [doorbell ringing] And the chair was on, on wheels, and he would… [pause in recording] Yes, the chair was on wheels, and, he would, by using this hook, he could wheel himself around, around the room. And, another thing we pointed out was that, that there was a strategically placed mirror, so that when he was sitting at his desk, through the mirror he could see his front door, and if he didn’t want to answer the door, he knew that he didn’t want to answer the door. [laughs] So, again, it’s hard to describe but the whole thing just comes alive when the listener knows that you are actually in these places where these things happened, you know.

Why was it Sam Berry that you chose for the evolution part, to take to Darwin’s house?

Why?

Yes, why Sam?

Oh, just that he’s, he’s well known as, as someone who’s into science and religion. You know, if you’re in science and religion, there are science and religion conferences, so, so you meet up with fellow academics who, who are interested in, in the field. There’s an organisation called Science and Religion Forum, which I was President of for, for a while. And then there’s, well Sam was in another organisation called Christians in Science. So, there are these means of meeting up with people who are also interested in this field, yah.

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And could you tell the story of interviewing the atheists involved in that programme?

The atheists?

Yes.

Well for example, Richard Dawkins. I’ve, I’ve had several encounters with Richard. I remember, for example, being invited to take part in a programme called Young Upfront, which was a programme put on by Granada Television in Manchester. The audience consisted of teenagers, and you’d got two speakers, myself and Richard Dawkins on this occasion. We, each of us gives a short presentation, and then it’s thrown open to the audience to ask questions. And the basic idea is that sixty per cent of the programme should be the young people expressing their views, OK. And, OK, we, we said our piece, and, and then there was, the kids joined in. And, one of the youngsters, she was a Muslim, she said to Dawkins, ‘Professor Dawkins, you said in your presentation that when you were young, a child, you believed in God, but now, obviously, you don’t. So, can you explain why you stopped believing in God?’ And, Dawkins said, ‘Oh it’s simple. I became educated.’ And it was like a tsunami wave going through that audience. They were infuriated. [laughs] This girl said, ‘Are you saying that, that as soon as you become educated you… Are you saying I’m not, not edu… Are you saying Professor Stannard is not educated?’ And, Dawkins just completely lost his rag. He, he became absolutely incandescent with rage, it was extraordinary. And, when the programme was over he snatched off his microphone, and he went for these kids. And the producer, ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ you know, ‘we haven’t had a clear. We’re not sure that the recording’s OK, we might have to record something more. Sit down please,’ you know. So he sat down, and, then, then we got the clear, and, oh, he was shouting at them. And, we came out of the studio, the producer, Dawkins, and myself, and Dawkins turned round to the producer and said, ‘And where did you get that lot from?’ And the producer said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just a cross-section of Manchester schoolchildren. Just happens that some of them don’t agree with you.’ And we, we were supposed, then, to, to go off to lunch together, and Dawkins just stalked off. He wouldn’t have lunch with us. So that was one side of, of Dawkins. [1:04:49]

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But then, there was another occasion, in fact when I was recording Science and Wonders, this radio series, and we were on location, I went to his house, which was, which was very interesting, because, he has this interest in fairground animals, and so, you’d got these fairground animals there, and, you throw your coat over a, a lion for example. [laughs] And, and we sat down on, on a settee together, side by side, and I was holding the hand microphone. And, we had a very good conversation somehow sitting side by side. And he wasn’t able to get on his high horse, you know. And, and it, it, it was a, a very good discussion, and, OK, we ended up agreeing to disagree but, you know, it was, it was sensibly conducted. So, you know, you, you never know quite what you’re going to get when, when you’re doing this, this sort of interviewing. A very different atheist is, is Lewis Wolpert. Have I talked about him before? No.

You’ve talked about meeting him in the green room of a Jeremy Paxman…

Oh OK, OK I’ve, I’ve said that one, OK. Yah, yah. Well he, no he is someone who is, is always a pleasure to talk to, you know, he… Yes.

In what way is he different? You said a very different atheist as you recall.

Oh. [laughs] He’s just very friendly. It’s a very friendly discussion we always have, you know, and we respect each other, respect each other’s views, and we can understand where they’re coming from, you know. Another awkward character is, is Peter Atkins, who is a professor of chemistry, I think at Oxford, or might be Cambridge, I get the two muddled up. I remember we were… He’s a, very much an atheist. And, I, I remember we were pitted against each other at the, in the Town Hall at Cheltenham. The place was packed out, there were about 500 people there. And, we each had to do a presentation, you know, and then discussion. And, I… Well he, he was talking about… Oh we, we got on to the subject of love, and, he said, ‘Oh no, a complete description in terms of flows of chemicals, and, and firing of synapses and…’ You know, he gave a completely sort of, biological explanation as to what, what love was all about, you know, and that, that’s it, that’s a complete description of it. And, sitting in the front row was his wife, and, I, I, [laughs] I… [inaudible aside] Sitting in front, sitting in the front row was his, his wife, and very naughtily I turned to her, I said, ‘Excuse me, but, when he was courting you, did this sort of 18

Russell Stannard Page 19 C1672/03 Track 9 language turn you on?’ [laughs] And the place just erupted with laughter. Yeah. Yeah, he, the first time I came across him, Peter Atkins, was at Windsor Castle. Now have I spoken about that before?

No.

We haven’t. OK. That was when he gave this presentation about science, and, I thought he was being very clever, because he talked about science being absolutely wonderful and, blah blah blah, you know, and I thought he was taking the mickey out of religion, because it seemed as though, every time he used the word science, you could substitute the word God. And, it really does seem that for Peter Atkins and Dawkins, you know, science has become their god. Which all tunes up with Jungian psychology where, Carl Jung said how in everyone there is a, a drive, a basic tendency to devote yourself to a cause, which, he being religion, religious himself, thought that this was God-implanted, that there was this drive to, to find God and to devote yourself to God. But if you didn’t, if you didn’t do that, then you would devote yourself to something else. All right, it might be animals’ rights, it might be gay rights or something like that, or nationalism, or something of that kind, you know, but there is this inner, inner drive. And, and for some people atheism, fighting against a superstition of religion, has become their, their religion.

