Michael Wright & John Mayberry

0:00 Oh, hello, Bill. It's Mike. Oh, hi, Mike. How are you? No, it has been much too long. That's why I was wanting to get in touch. I just wanted to check, first of all, everything is okay with you and Fatima. You're over in Europe, I believe, not next month, but in October, for this thing in Brussels for Francois Bourceau. Is that right? Well, I certainly plan to come up there. So we'll have a chance to get together on that occasion. Yeah, well, I've been quite busy. I had this awful problem with my neck, as you know, when you saw me in Calais, but I got that okay. That's okay now. That's straightened out. Oh yeah, much better. It took about a month to finally get it sorted out, but they got to the bottom of the problem and it's fine now. And, well, I've just been, you know, I've just been steadily chugging on amongst the things that I've been doing is finishing off this catalogue of the interviews and the recordings that I have a view over the last 20 years, which comes to, amazingly, to almost 500 items, which I look forward running past you in Brussels, so you can tell me something like that, yes, getting close to it. Oh, yes, it is. I mean, that's, you know, some of them are just quite short. But, yeah, anyway, what I was hoping was that we could sit down and you could tell me what the priorities you, what priorities you think that I should, I should follow in making the transcripts, which we talked about with this new software. But I also wanted to check up on a couple of things. Cartier, Pierre Cartier, spoke to me the other day. This thing in the IHES in honor of Grotendieck is definitely going to go ahead on the 12th of January.

2:30 Yeah, that's the beginning of the second week and it's going to last a week. He and Bourguignon should be sending out the invitations to the speakers, he tells me within, well he didn't actually give me a date, but I understood that they were... They were going to do it within the next week or two at the most. Last time I spoke to him, he definitely wanted you to be the keynote speaker for the, on the whole subject of topos theory. But at least that's what he said to me, unless there's been some change of plan. The only reason that he hasn't, I think, actually sent the invitation to you is because he was having a bit of a problem with Bourguignon and the direction there in nailing down the dates. But it is definitely now going to be the 12th of January that week. The week starting the 12th, yeah. So you can circle that if you can ring-fence that in your diary. Then John Mabry was asking me, you know he and some of his students have had a reading group in Bristol for about a year now on... ... mathematics and some of your other work and he was very much hoping that you might be able to get together with them when you're over either on that occasion if there's any chance of your coming over to England afterwards or perhaps later in April when I think you're planning to be around for the peripatetic for the thing that they're having in Cambridge in honor of Peter and Martin Highlands 60th birthdays. I'm not quite sure exactly when that is. I think it's in April, but, yeah. Well, it would just simply be a question of which of those two occasions was the most convenient from your viewpoint to travel on to Bristol for perhaps two or three days. They'd obviously look after you and pay your travelling expenses. Because you were going to go down to visit Alberto, weren't you, amongst other things? Have you heard from Alberto at all in the last month or two?

5:00 Because I was trying to get hold of him without any success and I was very concerned because the last time I spoke to him he, you know, he had been having such terrible problems concerning Francesca's mental health and, you know, the own strain on his family, indeed on his job, and I, partly because of my own problems, I hadn't put as much effort into contacting him as I should have done. I really would like to go down and visit him. But when was the last time you heard from him, if you don't mind my asking? Yeah, of course, because he came to that thing in Como, didn't he, when you spoke at Udine in Como? Oh, by the way, Bob Walters finally got back in touch with me about that. His technician claims to have sent me a copy of the set of DVDs that they made. But I haven't seen them yet, they haven't arrived. But when they do, I'll try to ensure that they do work. Excellent. Yeah, I'm sure that it was. I was certain it was just a... Bob had said that his copy worked fine, so I knew that it must just be a technical problem either with your player or with the disc itself. Anyway, he's sending one to me, which I haven't had a chance to... which I haven't received yet, but apparently it's in the mail, so I'm looking forward very much indeed to it. I certainly enjoyed reading the abstract of those talks. They sounded absolutely fascinating. Yes.

