FW Lawvere

0:00 Oh, hello, Bill. I'm okay. How are you? Yeah, I'm very disappointed indeed about the news from Cartier, but maybe as Fatima intuits, maybe it's a blessing in disguise. I don't know. I discovered from speaking to, actually not to Pierre himself directly, but to somebody else earlier today, that this committee The scientific committee for the meeting, which he refers to, that Conn was indeed on that, so that may have quite a lot to do with the outcome. It was Conn, Cartier himself, Bourguignon, and two other people whose names I didn't recognize. But I have the strong impression that Pierre was completely isolated on that committee. And, you know, that they were all, and indeed these two guys I mentioned that I ran into at this conference in Mainz, they were there to chatter about non-commutative geometry and to promote the whole sort of con obfuscatory program. And so it doesn't come as such a great surprise to me either, but still very disappointing. You think from what you wrote in this message that you see a convergence at some level between the the kind of methodological confusions and conceptual blind alleys in mathematical physics and what has been going on in financial economics in the last 20 years. Yeah, I'm very interested. Yes, yes, that certainly was quite a singularity. It certainly detects certain parallels, but I would love to hear far more from you, maybe when we get to Brussels on that subject, more analysis.

2:30 It would be a very useful task for Marxists to do so. There is quite a good, I think quite a good article on the whole... You know, the whole sort of financial crisis of capitalism on the web, which I was looking at last week. In fact, it was actually written a couple of months ago before the full impact of the, I don't know, the scale of the crisis became... It became apparent by Perry Anderson, who's the founder of New Left Review, a man whose views I don't always find myself in agreement with. He's a British Marxist who was very much taken by the ideas of Althusser and structural Marxism in the 60s and 70s, and has certain Trotskyite affiliations. But I have to say, on this occasion, I thought he'd turn in a historically pretty... This is a very profound and well-researched piece of analysis on the banking system. I'll send it to you as an attachment and you may be interested. We actually have an online journal, do they? The Communist Party of Canada, Marxist-Leninist. Oh, I will certainly, yes, of course, I'll just simply Google on there. Oh, I will certainly look at that. Yeah, I will certainly look at that. I sent you the Anderson article and I'll certainly go online and read that. John Stachel sent me a plaintiff because unfortunately he wasn't able to come to the Mainz meeting because of his continuing ill health. But he sent me a thing saying,

5:00 Isn't it a tragedy at this moment that there isn't a mass left movement. I have to say I think the emergence of what the media will christen or perceive as a mass left movement may in fact be one of the most dangerous points in the development of the crisis, given what has passed for the left and the way that the... The point is that it could so very easily be diverted into kind of unprincipled slogans, just unprincipled populist slogans, simply devised to divert people from any real serious analysis of the nature of the capitalist system. His point was that, you know, why on earth isn't there... A mass left movement. You know, why hasn't this crisis called it into being in the way that the invasion of Iraq briefly caused a mass mobilization of people on the streets, which in fact led absolutely nowhere. It was completely, as you yourself pointed out at the time, it was the whole thing was just a, well, a kind of flabby spiritual exercise because at the end of the day, none of these people were actually prepared to... I don't know, to display any kind of revolutionary initiative or... No, exactly, they had no principles, no framework and hence of course no understanding of the kind of organisation that was needed. And it might pervert, but yes, yes, still joined in, you know, yes, I know, I know. Well exactly, of course the really depressing thing is that when Mussolini and the fascists marched on Rome they probably didn't have a tenth of that number. In fact, they certainly didn't have a tenth of that number, but unfortunately they knew their mind and they, you know, they were organized. Also, of course, they're hand in glove with the ruling class anyway, which of course tends to make a big difference. But no, of course, you're absolutely right. They might as well have gone there for the funeral of the bloody Pope, you know, and then gone home.

7:30 No, I agree. Oh, I agree, excess is not. But of course, at the moment, what we're hearing on all sides is, oh, of course, there has to be a Bretton Woods 3, there now has to be a new system of global regulation so that the system can be made to flourish again and it will no longer be subject to these excesses. I mean, it's all, we have been here before so many times, you know, the 18th of Brumaire. Well, look at Paulson himself, who landed with a golden parachute from Goldman Sachs, was it $57 million? And this is the man who's just absolutely unbelievable. And I mean, even Biden saying in the Bryce presidential debate, that as if, you know, well, of course, you know, there will now be no really serious policy constraints on any incoming... So foreign aid, any prospect of kind of increasing foreign aid programs will have to go by the board. Well, obviously foreign aid programs with American government have not really intended to aid people in destitution and third world anyway, but yeah, it's just different factors of the ruling class. But all the same, the moral nullity of the position is just simply unbelievable, that they can find trillions to give to bankers who caused this entire crisis in the first place, so that they can carry out a further wave of amalgamations and consolidations in the name of even bigger finance capital, but they can't find a fraction of that amount to fund a proper... A system of basic universal medical insurance for the United States still has 40% of its population without any form of medical insurance.