Was Richard Dawkins happy with the, the edit of The Question Is…, you know, happy with his appearance and…?

I, I never found out whether he ever saw it, no. No, yes.

[1:11:22] And, could you tell the story of, I think the other debate you were involved in, which was with, it was yourself and Hugh Montefiore…

Oh, yes.

…and Richard Dawkins and Hermann Bondi. 19

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And Hermann Bondi and, and Richard Dawkins. Yes, that was held at the Royal Society. Yes, Dawkins had, as I recall, Dawkins had been involved in a big confrontation with John Habgood, who was Archbishop of York. This was at, some location in Scotland, I think it was Edinburgh. And, the newspapers had, had reported how Dawkins had torn Habgood to shreds with his arguments. And, certainly one of the newspapers, I forget which one, pointed out that, ‘Dawkins will again be in action at the Royal Society this evening, where his, his companion will be Hermann Bondi, famous cosmologist, and he will be up against Russell Stannard and Hugh Montefiore. And, so more fireworks,’ blah blah blah, sort of thing, you know. So there was a big turnout for that. And, if I say so myself, it went well from, from my point of view, I thought Hugh and I did, we certainly held our own, to put it mildly, you know. Next day in that newspaper, I think, I think it was the Times, there was no mention of it. So I wrote a letter to the editor saying, you, ‘You were very keen to point out that Dawkins won the battle with Habgood, and, you also went out of your way to point out that Dawkins would again be in action at the Royal Society. So how come you didn’t report how that meeting went? Was it because the wrong team won?’ They didn’t publish the letter.

Or get in touch with you in any other way?

Mm?

Or get in touch with you privately?

No. No. No.

When you remember it going well, what do you remember in particular, if you have a particular memory?

I can’t remember the details now, it was a long time ago, but, I and friends I had in the audience, the friends were, were delighted with the way things had gone. Because they, they had been a bit concerned after hearing what had happened in Edinburgh. 20

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Is this, would you have, given what you had heard about Edinburgh, did you approach this nervously yourself?

Oh yes. Oh yes. [laughs] Yes, very anxious. Very anxious indeed, yes. Mm.

And why was it you and Hugh that were chosen, if you were chosen, or did you volunteer? How does it work?

I, I don’t know. I just do not know. I don’t know.

That’s great, thank you.

No, it’s, it’s just sort of, knowledge and academia as to who’s had a history of talking on which subjects, and, you know, you just know that, oh, if we’re talking about this, we need to get so-and- so in, you know, because he’s been, he’s a figure in that field. Yes.

[1:15:33] Science and Religious [sic] Belief did very well. Do you happen to know sort of, roughly how well it did in terms of sales? Because, you spoke about it being, it coming out at a time when there were few books, and that it, it did well, but I wonder whether we can sort of quantify that, get a sense of how…

Science and the Renewal of Belief?

Yes, the first one, yes. How widely read it was.

It wasn’t a big seller, no, not a big seller. In the science-religion area, the big sellers are, are the Richard Dawkins type of book, you know. He had this book that he called The Great Delusion?

The God Delusion. 21

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The God Delusion. The God Delusion, that’s right. Well when that came out, you, you couldn’t escape it, it was, in all the bookshops it was, the first thing you saw when you went into a bookshop was a whole array of God Delusions. And I well remember how Alister Mc Grath, he, he wrote a refutation of it, and a very fine refutation. Sank without trace. And anything that’s, that’s, you know, trying to put a, a balanced, sensible gloss on things, just does not sell, nothing to like the same extent that, if you are being controversial. And it’s not just, it’s not just Richard Dawkins, you know, Stephen Hawking and The Great Design, which rubbishes philosophy, rubbishes theology, again, that was promoted to such an extent, you couldn’t escape it when it came out, you know.

Is the difference in the way that ideas are presented, then, or is the difference in the kind of publisher that is involved in publishing the ones that…?

Oh it could be that. Yah. Yah. [pause] Yes, because… Well one knows for example that, if you, if you want your book promoted at Waterstones, if you want it to be on the front counter, the first thing you see as you go into the shop, your publisher has to pay Waterstones a very, very considerable sum. So… And there are different amounts you have to pay for different locations within the store. And so, in order to, to get that publicity, then the publisher has to invest a lot of money upfront to make sure that it gets the prominence that, that eventually comes its way. And the sorts of publishers that publish the kind of books that I write on the science and religion side of things, they can’t afford to, to bribe Waterstones to, to push their book.

Have you tried, in that case, publishing with a publisher who could afford to bribe Waterstones?

[pause] No, I, I haven’t, because, well you… You know you’re not going to get anywhere with them, because, they’re looking for the fast buck, and they’ve got well tried, tested means of promoting certain kinds of author, and knowing that that works, you know. Yes.

[1:19:53]

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Thank you. You said, this time and last time I think, that the media tends to prefer, and in fact seek out and design, stories that involve opposition, and therefore, this partly explains why science and religion tend to be presented as opposed by the media.

Yes. Yes.

In your experience of the media, TV, radio and newspapers, are there particular commissioning editors or journalists who sort of go against this trend, and, as far as you’ve been able to experience them, have a more subtle balanced interest? The reason I ask that question is because you mention one in your autobiography and say, for example, that, Clifford Longley on the Times was particularly good at commissioning more balanced, complicated treatments. So, I suppose you could talk about him, but are there any other people sort of, with influence in the media who, in your experience, seem to have been interested in a more complicated discussion of science and religion than simply pointing out their opposition?

I don’t know of any. [pause] At the Times, you had Clive Longley who had a regular column which was serious, and from time to time he would invite others to write the column for him. I think I did about four columns for him. But he was very much an exception, very much an exception.

[1:21:49] Thank you. Could you tell now the story of leading fifty scientists from eight countries in the writing of newspaper articles on how they saw religious belief at the turn of the millennium?

