‘Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake.’ The first night of the conference, in the community centre, I was at the buffet dinner when I was suddenly struck dumb by one of the most beautiful voices I had ever heard, singing in the next room. Mesmerized, I left the dining room and gravitated towards the music as if lured by a Rhinemaiden. A lovely soprano, accompanied by a string quintet of obviously professional quality, was singing in German to a nostalgic, probably Viennese, waltz tune. I was entranced, and made enquiries. The string players were indeed professionals, who came from Germany every year to Melbu to play, pro bono, for love of the place and its idealism. The sweet soprano was not German but Norwegian: Betty Pettersen, Melbu doctor and one of the consortium who had joined forces with the dentist to found the centre. We became friends during the course of the conference, and I was sorry to lose touch as the years passed.
But there was a sequel. In September 2014 I was invited to the Blenheim Palace Literary Festival in Woodstock, near Oxford. Blenheim Palace is the magnificent Vanbrugh-designed residence of the Dukes of Marlborough (the Churchill family, and indeed Sir Winston was born there). It’s a beautiful location for a literary event, and I usually go to the festival to promote each of my new books. This time, for An Appetite for Wonder, the format would be different: the interview was to be punctuated by music, chosen by me – as in the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs (on which I once appeared as castaway) – to illustrate scenes from my life. The big difference in the Blenheim Palace version was that the music would be live, played by the Orchestra of St John’s under their Director John Lubbock, with a soprano, a contralto and a pianist.
Among the fifteen pieces I chose, I really wanted the haunting Viennese waltz-time song, to remind me of Betty and the Spirit of Melbu. I knew neither its name, nor that of the composer. The tune itself, however, was firmly lodged in my head, one of my morning shower repertoire. So I played it on my EWI (electronic wind instrument) into my computer microphone, and emailed the melody to half a dozen musicians in the hope that one of them would recognize it. And one – only one – did: Ann Mackay, a dear friend of Lalla’s and mine who, by a lively coincidence, had been engaged as the soprano soloist for my Blenheim concert. She knew the song well, had often performed it and possessed the sheet music: Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume (‘Vienna, city of my dreams’) by Rudolf Sieczynski. It all worked out to perfection: Annie sang it beautifully in the long, sparkling Orangery of Blenheim Palace, and stirred sweet memories of my Melbu nightingale.
EWI son et psycho lumière
The EWI (pronounced ‘ee-wee’), by the way, is another story. In 2013 Lalla went on the popular BBC radio show Loose Ends to talk about an exhibition of her art that was being mounted at the National Theatre in London. The band Brasstronaut, which provided the musical interlude on the show, included Sam Davidson, a virtuoso on the electronic wind instrument. Lalla was intrigued and got talking to him. When she reported the conversation to me, as a sometime clarinettist I was even more intrigued. I had an email conversation with Sam, and stored away in my head the idea that some day, if the opportunity arose, I would love to try my hand at the EWI.
Meanwhile I happened to be approached by the London advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi. They had been commissioned to produce the opening tableau to get the ball rolling at the Cannes documentary film festival. They chose the theme of ‘Memes’ and wanted to feature me. I was to enter, stage left, and give a precisely scripted three-minute lecture on memes. I’d then walk off, giving way to a weird psychedelic film in which words and phrases from my lecture would be, as if by magic, incorporated together with spinning images of my face, loud booming music and strange light-show effects coming from all sides, my voice distorted and made vaguely musical with surreal echoes and harmonies – exploiting the whole whizz-bang repertoire of computer graphics and sound. Could this be what is known as postmodern? Who can tell?
It was all designed to seem like a conjuring trick, as if the computerized son et lumière had somehow picked up the words and phrases of my lecture and instantly magicked them, in fragments and distorted echoes, into the fabric of psychedelia. To the audience it would have sounded as though weird, dreamlike memories of my lecture had somehow been captured and instantly rearranged and regurgitated. Of course, in truth the Saatchi team had recorded me giving the word-for-word identical lecture weeks earlier, in an Oxford studio, and so had plenty of time to extract snatches from the recording to make their phantasmagoric film.
