Michael Wright reflections on foundations & philosophy of mathematics

0:00 Hello Bill, it's Mike, it's Michael Wright here. I was hoping to catch you and Fatima at home, but obviously I just missed you. I'll try calling you tomorrow. If there's any way you can just send me a quick email to give me a time that would be good for catching you. I hope you saw my email of the other day, of the 1st of May. Well, various things, but... I'm going to talk to you on the practical side about the mechanics of transcription and recordings and I wanted to talk to you if possible a bit about that because I've been in touch with quite a number of people about possible funding for the project of making transcripts. If you get this message, if you can send me just a quick one-line email, and I'll try calling you tomorrow, Friday the 9th. Very best wishes to you and Fatma, and hopefully we can talk in the next... Okay, take care, and speak to you soon, I hope. Say something. Say again. Yeah, no, it's okay, it's okay, it is hands-free. Good.

2:30 Yes, I'm fine. I just went and, of course... Having thought I've missed you for the night and sent an email, I've put all away all the paperwork that I had that I wanted to go through, but if you just give me a second, just give me a moment. I can put it together again. Hang on a second. Oh, okay, no, that was the email I just sent you. That was to say, I'm so sorry, you'll have to excuse me because, as I say, I just put everything away. Just give me a second, I'll get stuff together. I wanted to ask you, did you get my message about the mechanics of transcription of sound? I didn't get it very much. But I've also done something else, which is in the email I sent you just half an hour ago, which is I've been in contact with a number of possible sources of funding for this overall project. One part of which, as far as I'm concerned, a very, very important, possibly the most important part of which, would be to transcribe the recordings that I've made of your talks and discussions and the ones that you're holding yourself. And I've been in touch with a guy who I think you know called Albert Lewis. From the archive of American mathematics, who tells me that he met you in Rueben in 1994 at the Grassman, Cespi Centennial meeting. Yeah, we met a couple of times and corresponded about various questions like MacLean and... That's right. He said that he and you were both involved in trying to ensure that all of Saunders' papers would be properly preserved in the University of Chicago.

5:00 And also, he has published a couple of articles about Grassman, one of which I read in Historia Mathematica, which was about the role of pedagogy, pedagogical concerns in the formation of Grassman, which I thought was actually a very good article. And he seems to be, you know, a pretty good thing. Anyway, he is in charge of this thing called the Peirce Project, but he's also on the board of this thing called the Archive. For American mathematics. And, I mean, nothing is certain yet, but there does seem to be a chance, a good chance, that he may be able to get at least some funding for the project of helping to transcribe the recordings that we... Technical detail, many of which you have... Well, yeah, that of course, the funding and the question of who can do it go together. Do you have any ideas about that? I do, but it... Yeah, I certainly have, but it's, as you say, it's an extremely tight and scheming business. He himself hasn't done it, no, but he has, but there are people involved in the first project who have. They've certainly used people, so that's one of the things that I'm talking to him about. So, yeah, I mean, there's an awful lot of possible avenues. I would drop everything else that I'm doing myself and come over to Buffalo and sit for a year to record your stuff if nobody else was able to do it. And I would be willing to do that. I mean, you know, there are only so many good things you can do with your life. But there are prospective solutions. I've been thinking about it very hard. It's a question of finding both volunteers who can be relied on to take the thing absolutely seriously.