Yes. Yes. Yes, I, having had the experience of, of writing newspaper articles, for example for the Times, I, I had taken the trouble to, to read advice as to how to write a newspaper article. You know, you must start off with the hook, what they call the hook, which is some arresting statement or question, you know. And, you’ve got to realise that, if you like, you’re in a marketplace, you know, the reader is skimming his eyes across, and he’s being attracted by various headlines on the page and you’ve got to grab their attention. So, the hook has to be there. And, you must get your main message across in the first paragraph. Because, hardly anybody reads to the end of an article. 23

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Now you might think that is shocking, and not true, but you just analyse, next time you read a newspaper, how many articles do you actually finish? And the answer is, virtually none. So, your message has to be at the beginning. And then, and then you, you elaborate as you go further on, with less and less important things coming towards the end. And the reason for that is that, an editor has to fit your column onto the page, and, it depends on the length of other items on that page, and if he wants to fit your… he clips off the last bit of your article to fit. So, you must… So, it goes against the grain, because you normally think, when you’re writing something, you know, you have an introduction, and then your dissertation, and then you build up to your conclusion. That is not a newspaper article, because your conclusion’s going to get the snip. So, it’s, it’s all back-to-front, it’s all back-to-front. I always remember going to a jazz concert, there was a jazz musician called Acker Bilk, and he introduced one of his numbers by saying, ‘The next number is in three parts. First of all there is the introduction, then there is the main part, and finally, finally it sort of, peters out.’ And I thought, that is a perfect description of a newspaper article. So anyway, I, I had learnt all this sort of stuff. So I thought, well, let’s, let’s try and train up academics to write newspaper articles on science and religion, you know, people who I knew would be sensible about it. So, that gave rise to a book called, what was it called? God for the 21st Century or something like that, where I got something like fifty academics that I knew. And I, [laughs] I gave them a four-page leaflet setting out what their, how they should go about it. It was very cheeky of me, but it included things like the fog index. The fog index is a way of deciding how difficult it is to read a particular article. And, if you want the article to be easy to read, then you need short, essentially short words, very few syllables, and short sentences. And the fog index, I forget what the formula actually is, but there’s a formula. You count a certain amount of sentences, and you count the number of syllables, and that gives the fog index. And, various newspapers have different fog indices, and it’s, it’s very surprising, because, as far as reading ability is concerned, you should not, even for a quality newspaper you should not have a fog index which exceeds that which would be appropriate to the reading age of twelve. Which sounds absolutely insulting. You know, you mean to say I have the reading age of a twelve year old? No it doesn’t mean that. It means that when you are reading a newspaper, as opposed to a scientific paper or a, a serious book, when you are skimming a newspaper, you essentially have the reading ability of a twelve year old. So these hints were, were all in this leaflet. And that’s, that’s how it gave rise to this book. I don’t think it sold many copies, and, I don’t know whether any of the academics then went on to write actual 24

Russell Stannard Page 25 C1672/03 Track 9 newspaper articles. But that was, that was, if you like, the first attempt to get newspapers to carry sensible articles about science and religion. [1:28:15] There then came a second attempt, which turned the whole thing upside-down, in as much as, it’s all very well training an academic to write for a newspaper; he’s going to have difficult placing the article in a newspaper. So, I got to thinking, well, how about turning the whole thing on its head, and taking people who have got access to writing articles in newspapers, in other words, journalists, and getting them interested in science and religion. Because if you can excite their interest, then, OK, they will write articles, and they will get them published because they’re in the business, that’s their job, you know. And so, that gave rise to a project called the Templeton Journalism Fellowship Programme, funded again by the Templeton Foundation, and the idea was that you got ten leading journalists, or broadcasters, and, you paid them the equivalent of two months’ salary so that they could take leave of absence from their job for two months. You bring them to Cambridge University. You would subject them to a week of intensive lecturing by leading figures in the science and religion field. They would then go back to their homes and work on a project for six weeks. And then they would come back to Cambridge for another week for more lectures, and they would then present the results of their, their project. And, you know, that was, that was the idea. And, we wondered what the take-up would be, you know, would editors allow their staff to take two months off, you know. It turned out there was no problem at all, you know, we… Most of them were, were Americans. We got to know Wall Street Journal people, Chicago Tribute, New York Times, as well as people over here, the Guardian and so on. And, this was run for about, about three years. After the, the first run, again we got in an independent evaluator to work out how effective it had been, and what they did was, they monitored the output of the ten former fellows for the next six months to see what they wrote or what programmes they made. And, in those six months I think, there were sixty, sixty newspaper articles or broadcasts which were relevant to the science and religion theme, written by those, those ten journalists. So that seems to have been much more successful than what I first started out, which was trying to get academics to write newspaper articles; instead you get journalists interested in writing those articles.

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What was your role in choosing the lecturers and in choosing the, of the people who applied, the journalists who were going to go on that fellowship?

The lecturers, again, was a cross-section. OK, there were, there were certainly more pro, you know, sort of, religious people, but we had Richard, we had Richard Dawkins, we had Jonathan Miller. He’s an atheist. He came and lectured. So, certainly, the atheists once again had their say. When it came to choosing the, who should be fellows, we did not ask them whether they were religious. In fact, quite a number of them were not. What we were doing was probing whether they were interested in the science-religion question. That was, you know, were they interested in it? In fact we were quite happy to, to take on atheists, hoping that, you know, once they had learnt more about the subject, they wouldn’t be quite so strongly atheistic, so, so there was no reason for us to give preference to religious ones. And the other, main, thing was, how influential are these people? Who are they writing for? So, we had obviously lots of people writing in who were simply journalists on comparatively local newspapers, and we thought, well their influence is not going to be very great. Wall Street Journal, New York Times, yes, yes, yes. So… And, and as I say, there was, there was no, no shortage of journalists from top newspapers and top broadcasters, broadcasting networks, who came on this. That programme was wound up after three years, for no other reason than that the Templeton Foundation does not fund projects for more than three years. And it’s an unfortunate restriction I think, just arbitrarily stop a project which is obviously successful simply because it’s more than three years.