7:30 I hope I'm not disturbing them because it's... Ah, good, right here. Yeah, once they're asleep, yeah. Yes, which is usually the case with very active and energetic young children. That's good, good, good. The closing ceremony of the Olympics. Hmm. Yes, I saw that he is now on their board. Well, no, as a matter of fact, I think he's actually just one of their advisors, but not a permanent member of their board. They seem to have a rotating team of advisors that changes every three years or so. But I was told by a couple of my Oxford contacts, including Simon Saunders, who is now one of the trustees of this archive and who, I'm sorry to say, has actually sort of taken money from them in the past as part of this philosophy and cosmology project that they were financing, that they've completely dried up, that they have no more money to give. FQX as such has not been topped up by Templeton in the last couple of years and is now apparently, well, I'm not sure, nobody knows what's going to happen to it.

10:00 I think this may be because the old bugger himself, of course, dropped off his perch about three, four months ago. I'm not so sure how far, I'm not sure how far at his very great age he still, you know, personally administered things, but I imagine he had the final say, and it may just be that it's, hmm, yes, I was going to say he's such an old man anyway. I hadn't realized just how much of a religious fanatic he was until I read his obituaries. Of course, Prince Charles is very much into woozy New Age religion, and of course is a great fan of the Dalai Lama, but, yeah. It surprises me because the Ayn Rand people tend to be, that's very interesting, because they tend to be extremely hostile to conventional institutional religion, and they have their own pseudo-religion of course that they would like to substitute for it, but on the whole most of the followers of Ayn Rand tend to be rather hostile to anything like Orthodox Christian theology. But I'm sure that they're quite unprincipled enough to make use of any instrument of obfuscation that, you know, that they can... But that's curious. I hadn't appreciated that. I thought that they tended to sort of fight amongst themselves. Oh, yes, of course, of course, yes, especially with... ...who does most of their, you know, that's his, he's their editor, he's the...

12:30 Yes, yes, I... Absolutely, yes. It's all about manufacturing buzzwords and, you know, bias-pronounced that such and such a buzzword is really cool. And therefore something which you should all learn about, i.e. something which you should chatter about without actually having mastered the serious mathematical definitions. Oh no, it is repellent, I agree. I read the original paper that he and his psychic Dolan wrote on categorification about ten years ago. And it seems to me to have very little serious content indeed and to make a lot of what would really just straightforwardly false claims as claiming that, you know, the various constructions are de-categorifications or categorifications of things which, you know, insofar as I can make head or tail of what they mean by categorification, they're quite clearly not. I mean, it just contains a great deal of wrong information. But I can't understand what... I didn't realize that... I knew that he'd become involved with Templeton, but I hadn't realized that he'd been given money for this research project. Yes, yes. Of course, after you told me about that, I looked up all of the proceedings of that on their site, and yes, it looked...

15:00 Well, as I say, FQX itself, although I'm quite sure there'll be another front organization along to take its place if it does come to an end, is at the moment not giving any more grants. They're telling everybody that the cupboard is bare, that they have no more money. At least that is what I was told by several people, including actually Penrose, who I spoke to in Sweden. Very innocently, without insinuating that there was any kind of agenda or anything that just asked him about this philosophy and cosmology project that he was involved with. And he confirmed what Simon had said, that there was at the moment no more Templeton money, at least not from the FQX source. But that may be, of course, that they're simply regrouping and that they're going to open another front. That's the usual way they work. Yes. I mean, the Templeton have got huge amounts of money. FQX was only ever simply a front for them. They could just as easily start a different front organization tomorrow. There may be, it may just be a purely tactical device that they've decided to wind down FQX, if indeed they have decided to wind it down. I'll keep my ear to the ground and... Yes, it's where most of the people working on loop quantum gravity concentrated. And there do appear to me to be some perfectly serious mathematicians and philosophers of physics there. It's very opportunistic, but they don't seem to have any very clear ideological agenda. They just have...