7:30 Yes, exactly. Some knowledge of mathematics. And they've always had at least a passing acquaintance with the material. They have some understanding of what it is that they're listening to. Someone who was acquainted with Parisian mathematics in one way or another. But that's not... Yes, I mean... The third requirement that I... In the sense that it needs a very long, long, long... it'll get incredibly boring. Yes, I know that feeling, only too well when I'm just going through my own archive, just cataloging everything, although that, of course, is much, much more boring than it would be going through your talk because of the nature of the material. It needs to be someone who's actual and nothing else, some graduate student. Yeah, the ideal solution is to find somebody like that, I agree. Given a grant to do this, and then this would be the only thing they really have to do other than stop the science. Yes, that's exactly right. Someone who's doing it as a sideline will be blocked by this board of... No, no, it's going to be somebody, as you say, whose life depends on it, both emotionally and materially, and then in addition to that, you've also got to have somebody who's got sufficient understanding of the background, even though, obviously, you know, they don't have to be a research mathematician, but they do need to have at least a basic understanding of the material that they're transcribing, so that they don't have to constantly keep asking you if they've heard particular... So, yeah, it's a difficult mix of skill. It's not that easy to find somebody with that mix of skills who's also prepared to give up, you know, that proportion of their time to doing it. I have been thinking about it very seriously. I've got a couple of ideas in mind, but I don't want to say anything now because, you know, I don't want to sort of build up your hopes or anything going off at half-cock, but believe me, it is absolutely, you know, my...

10:00 There's probably my top priority, but certainly one of them is a very high priority that I have, to try and find somebody who could do that. The other problem, of course, is that ideally it needs to be somebody in the US, because if somebody comes over from Europe at the moment, because Bush has turned the dollar to confess, they're going to want paying in euros, which of course is tough. The ideal, as you say, is a dedicated graduate student who, for one reason or another, got a year free and is prepared to give it up. As a matter of fact, when I look at the catalogue that I've already done of the recordings, your material that I have of your talk, but also others over the years, I hate to say it, but there's a great deal more than one year's worth. I suspect it's probably nearer to it. This is something that I have been thinking about very, very hard indeed. You know, there are quite a number of decisions I need to make. Yeah, yeah, I know Bill Grosberg. There were certain books to be translated, put online, between volunteers who had, of course, it was already written. Yeah, yeah. But all the same, it was, you know... I'd like to know more about that. Which were the books in question?

12:30 I think more than one. I think that the most recent, Attack Reprint No. 18, is a book called Zurich Triples, which is my... Oh, right. And several fundamental papers in Beck and Linton. That's the thing which has the first definition of the Beck-Chevalier condition in it, is it? One of the earliest. No, no, that was earlier. That was earlier. That hasn't been. I'm thinking of something else in that case. But it's, no, it's the so-called Equational Doctrines. Oh, right, yes, which is what, about 1970 or so? Yeah, 1960. The point is that Thiem better flied handily. Yes, absolutely, but, you know, if that wasn't the first one, I forget there was another one, at least one other of the tactics. It's probably worth talking to Bob Rose, I mean, have you talked to Bob Rose about, you know, how he assembled this team? Well, it might be, you know, it might be well worth doing so. We could go back to Halifax for a few years, thanks. Ernie Mannes, the triple... Oh, as in Arbib and Mannes? Yeah, well, that's one of his more infamous works. No, he was quite an important contributor. He has papers in that same book, the Zurich Triples book. But anyway, so I'm going up there for that. Probably we'll see... Yes, well that would certainly be one, that's certainly one avenue worth exploring. And then you're going to be over here next month, aren't you, or at the end? Is it at the end of next month for the ICTC meeting in Calais? 20 something, Calais. Yeah, in Calais. So that's only about six weeks away now. So I'll see you then.

15:00 I shall also maintain a very low profile. If you want to maintain a very low profile, indeed, you can always just step away and come and stay with me. We could, actually. It's not all that far. There's a kind of shortcut that you haven't ruined. No, seriously, I mean, I'm going to try and, you know, talking to, as I say, talking to Albert Lewis, but also talking to people together some in the next six weeks that we could, you know, have a really concrete... and it's already it already mounts up to well over 200 court recordings since 1989 and i'm still counting i suspect it's going to come out at near 300. so that problem would be one-sided or two-sided these would be two-sided no no no sorry no most well you know half and half actually i would think probably about uh maybe maybe about one-third is just you talking and uh maybe uh what a huge Oh, that's only a fraction, but of course, you know, one has to prioritize them. Not everything in there is going to be the stuff which is of maximal value. It's precisely what I want to sit down with you and you can tell me what you think. That's the stuff which certainly should be prioritized. I want to decide how I'm going to use my time over the next three years and what the priorities should be. And if the worst, if push comes to shove, I'm quite prepared to give up everything for a couple of years to transcribe stuff myself. But it would be much better if we could, you know. A couple of things I wanted to ask you, so I've finally got together the paperwork here, yes, the meeting in London next week and particularly these strange things that Chris Isham has been going around telling people about so-called arrow fields and things which seem to be a rather roundabout way of, as far as I can tell, of...