[1:35:20] Could you say more about the motivations for starting the project in the first place, from the point of view of the Templeton Foundation. Why were they interested to fund that project? Was it, for example, a response to a particular concern about, either articles that were appearing in the newspapers, or the absence of them?

I… Yes, that’s, that’s an interesting question, because, the Templeton Foundation was founded by Sir John Templeton, and… [pause] The Templeton Foundation was founded by Sir John Templeton, and, I got to know him quite well. Initially he was very concerned about promoting research into subjects like science and religion, academic, the promotion of academic work at that 26

Russell Stannard Page 27 C1672/03 Track 9 level, gaining, you know, a deeper understanding of these relationships. But, I pointed out to him that, this science-religion discussion was actually taking place at two levels. OK, at the academic level, yes, where you’re seeking new knowledge, new understanding, you know, thoughts that people have not had before. But I said, that’s all very well, but there is the other level, the level of the general public, who aren’t anywhere near the kinds of thoughts that are going on up at the academic level. One needs to be fighting on that front as well, because that is then helping them to have thoughts which are new to them, new to them, or, not, not new to mankind but new to them. And that, one needs to use the media to get to the public. And because of the financial resources of the foundation they were uniquely positioned to provide the very considerable financial resources needed for putting on things like making expensive video series and that sort of thing. And, in our discussions Sir John eventually came round to recognising that, that there was this second front to be active in. And so that’s, that’s how it came about that these sorts of projects did get funded. And, it wasn’t entirely due to me obviously. [1:38:32] Another aspect of the Templeton Foundation is character development in young people. He had essay competitions, getting young people to think about what is really important in life. So, yes, he, he was always interested in what the public were thinking, and trying to influence the public. All I was doing was saying, well he ought to expand that interest so that you inculcate into the general public a better understanding of this particular subject, science and religion.

When would you have been having those conversations with him, about that second front?

Ah, well they would have… I got the UK, Templeton UK project award in, 1988, and then I joined the Board of Advisors of the foundation, I suppose that would be round about 1990. I spent quite a number of years on the Board of Advisors, and then I became the first non-American to be invited to be a trustee, and that extended over a twelve-year period I was a trustee. So, throughout all that time I was coming into contact with, with Sir John at these, at these meetings. And, you know, we, not only do you have exchanges at the meetings themselves, but also in the bar afterwards, over a meal, that sort of thing. Because we would get together for two or three, four days at a time.

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Did he have reservations about extending funding into this funding of what we might call media projects?

Well, he, initially he was very much biased against, certainly biased against television. He could not understand how anybody of any intelligence would watch any television. Which, when you actually see television in the United States, you can understand. And certainly in those days there was a huge contrast between the quality of television in, and the sort of things you saw on American television compared to what you saw here in the UK, particularly with the BBC. Unfortunately, I think, the serious side of TV broadcasting has very much diminished here in the UK, it’s become much more, rather like American stuff, you know. Very ephemeral and, and, reality programmes and game shows and, forever-lasting cookery programmes and things of that kind. It didn’t always use to be like that. But he, he was very much against television. And, so, it took a while to, to get him to recognise that he ought to be funding videos, that videos didn’t necessarily mean television, you know.

And what about newspapers, you becoming more engaged with newspapers, was he also reluctant in that?

No, I, I… No, I think he was, he was much more… Well, certainly in America as well as here, you know, you do get serious newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, you know, they are serious papers. So, no, no he respected those sorts of newspapers, yes.

[1:42:31] And, was there anyone else in the organisation, perhaps on the board or in the Strategic Planning Committee, also, like you, attempting to convince him of the value of such work?

Getting involved in…?

In this sort of work, in the media and newspaper work, was there any, were there any other voices in the Templeton pushing in the same direction that you were pushing in?

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Well, well you certainly get quite a number of them who, who write books. One thinks, for example, of John Polinghorne, Arthur Peacocke, Ian Barbour, you know. So, that, that is the main means by which most academics in this field put across their ideas, it’s through books. I think that I am somewhat unusual in, in my use of broadcasting and videos, and, and that has simply come about by my association with the Open University and the fact that I had to learn those media as part of my job, which is very unusual for a normal academic.

Is there also a difference in what different individuals in this field think of as being a general book, or a book for a, a non-specialist audience? Because, it’s my impression, and it’s only my personal impression, that some of the books, say, of John Polkinghorne that he thinks are for a general reader, are still operating at a very high level.

Yah. Yes, that is very much the case. I don’t know whether I’ve already said this, but, when I joined the Open University we had these educational technologists, and, they were very hard on us academics. When we were writing, they would go through drafts of what we had written, and they would underline with blue pencil all the technical terms we were using, anything that they felt that the student might have difficulty with. And, this, this was a revelation, an absolute revelation to us, because, coming from a normal university background where you can assume that your students have good grades in Advanced Level, you know, A Level qualifications, so that you are already sharing a vocabulary with your students, and you’re just building on it. When you’re dealing with students at the Open University, who, although there are some who are already highly qualified, some already have degrees at other universities, you know, but, you know, we were always being told, look, it’s open application and therefore you’ve got to take into account those who have not got even Ordinary Level, O Levels, let alone A Levels. So, you have to be very, very sensitive about the terms that you’re using. It’s only when you get all these blue underlinings that you realise just how much you talk jargon. It’s, it’s a language which is, for the specialist. And, having, you know, made myself sensitised to this, this is, this is why I’m able to write for children, let alone ordinary members of the public, but, other people, other academics who are in the science- religion field have not had that advantage. And, so when I read their, their books, all sorts of flags are going up in my mind. Oops! you shouldn’t have said that. They won’t understand. You’ve lost them there. You know, these sorts of thoughts can’t help but go through my, my mind, 29

Russell Stannard Page 30 C1672/03 Track 9 because, this is what the educational psychologists have, have taught me. But for most academics, these warnings are not there, and so, they keep on losing their, their audience, or at least they’re making it difficult for their, their readers to keep on ploughing through it.

[End of Track 9]

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[Track 10]

Could you tell me, please, about the origin and development of your interest in and work as a sculptor?