17:30 Crane, of course, who you met in Boston, has been there as a visiting fellow, although doesn't have a permanent position. They get all their money, as I'm sure you know, from this character... Sorry, my mind's got... Yeah, that's right, the guy who founded Blackberry. What is his name? The Greek guy. I keep wanting to say Nicolaides, but it's not... Yeah, it's not Nicolaides. Yeah, it'll come to my mind. And the guy who was the first director of it was given the sack, rather peremptorily, about a year ago, because there was some personality clash between him and, whatever his name is, I'm sorry, and they haven't yet appointed, although they have actually, they have appointed a new director now, and it's a physicist, I'm trying to think, I was hearing about it in Sweden, who the heck is it? I'm sorry, I'll have to do a little bit of digging and remind myself. But it's somebody who I've read some of their papers and they strike me as being a pretty serious person. The guy I had previously was just really a pure administrator, but he was very good. He was apparently very, very in the kind of atmosphere with which the place was run. I mean, various people I spoke to who had visited it said that they... They had given a great deal of attention to ensuring that people had a very comfortable atmosphere in which to interact, but apparently he wrote a novel, Roman Arclef, about being a science administrator. And the character of, you know, this guy who puts up all the money, the billionaire who owns Blackberry, comes into it as a fairly thinly disguised character, and although he obviously was not so foolish as to go out of his way to attack him or satirize him, he apparently was offended because I suppose he didn't feel that he'd been built up enough or given a sufficient essential role in the thing. I mean, the guy's a complete megalomaniac.

20:00 And so this poor guy's head rolled and he suddenly found himself out of a job. I was hearing all about this because Penrose is, of course, on their board. I think he's chairman of their trustees or one of them. But why can I not think of the name of their new director? No, it's okay. It'll come to me anyway. I think it would probably be, if you had an invitation to speak there, I think it would be well worth your while going, because there are some serious people there, and you might correct, for instance, if you were to make a bit of propaganda for Steve's work on smooth functions and analysis, I think that's something which they certainly ought to know about and pay a bit more attention to, trying to understand where the canonical commutational relations really come from. Those are the kind of things, and excavating in the same direction that George Mackey was working in. They have some, as I say, they have people there who are good enough to do that if they just point in the right direction. I wouldn't give up on them. They're not a complete bunch of shysters. They're not, as I say, like the N category cafe bloggers, though there is unfortunately some overlap between the membership. They certainly haven't been taken over. They gave a lot of money to the Everettians in Oxford. Even Penrose was disgusted by that. He was fuming about it. He was upset because for some reason they have a nest of followers of Everett in Oxford at the moment in the philosophy department.

22:30 And they were given a large chunk of money by Templeton because for some reason Templeton think that the Everett interpretation is... Well, as Byers would say, really cool. The whole thing is just so, as you say, so, so unserious. Anyway, Bill, I just wanted to make sure that you and Fatima are okay and that everything is fine. I'll see you in Brussels in October. Oh, I'm fine, you know, I'm just, you know, I think it's the 9th or the 10th, isn't it? I've got it in my diary anyway, I've got it. Oh, and tell me this, the article that you were talking about, about smooth... About the smooth category, about Chen's smooth category, is in the, what is in the categories list, is it? You said you posted... I have got on my shelf, which I ought to go and study. Indeed, I think I remember when I got... Ah, yes, indeed. It's the, you know, the idea that open sets are, you know, the defining notion rather than a derived or defined notion, yeah.

25:00 Yes, I remember talking about this when we were in Calais. I remember you talking to Bob about this. I still haven't written it down. If you sell it as friends, you understand better than I don't think they understand. Good. Yes, it was a fantastic talk, and obviously you've got the transcript of it. Yes, yeah. Well, I was going to say, I'm sorry I didn't produce one myself. I should have done. It was an extremely good talk and I got a great deal out of studying it. But you're right, the default assumptions about the nature of topological space, the nature of topology in particular, that the open set is where one starts from in building up. The notion of topological space is certainly, well, it does seem to get the relationship of intensives and extensives completely muddled up in really serious conversation about your work that I had with Alberto was mainly about generating figures and the nature of categories of space, correct understanding of categories of space from the viewpoint of understanding the role of figures. Which he helped to make clear to me in a way which I had not really understood fully before and he did a marvellous job. I remember we had a very interesting conversation about that when I was staying with him in Florence in, when was it, about 2004. I will certainly try to look him up and just check how he is and let you know what his news is. But you're planning to go down and see him in Italy sometime in the winter or spring, possibly after the...