Anyway, the idea was that, as the sound and light show soared to its end, I should walk back on stage, this time carrying a clarinet and playing the refrain from the music that had just stopped thundering through the wraparound loudspeakers. ‘Er, it is true, isn’t it, that you play the clarinet?’ Well, I hadn’t touched a clarinet for fifty years, no longer possessed one, wasn’t at all sure my embouchure was up to it. But then Lalla reminded me of the EWI. I explained to them what it was. It was now Saatchi & Saatchi’s turn to be intrigued. Would I be prepared to learn to play the EWI in order to do the walk-on-and-play climax to their psychedelic extravagarama? How could I not? ‘Just try me.’ We both rose to the challenge; they bought me an EWI and I set about learning to play it.
The EWI is a long, straight thing shaped like a clarinet or oboe, with a mouthpiece at one end, a cable leading to a computer at the other, and woodwind-style keys in between. The mouthpiece contains an electronic sensor. Blow into it and a noise comes out of the computer: clarinet, violin, sousaphone, oboe, cello, saxophone, trumpet, bassoon – the mimicry of the real instrument is as good as software can make it, and that means very good indeed. If the computer is connected up to the massive speakers and boomboxes of the theatre in Cannes, it sounds pretty impressive.
Electronic keyboard instruments purport to mimic real instruments too, but the added control you can exert when you blow into the mouthpiece of the EWI makes all the difference. You can transmit emotion in a way that you really can’t with a keyboard trying to mimic orchestral instruments (you can with a piano, but that’s because the keys are sensitive to how hard you hit them: hence the full name, pianoforte). The EWI is fingered pretty much like a clarinet or an oboe. This makes it much easier, startlingly easier, for a beginner to produce the sound of a cello, say, with a beautifully resonant vibrato, or a singing violin, without any of the agony we associate with those bowed instruments during the years of scraping, scratching apprenticeship. Tongue the EWI’s mouthpiece hard, and the software renders it as the characteristic ‘zing’ of bow hitting string. Tongue the mouthpiece when the software is set to trumpet mode and you get the ‘lippy’ attack of that instrument; or in tuba mode and you get a satisfying oompah. Tongue it in clarinet mode and you hear exactly what you would hear from a real clarinet. In any mode, blow steadily harder and then die away, to create a soulfully burgeoning crescendo and sighing diminuendo. For the finale of the Saatchi show I played it in trumpet mode, blaring and forthright. I actually made a mistake through stage fright, but managed to recover and the Saatchi team were kind enough to congratulate me on my impromptu ‘improvisation’. They tell me the YouTube video went viral.
Astronauts and telescopes
In 2011 the astronomer and musician Garik Israelian convened a most remarkable gathering on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. This volcanic archipelago off the coast of Morocco is a major centre of astronomy because there are mountains high enough to penetrate most clouds, and important observatories take advantage of this on both Tenerife and La Palma. Garik had the inspired idea of getting scientists together with astronauts and musicians to see what they had in common, and what they could learn from one another: hence the event’s name, ‘Starmus’. The musicians included Brian May, former lead guitarist with Queen, a supernormally nice man; the scientists included Nobel Prizewinners such as Jack Szostak and George Smoot; and among the astronauts were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders (who, though an unbeliever, had been made by the NASA PR department
to read aloud from the book of Genesis), Charlie Duke (who, disconcertingly, has become a born-again Christian), Jim Lovell (captain of the nearly doomed Apollo 13), Alexei Leonov (first man to walk in space), and Claude Nicollier (the Swiss astronaut who walked in space to repair the Hubble telescope).
Halfway through the conference, several of us were flown in a small plane to the neighbouring island of La Palma, to have a panel discussion inside the housing of the largest optical telescope in the world, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, with its 409-inch mirror. Lalla and I travelled with Neil Armstrong, and it was a pleasure to see how well deserved was his reputation for modesty and quiet courtesy. This was in no way belied by his very reasonable policy of never giving autographs to random strangers – instituted (as he explained to an eager autograph hunter on the journey) when he discovered that his signature – and even his fake signature – was being sold on eBay for tens of thousands of dollars.