A sculptor. [laughs] Oh. The beginning is sort of lost in the mists of time. I used to live in Hatch End, and at the bottom of the garden there was a stream. And, there was, it was a very clay soil, that you had this yellow clay at the bottom of the stream, which was fine for modelling, and I, I started to make some models. The thing is that, I’ve always enjoyed Henry Moore’s sculptures in particular, not everything but some of Henry Moore’s stuff is, I just find totally amazing. It just takes my breath away. And, that interest dates way, way, way back. And I’d got this clay, and I thought, oh, why don’t I make some Henry Moores, you know? And, so I’d get a photograph and try to, to reproduce it. And it just didn’t work out. So that made me go and, to the Tate Gallery, and, and look more closely at, you know, why does he produce this stuff and, and I’m producing silly blobs, you know. And gradually you… And also I, I read quite a bit of what people say about him and what he has written about it, his work. Like the idea that you imagine that there’s a skeleton inside the sculpture, and it’s covered in a skin, so that, you, the convex surfaces are kept smooth, it’s like skin stretching over the bone, and those concave surfaces are, are slack and therefore left rough. Things of that sort of kind. And also, putting a twist into things, so that you, you see something to one side and you think, oh, how is that going to work out? And you find you, you walk round and you see how that works out. But by now something else has come into view, and you think, oh well, what’s that about? Before you know what’s happened, you’ve walked all the way round, which is the way it should be with a three-dimensional artwork. So, you know, you learn things like that. And, I, I played around with these clay models, sort of abstract things, Henry Moore-ish type things. And, gradually this started getting bigger. I found myself working on a bigger and bigger scale, until eventually they, they get to normal human size, six feet. The latest one, well, the tallest one I’ve done so far out there in the garden is ten feet tall. Which then of course raises the whole problem of, how do you make something that’s, that’s that big, and, and is weatherproof? The kind of sculptures I make are, are the sort which ought to be cast in bronze, but I can’t afford that. I went to Henry Moore’s studio and I talked to Malcolm Woodward, the, his chief assistant at the time, as to

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Russell Stannard Page 32 C1672/03 Track 9 whether there were cheap ways of doing things, and he explained how they had used fibreglass, but, that didn’t really work out very well. They needed constant repairers and, and attention. So that wasn’t very helpful. So I had to experiment on my own. And, what I eventually did was, I, I carved the stuff out of expanded polystyrene, you know, soft expanded polystyrene. Then I put on a layer of car body underseal, it’s the black tar-like stuff which you put under cars. And then on top of that… That sealed the surface, and then on top of that, car body filler, the stuff that you mix up with a hardener and then that goes on. And that’s what I file and sandpaper to get the textures that I am after. And then, if I’m going for a stone finish, that’s more or less it, I just then get a substance called Aquaseal, which is a transparent liquid which you put on porous brickwork to keep the rain out. So that goes on. And it’s, it’s now weatherproof. What you are actually looking at is the car body filler which is sort of white, slightly off-white, and because you mix it up with a red hardener in batches, it gets a slight pinkish tinge. So, you can almost think of it as being marble. So some of the sculptures I, I like to leave just looking like that. But if I’m going for a bronze finish, the next step is to get shellac, or French polish, mixed up with a very dense black stain. So that goes on. So at that stage the sculpture is totally black. And then I get shellac mixed up with bronze powder, which goes on to a pad, and I lightly then dust the surface of the sculpture so that the parts that stick out become bronze, and the indentations remain black. And at that stage it looks just like a bronze. And, it weathers. So, the sculptures out there in the garden have been there for, for many years, and many of them have been many years. So that’s the technique. [06:22] And, in fact, the television network BBC2 came and made a half-hour documentary about me and my sculptures. We started off in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, with a Henry Moore, and I was explaining what I saw in this Henry Moore, and, why I was fired up with an ambition to produce something like this, that was then challenged because of the cost of everything. And then we came back to my home here, and we, I demonstrated how I made them. And that was, that programme was broadcast, oh, about half a dozen times, and each time I would know it’s been broadcast again because I would get queries from people saying, ‘Where did you get the expanded polystyrene from?’ you know, et cetera et cetera. So that was, that was interesting. And, I, I just… I’m often asked, you know, do I sell them? And, and the answer is, no, I don’t. And I don’t because, I make them for my own enjoyment. I quite honestly wouldn’t, wouldn’t want to be parted from any of them. What happens to them once I am

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Russell Stannard Page 33 C1672/03 Track 9 dead, I don’t, I don’t mind obviously. But whilst I’m still around, I, I want to, to have them with me. And, there are a variety of them, some of them still owe something to Henry Moore, others don’t, you know. For example, there is, there’s a couple of out there which I call Organic Towers, Organic Tower 1, Organic Tower 2. And, basically, they are a tall cube about eight feet tall, and, what I say is, have in mind an office block, a totally anonymous, geometric office block, looking like every other impersonal office block. But inside that office block it’s teeming with humanity. So the sculpture on the inside opens up into all these wonderful organic forms. But these organic forms are all, if you like, imprisoned within a geometric cube. So you have the interplay between free-flowing organic forms and the strict geometrical regularity of the framework, which I, I find interesting. The latest sculpture I did is a two-piece thing, which is called Rejection. You have one figure with its head down, abstract figure but you can make out it’s supposed to be a person sort of thing, and its head is down, apparently walking away from a second figure, which is a terribly clinging figure, it doesn’t even have a head, you know, it’s just a body trying to hang on to this, this upright figure, and it looks as though this upright figure is moving away, head down in shame at abandoning this very dependent second figure. That’s how it looks from the side. I then tell people to go and look at it from a viewpoint, at ninety degrees, directly behind the so-called clinging figure. And what you see there is a figure which is not at all clinging, it’s full of muscle and sinew. From that angle it looks, it reminds me of a rugby player in a scrum; it has no head because the head is tucked down, and it’s pushing, it’s pushing. And in the distance you see there’s the tall figure with its head down. And now it seems as though, the head is down because it’s sorry to be pushed away. So it’s about rejection, but it does raise the question as to who is rejecting whom. It depends on your point of view. And, that is how it so often is in human relationships, a relationship breaks up, but who is actually responsible? So that’s, that’s the kind of thinking that goes into that sculpture, which happens to be the latest one that I’ve, that I’ve made. I just find all these things, you know, utterly fascinating and absorbing, and it feeds part of my personality that my science does not.