27:30 Well, I'll give him a ring and, as I say, just find out how he is. And I'm hoping very much that if things go a little bit better for me this year financially, that I might be able to come down and stay with him, spend a little bit of time down there myself as well. Well, I wouldn't say all right, but I'm, you know, as usual, hanging on by my fingernails. But I managed to sell the land or some of the land at the back of my house, which is going through this coming month and which will give me a little bit of a breathing space. Yes, it's a pity, I didn't particularly want to sell it, but, you know, no alternative, and it's, the people who are buying it, they're my next-door neighbours, or next-door neighbours is one they plan to use it to graze some goats on. And probably a pony for their little girl when she's a bit older, which is fine, so it'll be put to good use. And as I say, it'll certainly help me, time me over for probably, well, if I'm very careful and economical, for about a year or so. But at the moment I'm surviving on this small grant from the people in Sweden, the Swedish Foundation, and may have something coming through in the new year from Australia. We do have a new product on the market which George has sent to me which is supposed to be based very largely in fact on Soviet research in the 1930s and 40s. There's a tremendous amount of research on the properties of herbal medicines of various... ...naturopathic remedies that was done in the Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s. They had by a long way the largest database in the world, and also they had done far, far more extensive field trials than anybody else did. And it was very largely on the basis of that data that George's products are actually to this day.

30:00 Of course I remember Sylvana, yeah. Because George was telling me that this new product that they've got, which is a development, a derivative of Rosanna, which was this herbal product which the Russians produced in the 50s and 60s, it's a kind of concentrated form of this, that they had done the testing on that in Canada and wondered whether there could be any connection. I wonder whether they, yeah, you must ask Silvana next time you speak to her if she's ever had any connections with an institution called the Swedish Herbal Institute for Research and Development, SHIRD, because that's George's. Swedish Herbal Institute for Research and Development, SHIRD, S-H-I-R-D is the acronym, because they're the people who at the moment are keeping the archive afloat. Anyway, I'll let you get some rest, Bill. Give my love to Fatima and to Sylvana and to the family. I'm sorry, I'm lucky to hear you, as always. I'll see you in Brussels in October. You're not coming over to Europe before that, I take it? I look forward to seeing you then in about six or seven weeks. I'll give you a call if I hear anything from Alberta. And you, Chas, bye.

32:30 It's Mike. Hi, I'm fine. How, this is obviously not a good moment. Are you going to be around a bit later? I'm at home. I'm at Chez moi, at Fougere. Your home number? No, I think I only have your office number. Give me your home number. Quick, okay, look after yourself. Go carefully. Okay, au revoir. Go out and then, you know, one or two things intervened. How are you? That was why I was ringing you, as a matter of fact. What did you, you saw my email, did you? No. If you do decide, I really ought to contact Pavlov sometime in the next few days to let him know what's happening. What do you think about speaking to Jean? Jean-Pierre, do you think he might be interested? See if you can talk him into it, because, well, as I say, to be quite naked about it, as I said in the email, it will help me probably, vis-a-vis, but also, I genuinely think he would, perhaps even more than you, he might be very interested in some of the observational, cosmological talks. Confusing him with somebody else, then.

35:00 Well, that, of course, is why, you know, Pablo's so fascinated by his stuff, because, of course, their fixation with dodecahedral universes. But I don't know why I had the impression that he also worked on the observational side. That's not the case. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. Yeah, we were naturally, yes, but he's not himself. Okay, well, but all the same. See if he would be interested in giving a talk, because I do know that Pavlov's always been very, very keen on trying to get him to come. OK, well, see what you can do, anyway. I mean, they are interesting. As I say, when Luke Kauffman and I went two years ago, we did have an extremely interesting time. I mean, quite apart from the, in fact, well, entirely apart from the mathematical side. He sent you an invitation, didn't he? Didn't he send you an invitation? That was the thing that you sent me. I thought he already sent you an invitation. Oh, just an information. Ah, I see. I had the impression he'd actually invited you. Well, let me ask. Let me see if I can twist his arm over that. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, you know, you don't want to accept the invitation and then discover he expects you to pay for your own trip. No, of course not. No, no, no, no. I'll have a word. I'll ask him about that. It will certainly make it a lot easier if we can get Jean-Pierre as well. Do what you can. Yeah, I'll just put out a gentle field. Don't worry, I'll be very diplomatic about it. If he's not able to, well, I'll let you know straight away. But let me know what happens anyway. Well, to be honest, I'm so skint at the moment, it's a bit difficult for me. I'm just sitting here plowing on with completing the catalogue of the archive and doing various other things. But I went to this conference in Sweden.