10:00 Yes, yes, at least they briefly understand it. It is certainly a very clarifying moment. And there is an opportunity for a mass movement of the left. It's been seen on this scale before, or as openly. And at the very same time, a moment when the savings and security of everybody else is more in peril than it's ever been. It's absolutely unbelievable. On a practical note, yes, I'd like to sit down with you, very much indeed, in Brussels. Schole's algorithm. Schole's algorithm. They were the people who were supposed to devise the algorithm to tell people when they should place put and call options on derivatives. Yes, yes, exactly. Yes, in fact, I think Black was. The Black of the Black-Scholes algorithm was a theoretical physicist. There can never be another Wall Street crash. Absolutely. Who at the moment, Greenspan, who now I have to say must be amongst the most completely and instantaneously discredited historical figures in a very long time.

12:30 I can't even think of a comparison, except perhaps Professor Fukuyama, the man who announced the end of history about 15 years ago. Yeah, the end of history. But apart from him, I can't think of many people who, as it were, have been so completely discredited and whose public reputation, I mean, even in the eyes of their own class, has been turned around quite so dramatically in such a short space of time. The kind of math that was used to construct these derivatives and about how it was building so many cutouts and layers of additional security and predictability to the system, which turns out, of course, to be an exact opposite of the truth. There was a very interesting talk, as a matter of fact, about a year ago in Paris in the IHP. They had a little conference on the history of mathematics from the Italian and French Society for the History of Maths, and most of it was about differential geometry. It was quite interesting because I learned a great deal about Cartan, and Italian differential geometry, and particularly the Einstein connection. But there was one talk on the last day, which I nearly didn't go to, but I did in the end because it was given by, I have to say, an extremely pretty Lebanese Ph.D. student, a girl, who... Who gave a talk precisely about financial economics and about this Black-Scholes algorithm and she was extremely critical. It was a very good analysis. Her background was in the theory of partial differential equations. And she was just saying these people, they came in from theoretical physics and they did not really understand the theory of partial differential equations in anything like the mathematical depth or rigor that has been subsequently claimed for them. And it has been shown in retrospect when they run the various models, market models and these things, that this is obviously taking it in terms of the ...financial capitalists' own point of view, but nonetheless it's interesting, that it did systemically under price risk over the long run.

15:00 She was saying, of course, that's not to suggest that there's some purely mathematical explanation for the crisis. The crisis just comes from the nature of the system and from good old-fashioned insensate greed. But, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, I say that we should be too hard on Poincaré. I realize you meant that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, we'll come back to within that region of the phase space, yes, as Marx pointed out, history never repeats itself, but as I say, I guess you could even say, you know, the famous saying, you know, the first time is tragic, the second time is fast, it's all about revisiting, the trajectory is revisiting at least the proximate region of the phase space. And the third time is fast on stills. Yes, yes. It pretty much calls to mind, to my mind, the debate which McLean, of course, engaged in, in the mathematical, yeah, exactly, with, I'm sorry, what was their name, the two guys who announced the death of proof? It's of course Jaffe, Quinn and Jaffe, of course, I'm sorry, forgetting names, it's Quinn and Jaffe. I think there's a very clear parallel between that and what's happened in...

17:30 Well I certainly have. I see him quite regularly. He came to our meeting in Paris back in 2005. I'm afraid he's gone off the rails completely. Category cafe, yes I know. It's very sad he's gone completely off the rails. So, you know, Clay and Tesla were the most direct, most very positive scholars for this whole mathematical movement. Absolutely. This is what, this whole movement for the loosening of standards, for the, you know, for the loosening of rigorous scientific standards in maths and physics has been directly funded and prodigiously funded. I mean, that's the thing. These people have so much money. Yes. Which I certainly would like to understand better. Anyway, there were some good things in this meeting in Mainz. There was only one section on non-computative geometry. There were some good sections on differential geometry and on much more rigorous, serious, serious, serious maths.