[11:20] Why do you do, why do you, why do you think that you made a sculpture based around the idea of rejection? By which I mean, you know, does the idea come first, I’m going to make a sculpture about rejection now, or, does it emerge from sort of, manipulating the materials, or…?

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No. No, no there was no thought of that to begin with. Most of the sculptures begin with me simply playing around with clay, on, on a small scale, and just seeing what comes out of it. On the vast majority of occasions I just end up the session by squashing everything together again and putting it back in the bucket, because nothing came out of it. If something comes out which, from one point of view, I think, oh, that, that, that looks interesting, that reminds me of, of something, you know, then I will preserve that, and I will keep coming back to it. I’ll put a damp cloth over it so it doesn’t get hard. And I will keep coming back to it, and, try to get the other views to look OK. And that, that is often a problem, that you can get something to look good from one point of view but you can’t really work out how it ought to look good from other points of view. That’s, that’s the sort of challenge of, of sculpture that you don’t get in, in painting, you know. And, often quite far down the path, the sculpture just suddenly sort of reminds me of something, and then, OK, I might then work on that to, to enhance that. But, that, I, I just allow the subconscious to, to do it. So that is normally how it works out. You’ve then got the problem of, OK, you’ve now got this little model, this maquette as you call it; how do you reproduce it big? And what I do there, and again it’s, it’s something I’ve devised for myself, I’ve placed the maquette on a table, and I shine a light on it, so it casts a shadow on the wall. And I pin onto the wall a graph paper, and I draw the outline of the shadow. I then turn the maquette through ninety degrees, and I get a second outline. So that’s what it looks like from right-angle. I then get the block of expanded polystyrene, and using the graph paper, all the measurements on the graph paper, I then draw one of the outlines on one of the faces of the block. I then cut the block so that it’s that shape. I then turn it through ninety degrees. I then put the second outline on, and I cut that. So that means that the sculpture, the big sculpture is correct from two orthogonal points of view. And then, OK, you then just have to look, keep on looking at the model and, and making sure the rest of it is OK, but, essentially, that’s, that’s the big step to getting it big. So that’s one technique. One of the sculptures out there was made in a different kind of way. What I did was, I, I got big sheets of paper, and I free-style drew closed figures, a whole lot of closed figures just allowing my, to be absolutely free-flowing. And, I then studied this collection of free-flowing figures, and I picked out two that I thought were interesting. And I said, OK, those are going to be the orthogonal views of a three-dimensional sculpture. So what kind of sculpture would look like that, from one point of view would look like this, from right-angles? And, that gave rise to a sculpture, which turned out to be like a female,

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Russell Stannard Page 35 C1672/03 Track 9 very much pregnant, but sort of, sinuously dancing. So I called that one Ishtar, the goddess of fertility. The idea being, OK, pregnant, but with the dancing, you, you can sort of think of priestesses dancing. But, did I start off producing a sculpture which was representing Ishtar? The answer is, no, that was not in my mind at all. The name sort of, comes right at the very end.

Which did you make first of the two figures in Rejection, the one seeming to walk away or the one seeming to be following?

They… They came… They were made together. They were made together. Because, some of Henry Moore’s stuff is two things, three things. Which, you know, is a very interesting idea in itself, because you’ve got the relationship between these two things. So, yah, that’s how it comes, yah.

[16:56] Thank you. Now in terms of your, your life story more generally, we’ve reached the sort of, the end of the 1990s. Could you give an account of your sort of professional and personal life up to the present?

Mm. [pause] Ooh. [pause] Can we just pause while I’m thinking?

[pause in recording]

Well I suppose, you know, I’ve carried on, on writing various books. Not so much for children now. In fact I, I think I would actually find it quite difficult to write for children now, because, when I started out on this, with the first of the Uncle Albert books, my little heroine, Gedanken, you know, she was thrilled to get a digital watch. [laughs] Well, of course these days, the children have all got iPhones and stuff of that kind, iPads. They’re on Facebook, they have got Twitter and all this sort of… All of which is completely foreign to me. I, I still don’t even have a mobile phone. So, I, I have to be realistic that, I’m not really, I’m certainly not in tune with child culture these days, it’s left me a long, long way. OK, I’m, I’m OK on child psychology, but, you know, if you’re going to write a story, it’s got to be in terms that they understand today, and, and I’m not, I’m not into that at all. So, so that’s not

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Russell Stannard Page 36 C1672/03 Track 9 on. I still give quite a lot of talks and lectures and that sort of thing. But, obviously as one, as one gets older, and you begin to slow down a bit, I have this huge garden, I do a lot of gardening, which I, which I enjoy. And one has to say that, you know, there are family ties. My wife had a stroke eight years ago, which has left her quite disabled, she’s unable to speak. She has aphasia. And the time that we are talking now she has been in a nursing home for, for four months. She fell down, having had a urinary tract infection, and broke her leg. We’re expecting her home soon, but, when she comes home she’s going to be subject to carers coming in four times a day. So the whole pattern of life, you know, changes. And, you know, looking after my wife is becoming more and more demanding. Not only that but between us we, you know, we’re a second marriage, we have seven children, who are all grown up; they have children, we have sixteen grandchildren, and at the last count we have three great-grandchildren. So, it seems as though every day is somebody’s birthday. [laughs] And, no, we, we take great delight in, in the family, and, they come round very regularly. But, OK, it takes time, you know. You can’t enjoy a very rich family life like this without, without it taking up a considerable amount of one’s, one’s time. So, one’s definition of oneself as an academic starts to fade into the distance. [21:08] Now if, in the past if I was asked to describe myself, I would describe myself as a physicist, a lay reader in the Church of England, university lecturer, writer, broadcaster. It would in terms of my professional work. But now, although I, I still give lectures, I still attend lectures, I still, you know, write, to some extent, it’s other considerations which have come to the fore, and I suppose I would much more now define myself as, as a family person. Which is very interesting, and enriching, rather than just carrying on as, as one, as one used to be. Which doesn’t mean to say that I don’t have in mind thoughts that might eventually lead to another book. At the time of speaking I’m eighty-three; you can’t help at the age of eighty- three, looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking, God, you ought to be dead by now. And, having lost so many friends, one’s mortality does come very much to the forefront of one’s mind. I remember, for example, after I retired from the Open University, I still went back there very regularly to attend lectures, and it was great to meet up with my old colleagues, but gradually you found, when you looked around the audience, there weren’t so many of your friends, there were new faces there, people I didn’t know, people who had joined the OU, and, my friends, some of them had retired. So I looked around and think, oh dear, some, they’re all retiring. Well now I’ve got to the stage where I know so few there that