The La Palma giant telescope was stunning. Instruments such as this, and the similar telescopes of the Keck Observatory on the big island of Hawaii, move me deeply, I think because they represent some of the highest achievements of our human species. And, as my friend Michael Shermer has recorded, I was especially moved by the Mount Wilson 100-inch telescope in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, once the largest telescope in the world and the one with which Edwin Hubble first decoded the expanding universe. Before Mount Wilson, the title of largest telescope was held (for the longest time) by the Earl of Rosse’s 72-inch ‘Leviathan of Parsonstown’ at Birr Castle in Ireland, to which I have an extra emotional attachment because of its association with Lalla’s family. I experienced the same swelling of the chest when I visited CERN and the Large Hadron Collider: again, the near-lachrymose pride in what humans can do when they cooperate, across nations and across language barriers.
The spirit of international cooperation was hovering over the whole Starmus conference. When Buzz Aldrin arrived late in the conference hall, Alexei Leonov was in the front row of the audience. Completely undeterred by the fact that somebody was trying to give a lecture, this jovial Khrushchev-lookalike stood up and bellowed at the top of his voice: ‘Buzz Aldrrreeen’. Arms outstretched, he strode towards the incoming Aldrin and enveloped him in a full Russian bear-hug. At dinner, Leonov showed himself to have artistic as well as astronautical talent. Lalla and I were entranced to see him dash off on the back of the menu a rapid self-portrait (see the picture section) for Garik Israelian’s little boy Arthur. The tie, included at Arthur’s request to match the one Leonov was wearing at dinner, adds a quirky charm to the picture – as if added charm were needed, given the beaming abundance of the commodity on display in another bear-hug for Jim Lovell, hero of the triskaidekaphobogenic1 Apollo 13.
Neil Armstrong sat with Lalla on the return flight from La Palma to Tenerife. They talked of many things, including the remarkable fact – vivid demonstration of Moore’s Law – that the total computer memory on board Apollo 11 (32 kilobytes) was a small fraction of the capacity of a Gameboy that Armstrong pointed out in the possession of a child in a neighbouring seat. Alas, that gracious and courageous gentleman was no longer present when Garik reprised the Starmus conference three years later. It was again a great experience, this time with a much larger audience and with Stephen Hawking as special guest.
Flashing back again to the 1970s and the gatherings of my earlier career such as the Washington conference on sociobiology, an element of nostalgia creeps in. In those days I was able to be simply a delegate, listening to talks with interest, approaching speakers afterwards to follow up points of interest, perhaps having dinner with them. Recent conferences, especially since publication of The God Delusion, have become a very different kind of experience. Although I am not a celebrity with lots of people recognizing me in the street (thank goodness), I seem to have become a minor celebrity in the secularist, sceptical, non-believing circles that convene the sorts of conferences to which I am now invited. The other major change is the arrival of the selfie. I don’t think I need to elaborate, except to say that the invention of the cellphone camera is a mixed blessing. And you can take that as polite British understatement.
CHRISTMAS LECTURES
IN the spring of 1991, the telephone rang and a pleasant voice with a gentle Welsh lilt announced: ‘This is John Thomas.’ Sir John Meurig Thomas FRS, a scientist of distinction and the Director of the Royal Institution (RI) in London, was ringing to invite me to give the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children, and I went hot and cold as he did so. The warm flush of pleasure at the honour was swiftly followed by a cold wave of trepidation. I immediately knew I would not be able to refuse the commission, and yet I lacked confidence that I could do it justice. I was aware that this renowned series of lectures had been founded by Michael Faraday, who gave them himself on nineteen occasions, culminating in his famous exposition of ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’. I knew that in recent years the BBC had been televising the series, and the lecturers had included such scientific heroes as Richard Gregory, David Attenborough and Carl Sagan. If I’d lived in London as a child, I would probably have been in the audience.