20:00 And there was one very good talk by a guy on Mackey theory, a young Swiss mathematician. His name I've now forgotten, but I recorded everything on a DVD, so I can give a copy to you when I see you next week in Brussels. Practicalities. When are you arriving in Brussels, and when and where would it be a good place to meet up, if you want to meet up before actually speaking at the meeting? On Thursday? Oh, yes, no, sorry, because the meeting is on the Friday and Saturday, isn't it? That's right, yes, so you'll be coming in on the 9th. When you check that, could you just send me a one-liner to let me know, and then I'll sort of meet up with you there perhaps in the evening for a drink. Yeah, that's right, it's strange. Oh my, because I'm not going back to Paris until the Monday, so perhaps we could go off and chat, that would be great. No, exactly, not just chatter, not just gossip, but something serious. That would be a very good, that would be something very worthwhile. I'd like to do that. I'll be around, as I say. I'm staying in a hotel called the Aristotle Hotel. Which I hope is a good sign. It's somewhere now down near the South Railway Station. I haven't checked that. It's the cheapest place I could find in Brussels. And so I'll find out, or if you can send me a one-liner as to where the Speakers Hotel is, but certainly I'll keep the Sunday free. That would be great. Oh, you did! Good, good. Because, of course, when I last spoke to John and Richard, it was to tell them that you expected to be around in January, because at that time, of course, I still believed in, you know, Peer's invitation, leave it until April when you're going to be, for the celebration of Peter and Martin Highland's 60th birthdays. Yeah, I think, in fact, that's what I also just suggested to John and Richard. I think they are actually figuring on your being there in April.

22:30 John is actually in the States at the moment, visiting his brother, so I probably won't speak to him until after the Brussels meeting, but as soon as I do, I'll let him know that. But certainly April, I think in many ways April is probably better from their point of view as well. No, especially not in the middle of the winter. That would also be a good time to go down and visit Alberta, I guess when there's the warmer weather in Tuscany too. Zeno, paradoxes of motion, yeah. The guy who, according to my weird Belgian friend Karine Varelst, invented domain theory without realising it. I'll tell you when we get to Brussels, never mind. She's got this weird theory about how the real resolution of the paradoxes comes out of domain theory. But anyway, let's not go there for the moment. Anyway, about Zeno. I never got to Greece until earlier this year when I went... That's right, which is actually down in the heel of Italy.

25:00 Right, I'm getting mixed up with Pythagoras, of course I am. It's very close to the Gulf, it's very close to Paestum in that case. Yes, it must be close to Paestum. Haven't been, well I may have been through it without realising, because I have been to the Gulf of Sorrento many times, and I've been to Paestum several times, it actually has got probably the most beautifully preserved Greek temples of any part of the, either of the... Mainland Greece or Magna Graecia, you know, the part of southern Italy and Sicily where a lot of Greek cities flourish, in terms of that they're just more magnificent, better preserved than just about anywhere, temples anywhere else, but Elia itself I've not been to, no, but it would be fun to get down there, yes. No, I think it is a separate city. I think it is, you're right, I think it is up somewhere nearer to Sorrento. Paestum is actually very close to Salerno. In fact, Paestum is actually where the Americans landed in 1943 when they landed at Salerno. They didn't in fact land at Salerno, they landed at Paestum. I know that because I was with the veterans, oh this is more than 10, 12, of course it was almost 20 years ago now, Yes, well, that's 12 years ago, 13 years ago. You're right, it was around that time. No, actually, I think it was 93. No, in fact, it was the year before that I went to there. It was 94 that I ran into Clinton and all those, I had all the problems in Normandy. This was, in fact, the year before that. But anyway, whatever. But they actually landed right there and fortunately just managed the... They just avoided, well, not they personally, but the people who were in charge of the bombardment plan, they did. Take care not to demolish all these wonderful Greek temples, but they were shooting over the top of them, you know, they have this kind of naval barrage literally going over the top of these Greek temples, so they came quite close to destruction at that time.