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I look round and I think, oh God, you know, most of my colleagues are dead by now. It, it just changes your perspective on life. So, I’ve got to the stage, well, in fact I’ve been there for some time where, every morning I wake up and the first thing I say is, ‘Thank God for another day.’ The gift of a new day. Because I know that I am, I am living on, on borrowed time. So, that does, it’s almost in my mind… I’m not being morbid, I’m just thinking, well, OK, I, I can’t guarantee that, that if, for example, I start another book, [laughs] I’m going to be able to finish it. But, you know, we’ll just have to see. I have to say that one of the things I like doing is consulting a life expectancy table, because, it doesn’t matter which age you are at, it tells you on average how much further you’re likely to live. It’s what obviously insurance, life insurance companies use. And, it doesn’t matter what age you are, you have a life expectancy of, of several more years. I think at eighty-three I’ve still got a life expectancy of five years. And I find that a great comfort. [laughs] It’s a bit like the tortoise and the hare. It’s a way of looking at things, you think, well, you know, the hare is never going to catch up with the tortoise, but, at the back of your mind, you know that there is a flaw in this argument. [laughs] And meanwhile, I, I take comfort in the thought that, I’ve probably got another five years. [laughs]

[25:12] If you were to write the book without worrying about whether you were going to finish it or not, what do you think it might be on?

Oh. I… I was reading a book, I was reading Hans Kung’s book, Does God Exist?, and he quotes there a saying by Immanuel Kant, who said, ‘It is possible to have an experience of God, but not of the sort that without that experience you would not know God. You may experience God if you already know Him.’ And that really intrigued me, you know. How, how do you know God, if you haven’t had an experience of Him, you know? He was certainly ruling out, in his other writings Kant rules out, the idea of gaining proof of God’s existence by just looking at, looking at the world. And, you can think to yourself, that actually has to be true, because, if you look at… Well let me put it this way. That, we live in this scientific age, and, we can’t help but be, adopt the blinkers of a scientific age. Science really got going three or four hundred years ago when it stopped judging theories as to whether they were aesthetically pleasing, and instead went over to an evidence-based approach. Science is essentially saying, OK, I’m perfectly prepared to accept this hypothesis,

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Russell Stannard Page 38 C1672/03 Track 9 provided you give me the evidence, evidence that we can look at together and decide that that is the only explanation of that piece of concrete evidence. And it is, that approach has been incredibly successful, and we only have to look at the way our lives today are transformed by science and its applications. It’s so successful that one tries to apply it to other areas of life, so you get ‘social science’, ‘sports science’, ‘food science’, you know, this idea of, you know, adopting the scientific approach. And therefore, if, if it’s reasonable to say, OK, does the Higgs boson exist? Well, provide me the evidence. OK, build the accelerator, smash the particles up. There you are, there’s the Higgs boson. I now believe that the Higgs boson exists. It seems reasonable for science to say, OK, well, does God exist? Let’s look at the physical world and see what the proof is. Now the problem is that, the description of the physical world is carried out according to a particular language, a language which makes use of terms such as electron, quark, electric charge, mass, momentum, gravity, magnetism, stuff like that. But then you say, OK, well, what is this God like that we’re supposed to be looking for? And when you describe God, you describe God as a god of love, mercy, forgiveness, a god who decided to make a world, a god who has a purpose in mind for us, a good god, a moral god. If you are a Christian, then you think of Him as being a suffering god, he suffered through… And you think to yourself, well hold on, all those terms I have used to describe God, love, mercy, making a decision, having a purpose, none of that appears in the language we use for describing the physical world. It’s a totally different language. So why are we looking at the physical world and its sort of description, when we’re looking for something which can only be described in a totally different language? What is the language that we use for God? It’s the language of consciousness, of conscious experience. It’s what goes on in the mind. You’re sitting across from me. How do I know that you are conscious? If I’m just looking at you, from a physical point of view, how do I know that you are conscious? Obviously I don’t. It’s, it’s the problem of other minds. I, in principle at least, could provide a complete, comprehensive, self-consistent description of everything I see you do in terms of you being an assemblage of chemicals put together with the idea of being good at surviving and self-replicating. An assemblage of chemicals that survives in a hostile environment, and self-replicates, deterministically, blindly obeying the laws of physics. That accounts for everything that I see in physical terms. There is no need to postulate that you are conscious. So if I can’t even establish that you are conscious in a sceptical kind of way, there’s no way you’re going to be able to establish the existence of a conscious god by looking at the physical world. You have to examine the phenomenon of consciousness. And there’s