37:30 Penrose last month which was very interesting and I have to say which he met his wife for the first time Vanessa she really is an absolutely delightful person. I'm very very much hoping that you know once the catalogs completed and we put some stuff online and we've done various other things that he may be able to to get some funding out of Oxford for at least For a year or so for this archive project. I'm going to go to this conference in Mainz in September, so I'll certainly be passing through Paris just before that, so I could drop in and see you then. When are the categories and physics seminars starting again? When is your seminar starting again? The one that you... There's also a meeting in Brussels on the 9th and 10th of October that you may know about in honour of François Rousseau, which Lauvier and some other people are speaking at, which looks very interesting. I just had a long conversation with him on the phone last night, mainly about topology. What he regards as the kind of fundamental errors in the whole conceptual organization of the subject, which of course I only got glimpses of the scenery, but it was a very, very interesting, very interesting ideas indeed about the importance of bornology and the reason why in topological vector spaces there doesn't appear to be a home to tensor. Well, let's talk properly when I come to Paris next. It should be sometime, well, it should be sometime around the 20th of September. Okay. I'll let you know in good time. And obviously let me know after you speak to Jean-Pierre. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Take care and have a good time. Take care, have a good rest, and I'll see you soon.

40:00 Okay. Ciao. Ciao. See you soon. There is something wrong with the disjunct number 7. The disjunct number 7 is related to what? I don't know. Okay, I understand. Okay, I understand. It's one of seven fingers. One, two, three, four. You have to look at what it is. Look, you have to check everywhere to know what it is. Yes, you have to check and see if there is an element that... Ah, the fridge is good. The fridge is good, good too. You have to check everything. I'm not sure what to check. At the moment, at the moment, but... These are power outlets somewhere. You have to see them everywhere, in the rooms, everywhere. You have to look at what's in them. Okay, can you do it for me to see? Go ahead, go ahead. But all the other rooms... Here, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always the same, it's always

42:30 Yes, you have to look at this. Ah, the answer is this. It's a star. I don't know where it is. It's already at this moment. You have to go and see it. Oh, wow. What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? It's a star. What is it? It's a star. What is it? It's a star. What is it? It's a star. What is it? It's a star. What is it? It's a star. What is it? It's a star. What is it? It's a star. Thank you for your attention. That's it, right? You're going to look at a game that doesn't work. I think it's a problem with the disconnection that is linked to the number 7 question.

45:00 But we don't know exactly what it is, and I understand. As you go along, you will see what doesn't work. There will be an element that won't work. Yes, yes. Does the dishwasher work? Yes, yes, it works. So, for the moment, if I leave the dishwasher number 7 like that, if I leave it... There is no problem. Sorry, there is no problem. Yes, yes, yes, but the others don't speak French. Yes, no problem, it works. But now we need to know what it is exactly. Yes, yes, I understand. Until this time, maybe it's related to... but this is an old problem, since when? At least 8 months. I have a problem here in March-April with the heating, the heating of the water here. It has changed, hasn't it? No, I think I'm waiting for the payment of funds for me to replace it. The problem is an inundation, a small inundation, for example. Yes, but it may be him who... No, no, but it is said that it is cut, and this one is in Mars. Mars or... Yes, it's in Mars on the first day of April. And I have a friend who is in the first day. This is the first one that has been cut, the installation of the water heater, for this one, for this one, for the cook. And tell me, all the arrangements, I have the info here in Viancourt for the replacement. That's how I need it. But this one, it's from four months ago. And I have no problems with electricity in connection with this one. But at this moment, do you think that if I leave the subject to you, the other part of the system will work?

47:30 No problem. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for coming. Excuse me for being late. No problem. But you understand, this is the problem, because for me, the most important thing is the computer, because it's my work. I don't know if that was an answering machine by any chance. If so I hope I'm speaking to Guido and Jenny's number. Guido it's Mike calling from Europe, from France. By my world clock the time with you is about half past eight in the evening so I thought I would have a good chance of finding you in probably having just put Kate to bed but it seems I was wrong or possibly I've got the number wrong although I thought I'd taken it down very carefully from your email.