27:30 But no, but you're right, Elia I think is, I don't think unfortunately there are any ruins at Elia, although there may be a lot of archaeological excavations. I could actually test this at school. Wonderful! Why not? To find out what they know about anything about therapy. Because, you know, I can't just be the object B in that. I think that's what natural geometry is about. We have a problem with the contradiction of motion. Yes, yes. So I... So I'm just wondering if these people are confident that this is going to come together. Yeah, I mean, people will organize in the meeting about Parmenides and Heraclitus. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about this meeting, but I'll do a quick Google and... Yes, might have if you tell me who he is. No, okay, well, I'll do a quick Google on Heraclitus, Parmenides, January 2009 and see what I come up with. I'll do that in just a couple of minutes, yeah. One thing I do know on the subject of meetings in January in Italy, not Jonathan Barnes. Not Jonathan Barnes, he's just about the most prominent Brit. Jonathan Barnes, he's the brother of Julian Barnes, the novelist. Yes, Julian, Jonathan Barnes, he's probably the most celebrated British Aristotle scholar. Yeah, he is the...

30:00 He is a very serious and major Aristotle scholar. I personally have always found him a rather irritating person because he has certain personal eccentricities. He dresses in this weird 18th century costume with a cravat and a blue jabot, which I think is very affected. But he is a pretty good scholar, I have to say. He is a pretty good and serious scholar. He wrote one paper which I remember reading as an undergraduate. He must be in his seventies now, certainly his sixties. He wrote one paper which I remember reading as an undergraduate about Aristotle's philosophy of mathematics which I thought when I re-read it about three or four years ago is still actually a pretty good paper. But John would really be the person, John Mabry would be the person to talk to about that because I think his understanding of Aristotle's philosophy of mathematics is probably far... But no, if it is Jonathan Barnes, then the meeting could be well worth going to. But I'll check the site and see who else is speaking there. But if it's all about Parmenides and the... I see no reason at all why you shouldn't permit yourselves these such small luxuries. Well, if it is Jonathan Barnes, then he's perfectly reputable. No, he's a major Aristotle scholar. He's written many standard works on Aristotle. He's certainly not some sort of marginal figure or some crack. I mean, he is regarded as a very serious Aristotle scholar, certainly. If it is Jonathan Barnes, yeah. In fact, I'd say he's probably more or less regarded as the main expert at the moment in the English-speaking world on Aristotle, but certainly on Aristotle's.

32:30 Yes, that's the thing. I wasn't aware that he'd ever published anything about the pre-Socratics, but I could be wrong, because I don't pretend to know that much about present scholarship in Greek philosophy. But some of the pre-Socratics, of course, many of them were materialists, as one knows, and Zeno in particular, I think, was no fool at all. Anyway, we can talk a little bit more about that when you get to Brussels, as I say. I've got this view that... Yeah, well, before I commit myself, I do want to just go on the line and check that it is Jonathan Barnes we're talking about, not somebody else. So I'll do that and get back to you in a... well, I'll see you in two or three days anyway. And the other thing is, on the subject of meetings in Italy in January, going back to last January, to this January, I finally received from Bob Walters, and really thank him, the DVDs of your wonderful lectures, which I have now looked through, which I have now watched through, I think I can say, I think four times altogether. Actually, I might not have watched every single one of all three of them four times through, but I certainly watched them all through three times. And they were absolutely wonderful. I got more out of them, I think, possibly because, you know, obviously I should know the landscape pretty well by now. But I don't think I've ever heard you bring things together really quite so clearly. I was absolutely delighted. They were wonderful. I wish I could have been there. I particularly enjoyed the discussion with Alberto in the discussion session following the last talk. That was excellent.

35:00 And also, they do at least appreciate the importance of what they're hearing. I only regret that I couldn't have been there myself, but I'm really glad that Bob arranged for it to be recorded. That was wonderful. Well, the lighting was a little bit off. The first one particularly, it was a little bit dark. So, unfortunately, one or two things on the whiteboard that you wrote, which was a little bit difficult to read, but apart from that, every word you spoke was extremely clear, and the discussions, as I say, after the last one, it was a very, very, very fine exercise that I'm delighted that he brought it about. No, I think they were magnificent, and I think perhaps a better epitome than anything else that I've listened to. So, they were terrific. See you with a bit of luck on a Thursday evening in Brussels. Give my love to Fatima. If you can just send me a one-liner with the name of the hotel. Okay, take care. I'll see you there. Have a safe journey. I'll see you later this week. Have a safe journey. Take care. Cheers. This is, I think, a rather extremely rock generalization of Riemannian geometry. You're probably familiar with it. It's a rather weird idea which Riemann himself played with.