17:30 Just peddling over essentially kind of category of theoretic trivialities. Well, this question is not actually directly to do with his work, but can you tell me, is it known, is the answer to the question then when two categories have homeomorphic classifications? Yes. Is it known, I mean, I know there are all sorts of kind of special cases. To do with, you know, homotopy equivalents. You know, every nice space, that's to say that's kind of CW convex, is homotopy equivalent to the classifying space of some partially ordered set. But is there a general result as to when any two categories have homomorphic classifying spaces? Yeah, yeah, well, that's part of the background. Not the classifying space, but the geometric realization. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. I tell you why, can I just say quickly why I ask this question? I'm trying to understand what the hell is going on with these people, like, peddling this line about that you don't need a general, that you don't need manifolds. Any kind of sufficient, proper, geometrically realistic notion of space is unnecessary for doing quantum gravity. We only need partial sets. This is where the so-called causal set program... ...was the first one I encountered who was talking about... Yeah, he has a totally weird and to me completely unintelligible sort of version of it, but... ...when I looked into it, it was not only unintelligible, the fundamental mistake was it's funky, which it simply was not.

20:00 Yeah. I remember you talking to me about that in Nancy, and believe it or not, it's about number 128 on my list of questions I want to put to Bill Lorvier before I die, to make sure I've understood exactly what it was. I've noticed the same sort of, actually looking at the paper, that these people seem to have some sort of basic, say, differentiable manifold. ...educated uphold imperialist economics by saying, let this arrow represent production. Yes, yes, yes. ...upon which no so-called modern languages maintain the... I always have a fear that the community of mathematicians at large will come to regard Topo's theory and category theory as banal junk, if they take this sort of thing as the representative of its possible... Absolutely, yes, yes, yes. That's my fear as well. ...happen, but I worry about it. No, well, I don't think the community as a whole is going to, but I think there's a very, possibly, there's some very talented people in sectors of the community, particularly people working in mathematical physics, who may get that impression. Yes, yes, yes. Well, I've seen, I guess I mentioned this to you before, that, was it the Dutch guy, de Hooft, he's sure that topos theory can't possibly lead to anything for him, because... These are the examples yeah I know because he's all he's been exposed to is this kind of stuff that as you say you get from well you know on the other hand you see this till I say for years I maintained the rough criteria that if one is going to be ideological trash under the guise of mathematics although they're not mathematic here at the moment when they were about banach spaces and manifolds in not completely inconsistent way and at the same time go on with their little trash

22:30 Well, I'm beginning to detect, and obviously I'm not looking at these people purely on the basis of mathematics easily done in the past, any small category, you might say, well, of a monoid, applied by A, it gives A, and applied by B, there is a way of getting, you can just formally join one more, pretend that all the objects you've got, that construction is meaningless. In other words, if you try that, you get nowhere. It's one that you shouldn't make.