Sir John understood my fears (he’d given the Christmas Lectures himself) and kindly didn’t press me for a decision there and then, but invited me to visit the RI to discuss the possibility. I went up to London and he was as quietly kind as his telephone voice promised, paying special attention, as he showed me around, to the many legacies and traditions of his personal hero, Michael Faraday. With one of these traditions I was already only too familiar. A year or so earlier I had been invited to give a ‘Friday evening discourse’, another regular custom of the RI dating back to the 1820s. This particular tradition bristles with intimidating formality. Both the lecturer and the audience are expected to wear evening dress. The lecturer has to stand outside the lecture theatre while the clock strikes the hour. On the last stroke, an official flings open the double doors, the lecturer strides purposefully in and immediately has to start talking science in the very first sentence, with absolutely no introduction or preamble of the ‘Great pleasure to be here’ kind. That’s an admirable tradition. More difficult, the concluding sentence of the lecture must be uttered, with decisive finality, at the exact moment when the clock begins to strike the following hour. As if that were not alarming enough, the lecturer is literally locked in ‘Faraday’s Room’ for the twenty minutes preceding the lecture, having been handed Faraday’s own short book on how not to give a lecture – a bit late for that, you might think. I learned that this locking-in tradition began some time in the nineteenth century when a lecturer found the formality too much to bear and did a runner at the last minute. Sir John wasn’t too sure, but he suspected it was Wheatstone (he of the eponymous Bridge). I did read Faraday’s notes during my twenty minutes of incarceration, and amazingly I did manage to round off my lecture exactly as the clock was striking, despite being thrown off my stride by an illusion, only gradually dispelled in the course of repeated surreptitious glances in the dim light, that a particular dinner-jacketed gentleman in the audience was Prince Philip.
I took a deep breath and accepted Sir John’s invitation to give the five Christmas Lectures, ‘for a juvenile auditory’ to quote Faraday’s original rubric. The tradition is to make minimal use of slides (magic lantern, I suppose it would have been called in the early days, PowerPoint or Keynote now). Instead, there is a heavy emphasis on live demonstrations. If you want to talk about a boa constrictor, don’t show a picture of a boa constrictor, borrow one from the zoo. If a child can be called out of the audience to wear the boa around her neck, so much the better. Such demonstrations require a lot of preparation in advance, and I soon found I had underestimated the time I’d have to commit. The rest of that year leading up to the Christmas climax was marked by frequent trips to London for planning sessions with Bryson Gore, the RI’s chief technical officer, and with Richard Melman and William Woollard of the independent television company
Inca, subcontracted by the BBC.
Bryson was (no doubt still is, although he has moved on from the RI) a stalwart of technical ingenuity and improvisation. His fiefdom was a large workshop chaotically littered with useful rubbish, including props from earlier lecturing seasons (which, you never know, might one day come in handy). It was his job to make, or supervise the making of, apparatus and other necessaries for the lectures – not just the Christmas Lectures but the Friday evening discourses and many more. It was a trifle unfortunate that his given name sounds like a surname, so the audiences might have thought I was being old-fashioned when I addressed him as ‘Bryson’ during the lectures. In earlier times, indeed, lecturers had referred to his predecessor as ‘Coates’. Bryson’s services, and those of his staff (a young man called Bipin), were placed at my disposal, and I had to think hard, and discuss with Bryson and William and Richard, how to use them.
One agreeable and unanticipated feature of the Christmas Lectures was that the very name was a golden key to unlock goodwill whichever way I turned. ‘You want to borrow an eagle? Well, that’s difficult, I honestly don’t see how we can realistically, I mean do you seriously expect . . . Oh, you’re giving the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures? Why didn’t you say so before? Of course. How many eagles do you need?’
‘You want an MRI scan of your brain? Well, who is your doctor, have you been referred to the MRI Department on the National Health Service? Or are you going privately? Do you have health insurance? Have you any idea how expensive MRI scans are, and how long the waiting list? . . . Oh, you’re doing the Christmas Lectures? Well, of course, that’s different. I’m sure I can slip you into a research run, no questions asked. Can you come to the Radiography Department on Tuesday during the lunch hour?’
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 10