37:30 That, instead of having a, instead of having a... Est-ce que je peux vous poser une question? Comment vous êtes payé? Vous avez une position? C'est toujours difficile d'expliquer en France, parce que la sanction en France c'est toujours que... Oui, oui. No, I have no, I have no paid position at all. I have... I have no paid position. I've maintained the archive basically of my own initiative for almost 30 years now. And your own money? Yes, out of my own money, which is now exhausted. Fortunately, it happened in the last year. Roger Penrose has very kindly agreed to become the trustee of the archive. He's become the chair of the trust. And it has now been formed into a foundation, into a regular non-profit-making charitable foundation. In English law, Roger Penrose and five other people, all quite senior scientists, as trustees, and Marc Lachaise-Ray as the French trustee, and I'm now officially the director of it, and at the moment we're just living off a very small amount of capital, which I was able to borrow against my house, but I'm hoping that we may be able to, they may be able to start paying me a salary sometime in the next six months or so. Depending on whether we get some seed corn money from Oxford, and also possibly from the German History of Mathematics Association for the project of digitizing the whole thing, starting to put it online, we have... It's a lot of the money, you mean. Depends what you mean by a lot of money. It's quite a lot by the standards of history and philosophy of mathematics. It's peanuts by the... It's a minute amount by physics grants. For example, for you, it's a position. Yes, exactly. It's a position. No, no, we would need about a quarter of a million euros for the whole project over four years of digitizing the whole thing, which is a lot of money. But in the meantime, I'm able to keep going because we have just enough coming in from the Swedish Foundation, this foundation in Sweden. And I was, until recently, I was able to let out part of my house, so I received a small, a small, actually to the France, with the recession, I have no idea.

40:00 You have no kids? No, I have not married, I have no kids. Oh, I would not have, I would never have undertaken this if I had been. I did have my own company for some 10, 12 years. I was running a small specialist travel company, which in fact mainly organized conferences. This finished in 1994-1995. I sold the company then. And this was when I was still living in England. I came to live in France in 2003. And I used the funds from the sale of this company, which I had built up, which for instance had... Have you ever heard of a famous American medical foundation called the Mayo Clinic? No, okay, this is one of the most famous medical... Would you like some sugar? No sugar, thanks, but I will have a little... Oh, okay, no, I'll just have it. I'm sorry. In that case, no... No, because we're in France, and it's an English thing, you know, in French. In that case, I will have just a little sugar, just one half. The Mayo Clinic is a very, very famous... I had a private medical foundation in America, which is one of the probably three or four biggest private medical foundations in the world, and a very famous center of research. We used to make all the arrangements for their travel, for their European conferences, and for their alumni associations, travel programs, things like that. And then I also had a section of the company that dealt with veterans. Most of the Americans, but some Australians and British as well, coming back to visit former battlefields from the Second World War. This is in fact the reason that I sold the company after 1994-1995, because at that point it didn't seem that, except in 2004, they had the biggest numbers coming for the World War III, but now they really are much more.

42:30 But anyway, I used that to buy some property in England, in London. ...and then I sold those in 2002-2003. Thank God I did now. And I've been living off that capital plus of what I invested in buying. So I've been surviving. Do I forget? That was really a chapter of accidents. I wanted to come looking for somewhere that I would be able to buy a place, contain the archive, to have meetings. I still have room to live in, which of course is no provincial. And I knew Normandy well, to find this place in Fugere across from the station for me, because I don't drive. Because, um, unfortunately, um, I ran out of space on the two digital recorders I was using at the end of the third day.

45:00 Still need to get some of those out, but I'll give you the CD anyway. These are from Lumini, and you were telling me that these include some forms of my Bergman, right? Bergman? That's a maybe, maybe, maybe. I don't know where it is. I want to ask you, do you want me to let you have these originals back? Because I can copy these, I have the data, I can, because I have a big...

47:30 We had a secretary who made the work, I did it. Do you have any documentation as to... Okay, as to the meetings that are on there, as I've been asked. Because I can copy all of those, we have a big double-deck... We don't have the book by Eliminin. Which one? I may have it. I may well have it. We have quite a good library, but if you show me, I can tell you. I've got, I don't think I've got the report into them. Oh, wait a minute. I think, wait a minute. It's about studies in general relativity. Oh, no, alas, I don't have it as much as I would like to. I would love to have a copy of that. No, it's all right. Splendid. But that was the conference, wasn't it? Not exactly. I'll tell you what. Actually, I've left it downstairs. I have actually got a carrying case for those, but it's downstairs in my valise, but don't go there. Oh, gosh, you've got the whole of the Einstein papers. Well, of course you've got it. Yes, this is not... I've got one volume of the... Oh, my word. Yes, this is all. It goes with that. I'm extremely grateful. Now, Osgoode Hill, John Stachel recorded the whole of the quantum gravity meeting at Osgoode Hill in both the original one and the first one they had in 1970. I called him yesterday but I don't have him. Well, because he hasn't been very well, as you know, sadly. In fact, I must get him... You have round tables, you know. Fantastic, fantastic. Can you just tell me what the dates of that meeting are? What? Can you tell me what the dates of that meeting were? Or is it showing? It's showing in there. It's in there. It's in there. It's okay. It's the meter which is the volume. Eighty-eight. Fantastic. So you have... What is it? Eighty. ...or anything. That would be fantastic. This interview that I shall be recording on Sunday... This interview that I shall be recording on Sunday in Brussels,