25:00 I have a strong suspicion that this is also what's going on in some of these effusions of Baez and Caulfield on their blog. Obsession about, you know, treating everything as, well, trying to squeeze everything into some categories of group, or it's, it's... I keep thinking, now, when is the moment when I'm going to stand up and say, no more Mr. Nice Guy? No, you mentioned it to me last time we spoke. As a matter of fact, I meant to sort of do some homework on that, but I... I'm not lying to you. It's totally funded by... Oh, well, guess who? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Guess who the keynote speaker is? And you see he's been invited to give these lectures in Glasgow this year. There's some famous lecture that they give. The Gifford Lectures. The Gifford Lectures. No, no, no, not the Gifford Lectures, though I'm sure that will come. I think you're just anticipating that by a year or two. I'm quite sure you'll get that. No, these are actually mathematical lectures, but I'm trying to remember what the name of the guy is, but they are the most prestigious lectures that are given about once every 10 years in Scottish universities in mathematics. Not philosophy, not the Gifford Lecture. No, no, no, no, these are definitely mathematical lectures. In fact, he's supposed to be lecturing on Oh, it's the usual stuff about categorification of sets of numbers. Nonsense as well, even though the term has unfortunately caught on in some circles. Should one or should one not accept Templeton funds, by the way?

27:30 And also, Dering was one of the speakers there who would be applied to this job. Well, he's said some very, very strange things in the last couple of years. He's got a very, very weird line about... We've got an absolutely weird talk I remember hearing in Sweden a couple of years ago about how, to do with constructability, that all functors are constructed, that's right, that all, is it all covariant functors are supposed to be? It doesn't make any sense at all to me. It's called, what is it, Not Even Wrong, talked a lot about this deep beauty thing, and during it is in there, and you know, some people have been criticized, and so he says, Oh, there's an ad hominem attack. How dare you attack this person just because he's religious? It doesn't mean he's not very wounded, whining, sort of defending racism as some kind of unwarranted person rather than they say, including the bloggers. It's not so bad. You know, they mentioned the fact that he does a right-wing political program as the cause of the war. But no, that's overt. So what's wrong with accepting weapons of mass deception? Mass deception of life. What they don't grasp is It's clear to Lenin already 100 years ago that he is a right-wing politician. Absolutely! Incredible! I mean, you and I have sometimes seen, there are only two people in the world who kind of grasp this. It just staggers me.

30:00 It would seem probably there are others. It's exactly the point that Lenin made about immaterialism and imperial criticism. Yes, yes, yes. That this kind of Barclayian, you know, that all of this is really a kind of revival of the strategy of the Barclay. The survival of the strategy is to attack calculus, is to attack foundations of Anglo-American imperialism, get people to submit to slavery and war. And they do this, they do the logical hangman people more or less understand, arrive at, namely idealism and fetism, idealism and fetism being the philosophical tendency towards accepting things on a non-scientific basis. Or set by people who have sufficiently impressive establishment credentials like von Neumann, who you mentioned earlier on, because it's a classic illustration of this. Oh yes, yes. It's like saying that Baez is a physicist often enough and people believe it. I see the tone of the whole thing. The keynote speech itself, it continues Baezism that you don't want to know, right? In other words, it's what the Clay Institute and AMS have lost millions of dollars. To destroy the idea of mathematical clarity in favor of so-called beauty, I prefer to accept, and put El Mirandola, that there are diverse ways for arriving at this human fideism.

32:30 When politics say, well, we can accept a Bolton organization, they're very gracious people. All that's in there. Yes, yes, our gracious hosts. Well, I was hearing all this from Penrose when I was talking to her in Oxford about a couple of months ago. Well, what can one say? Oh, by the way, you may have seen in his, I'm not sure how recent it was, but in one of his recent blogs, that Baez is also pushing this line again, you know, setting out to destroy the very basis for thinking about axiomatic cohesion, understanding space. Spaces are really just can complexes. There's nothing more to geometry. There's nothing more to the notion of a space in general than that. We come across this line. This, of course, also connects with that line that, therefore, that, you know, partially ordered sets are enough to do everything. Because, again, it's this kind of, you know, attempt to arithmetize. I think it's going back, I think, in the same direction ideologically as, as, sorry, my mind's gone blank at this hour in the morning. Oh, you know, it was the 19th century. No, no, no, not Clifford. I don't know enough about that. I've always been very puzzled by Clifford, actually. He seems to have been quite honest about what he thought he was batting for. No, I mean... Sorry, my mind's just gone completely blank. The man who said, you know, God invented the integers, I was...