50:00 Okay, I will try you later if you are in fact getting this as a recorded message. It was just to check to see whether my letter with the receipts and stuff had arrived and also to update you on just a couple of things to do with the archive. Okay, if you do get this message and if you're able to give me a call back later today or this evening, otherwise I'll try sending you an email. Okay, take care. Cheers. We're going under a very special gate which is called a torii, which is a gate in these temples, and the idea is that we're moving from the everyday world into a world where plants can heal you. The most wonderful field incident yesterday at research at Northumbria University, and they've actually proven a professor of what is called neurochemical pathology, that's a bit of a mouthful, but what it means is researching disorders of the brain, and I've been doing this for quite a long time, various programs of research. To take forward in Newcastle and other parts of the country, these plants really do work. Project manager, it does some physics. I've been here under five years now. There are actually over 600 plants in this garden, so even after five years, I don't actually know. Okay, so we're going to go down these steps now into the sage garden. This sage garden used to be my own little original herb garden. Tell me the story of this physic garden. How did it come about?

52:30 I guess it goes back to my doing research at the university into... We're going to move on to new drug therapies and then thinking, well, why don't we look to see whether there are some plants that could be good for memory and we could start to do a search on them. There's only hundreds and thousands of them that have landed. I said, well, this is quite interesting, why don't you open it to the public, which is something I wanted to do. You know, this is my garden. I'm going to prune back the hawthorn bush because it's creating a little too weird for one of the beds. My name's Maggie and I'm a volunteer gardener here, well I'm not at the head volunteer gardener, I help organise volunteers and recruit volunteers. This is a little hawthorn and it's really, really, sometimes you've got to work your way in. It's a sacred tree in the clean calendar. 30th of May this one comes in and I remember it's because that's my birthday, so it's quite a special tree. I hope I won't object to pruning it then. No, no, no, I had a word with you first. Would you have to garden in a different way because you're looking after these medicinal plants? Yes, we do. Like at the end of the season, most people would take all their dead wood down and we leave it if the plants are allowed to go back down to earth. What do your medical colleagues make of what you do here? When we first started this research over ten years ago, I think some of them definitely thought we were straying from the straight and narrow path of scientific research, but what's been exciting is really latterly, more and more of my colleagues have thought, yes, there is some value in what's going on here, there is the potential, particularly in the areas that we're researching where there are not really good and effective drugs. I think it's important to realise that we're kind of bridging two worlds here. There's the world of medical herbalism, which has its own...

55:00 We've got all sorts of uses. I'm Ross Lentzleys, I'm a herbalist from the garden and I run courses here. We're now in front of a huge bed of lemon balm. You can smell the wonderful lemony scent coming off it if you press it between your fingers a little bit. And it is also a wonderful medicinal plant on so many levels. When I first met Professor Elaine Perry we were at a plant that she's done a lot of work on to look at and help people with, and also just generally to help improve memory and show through trials that it can. Scientists like Culpepper and Gerard wrote it all down in great detail what plants they were using to heal what disorders and they are the ones who I think have put the knowledge down to medical herbalist practices today, obtained a lot of their knowledge from the ancient Greek rite. We know now scientifically poppies contain chemicals which work on the pain receptors in the brain. Snowdrops, tell me about snowdrops. Snowdrops and daffodil bulbs, the main chemical in their bulbs called enanthamine, is used as one of the main treatments for Alzheimer's disease. It's now synthesized but it did originate from the plant. ...Lane Perry with Cass Graham and if you want to visit Dilston Physic Garden, you'll find it just outside Hexham in Northumberland. It's open to the public on Wednesdays and Thursdays until the end of September.

57:30 So the Sony ICD-P320 on the 26th of June 2008. Martin Hunt is speaking of the something-something object classifier because that's, so to speak, what abstraction is. A little later about extracting the pure theory from any monad and then the remark about... Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Okay, just my last question. Are there any, is there any recording of Cheney on YouTube conducting that you know of? What a pity. I just thought it might be...