50:00 which will be for the whole day of, you know, probably sort of six... Do you have a call for me? Because I couldn't call you now. I don't, I'm afraid, at the moment. I'm very bad about mobiles. I keep losing them. Not mobiles, but your proper phone. Yes, yes. I haven't it. Didn't I give it to you? I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I'll give it to you, of course. I'm so sorry. I thought I gave you my number. No, that's where I have a phone. At the moment, I don't have a mobile because I went and lost the damn thing and I haven't... I don't think so. You only gave me your email. Oh, it was my mistake. Let me give you my landline, my fixed line now. Right now. No, but Lorvier is the creator of topos theory. Well, actually, Grothendieck was the creator of topos theory, but it was Lorvier who... Of what? Topos. Topos theory. A very, very beautiful and profound mathematical theory. I'm so sorry. That was my fault. I'm very bad at... Now that should be... To show you the webpage of... Here in the early 1970s, created... He worked on the category of categories, the category of sets. Now that Eilenberg and Maclean are both dead, he is definitely the great father's generation in category theory, the most important living American man. He did some extraordinary deep work in the, as I said, particularly in topos theory, which unifies children's ideas from analysis, from geometry and from logic in an incredibly deep way. He was the guy who axiomatized the theory and who saw that it was one of the very important aspects of the structure which was the existence of this thing called the sub-object classifier, which allows one effectively to internalize any logical construction in these ideas, and he's done a lot of other very interesting things.

52:30 I worked for four days in the 70s to do my PhD, yes, but it's in history, history and philosophy of mathematics, but after the 70s I'm actually an academic magician on Anglicare, Berlain-Marco, the satirist. But, as I was saying to you, my mother and father became extremely ill in the late 1970s and they both needed continuous nursing for the last 18 years of their lives. They didn't have any possibility of that. Plus also the late 70s in England over the years. I always wanted to stay in touch with particularly the history and philosophy of mathematics and anyway what I will do is send you the link to the to our site as soon as it's free and then obviously the Tell me about what's going on here in the Observer Choir in the next few months, your series on the Choir de l'Astronomie. I went to two or three of those last year. Ah oui, vous êtes venu? Oui, bien sûr, bien sûr. Il y a environ sept, huit mois. Vous avez tellement de monde. Oui, bien sûr, bien sûr.

55:00 There is a conference that takes place in May, this last May, on cosmology, quantum physics, theory and... It's not me who organizes it. No, no, it's Mark and one of their respondents. It's in the Institute of Astrophysics. So, no, no, I try to come to those whenever I get the chance, if I'm interested. And I will send you the details about this meeting in Egypt that Marc and I are going to, which should be quite interesting. I will be very careful with these. You sent out a D-suite at the moment. D-suite, D-suite. Well, absolutely. See, if Jean Stachel doesn't have copies of these, I can send them to him. I will bring you back the originals, but I will make some copies. Well, he's in great form, last time I spoke to him. Let him know, if you do speak to him, that I will be in touch with him with copies of the Beyond Einstein meeting and lots of other news. Okay! Thank you again, John. Oh, okay, John, we meet. Okay, let me... Unfortunately, I have to take pills at the moment because in January I had a problem, a slight problem with my heart. No, but I have to be very careful on staircases because... I have a tendency to pass out. Oh, is it continuing down? No, it's good. I see where we are. It's the other. The other stairs. I did actually pass out on the staircase. No, no, it's okay. It's not the weight. It's just I have to be careful because I'm prone to slight blood pressure. I have to take these tablets. Ah, I see. I passed out once on the staircase. I have to be a little careful. No, it's okay. It's fine now. It's under control. It's made me a little careful on the staircase.

57:30 The spirit of this room is absolutely exceptional.