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Russell Stannard Page 39 C1672/03 Track 9 nothing new in this. You know, St Augustine, for example, said how he started off looking for God out there, and eventually he discovered that God was actually inside him all the time, that he had to look inwards. Gregory Palamas, another great theologian, said how you must search for God with a heart. So, you then think, well, perhaps this is what Kant is getting at, that, you’re not going to find evidence for God out there until first of all you know God and you know God by looking inside you. Which then raises the question, well if you look inside yourself, what do you expect to find there? Yourself. It’s just another way of looking at, you. But is that the, is that the case? Suppose we start by saying, OK, from the physical point of view, you are an assemblage of chemicals, good at surviving and self-replicating, behaving deterministically. And suppose this assemblage, somehow, in a way we don’t know, somehow became aware of itself. What would we expect to find in the mind of such an assemblage of chemicals? And that becomes very interesting. It takes you into the field known as evolutionary psychology, you know, how much of what goes on in the mind can be understood in terms of us being evolved creatures? What would you expect to find there? Well, at first you might think, well, if it just becomes aware of itself, it becomes a bit like watching a film, you know. You can’t do anything about it. You’re behaving deterministically. So, there are no decisions to be made, there’s no freedom; you’re just aware that these thoughts are somehow associated with this assemblage of chemicals, and you’re just watching what this assemblage does. Which isn’t anything like one’s normal experience. You would expect to find selfishness there, and, it’s there. You would expect to find aggression there, and that’s there. So that ties up, OK. You would expect to find cooperation with others, if it’s in your own interests, what biologists call reciprocal altruism. And that’s there. You would expect to find an ability to sacrifice oneself for one’s young, what biologists call altruism on behalf of close kin. So that, yes, there are features of consciousness that you would expect to find there, but there is a whole heap of other things there which you would not expect to find. The sense of good and evil, yeah? Why is it good to give money to starving people in Ethiopia if they can’t give anything back? Why a sense of purpose? In the physical world there’s no purpose. Why this sense of free will, making a decision? Why in fact do we have feelings? Now you might say, well, it’s important to have feelings of pain, otherwise, you know, you can stick your hand in a, a flame and, and you wouldn’t know. No. No. No. If this assemblage is deterministic, it’s going to withdraw the hand anyway. You don’t… You are not making any decisions, you don’t need to make any decisions to move. It’s going to happen anyway, it’s part of the survival mechanism.

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Feelings of pleasure. No. They are not necessary. You know? You’re going to have sex with this woman, whether or not, because, the laws of physics determine that that is what this assemblage is going to do to that other assemblage. You don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I’d like to do that.’ A sense of beauty. Why do we get a sense of beauty from looking at a rose, or a rainbow? A sense of awe looking at the, at the sky. Why doesn’t one just think, oh it’s big but it’s out there, it doesn’t affect my survival? Why a sense of… And so one can go on and on. [36:45] So, that’s, that’s what more I’m thinking about at the moment, trying to disentangle, from one’s experience of consciousness, what one expects to be there and what is actually there. And then raising the question, well, where does all the extra come from? And all the, all the extra is, is what traditionally we think of as being the qualities of God. OK, once one has got to know God by looking inside oneself, then you can look at the physical world, and reinterpret what you are seeing in terms of it being the work of God, in the same way as, once I look inside my consciousness, and I’m aware that my assemblage is conscious, I can then accept that your assemblage is conscious, and I can then start to interpret what you say and what you do in terms of you making the decisions and experiencing love and, and, and hatred and things of that kind. But first of all I’ve got to accept that you are conscious, before I then see you in that different light. And that’s, that’s, that’s the sort of things that are going on in my mind at the present time. Whether it will actually give rise to a book, I don’t know.

[38:15] Thank you. And in the last fifteen years, have you, have you, individually or you as a member of, say, the Templeton Foundation, noticed any particular changes in the discourse on relations between science and religion in Britain, over that period? So in the most recent decade and a half, has the, has the debate changed? I don’t mean in response to your own efforts or anything like that, but just, your observation of it, by reading, in reading newspapers, in watching things, in following, taking an interest in debates through the Templeton.

I, I don’t, I don’t really see much change. I think obviously, in terms of individuals, when they get exposed to the more nuanced approaches to science and religion, they as individuals change, but, as for a kind of sea change in, in the public in general, I, I don’t see that. I still

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Russell Stannard Page 41 C1672/03 Track 9 think that there is a tremendous amount of, well of ignorance about such issues. And I get very concerned for example about the prevalence of the literalistic interpretation of Genesis in the United States. I’m appalled at how many Americans, I think unthinkingly, you know, accept this literalistic interpretation, which automatically puts them on a collision course with, with scientific thinking. And, yah, I find it very sad, because I think that they, they are very impoverished if, if they are not embracing the wonders that have been revealed through science. It’s a very impoverished understanding of, of the world. And it’s so unnecessary. You know, they, they think they are defending the original interpretation of the Bible, but they’re not. They’re defending this misinterpretation, which, as I said, you know, comes from, from the Reformation, you know? So, I, I can’t say that I’m, you know, terribly pleased by what I [laughs], by what I find in the world.

And as a lay reader and as a, as churchgoer, has there been any change in the nature, or level of interest, in these questions within the sort of Christian church communities that you meet?

I, I don’t see a great deal of, of discussion of these issues going on in church. OK, in a couple of weeks’ time actually, I’ve been invited by another church to, to talk about it, so, that goes against what I’ve just said. But, that, that’s because, you know, they, they know me, but if I look further afield, you know, to parts which I and my colleagues in the science and religion field have not really contacted, there I, I don’t see any great, any great change.

[42:12] Could I ask you now about your, about your personal archive? And really, the point of this question is, for someone in the future listening to this recording, and wanting to find your archive, personal archive, where would you suggest they look for it, and can you give a sense of what it contains?

Well I suppose that’s in the… Well I suppose my, my archive is in the books that I’ve written and the videos I’ve made, but, I’m very well aware that these are very ephemeral objects, and that the time will come when they’ve all been remaindered and, been recycled. I, I just hope that during my lifetime, through these books and videos and the talks I’ve given, that I might have helped other people to have a better understanding of the relation between

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Russell Stannard Page 42 C1672/03 Track 9 science and religion, and that they, some of them in their turn, have passed these more positive attitudes on to their children, and their children have passed it on to their children and so on. So, I think that, the archive will be anonymously contained within a slightly improved overall attitude of people to the subject in the generations to come.

[End of Track 10]

[End of Interview]

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