35:00 Well, Kroniker. Kroniker, yes, I'm sorry. I just couldn't think of the name. Kroniker. I think this is a kind of revival of the Kroniker line. Well, in fact, you see, these people, these businesses, so-called, they openly quote what they're talking about is the gospel according to St. John. Yes, what in the beginning was the logos, yes, the pure abstract, anti-REM structuralism is the babble word that the philosophers like to use, which just saves you from saying idealism. What do you mean, in terms of the political agenda? I'm sure Peter Johnson's not lacking in understanding of technical issues in topos theory. Of course not. I certainly value his topos theory more than anybody else's. Absolutely. No, no, no, but it's kind of a bio savant, which is very high level and then suddenly stops. ...and I judge him in that way, but it certainly seemed to be tending in that way. Well, I can't understand what... ...contact with certain rules is one thing, but this, you know, you can see where the essence of this one is going. Well, with this stuff of Isham's, I mean, I can't really see it as being anything other than really rather mathematically trivial.

37:30 He's got this idea of, and he keeps going on about this notion of arrow fields, which is just a rather... ...the idiosyncratic way of talking about arrows in a category where the morphisms are intended to be interpreted as paths, so it seems to me. Yeah, because he wants to tie the whole thing in with... Well, I suppose in the context of... ...to do some really dang thing. Exactly. I mean, you know, I can see, I think I can see, you know, an aspect of the idea, the idea that arrow fields are required to take values in shortest paths so that then the arrow field becomes precisely a vector field. I mean, you know, think of the case of, you know, paths between infinitesimal neighboring points in a manifold. And then the idea is that they, you know, you take the underlying graph to be the graph of an infinitesimal neighbors. And then I suppose the idea is they want to build up Hilbert space, a construction like this, a category of spaces and processes, states and processes, and a functor of assigning a phase to each process. It's again, I mean, it's a bit like Baez's idea, but it doesn't seem to me to have anything at all to recommend it. I'm interested in this issue, which is why I asked you the question about, you know, the general issue about classifying spaces. This work of Tom Leinster that he was talking about in Patras, his work on the Euler characteristic, a characteristic of the classifying space of a category where that notion is well defined, which is why I was asking you if there was a kind of general result about when the classifying space of one morphed into that of another. But what did you want, there was something you said in your message that you had to take some important decisions about this whole Isham, Doering. And industry, and that you wanted me to give you some kind of a report on what was said in England.

40:00 The problem is this Calais meeting, as one of the invited speakers, the international committee in German, we remain aloof from scientific committee choices and so forth. In the past, I've never thought that was necessarily the wisest course, but in this case, the organizers have divided. And is one of the subfields, you know, speculative applications to everything-ology, which is where... Well, I do hope you will go to the meeting, because apart from the else, I really want to get some quality time with you. I decided to sort of go along with that for the time being, rather than raise a ruckus, at least about the meeting per se, at this moment. Well, yes, and I'm assuming, because I haven't seen the program of the meeting yet, but, I mean, during is only going to be given one relatively short, sort of, what, 45 minutes in the course of a, you know, four or five-day meeting. So, I mean, even if it is absolutely a disaster, it doesn't destroy the psychic value of the media. I'm sure there will be plenty of serious talks there. People like that end up going to have cognitive science.

42:30 Yeah, I take your point. I'm going to continue to pursue the question in general, and I may even say something about it publicly, but as far as the meeting itself goes, I'm just going along for the time being. My discussion with Josh Johnstone semi-resolved the, well, apart from anything else, there are, I told him as a side, I said, uh, I said, uh, St. John's College, take no offense at the, yes, yes, well, I hope, oh, I think Peter can take these things in, but, um, as I say, apart from anything else, I, I, I hope to get the chance while you're in Calais of sitting down with you to go through this, the 300. Recordings and to decide what should be the operational priorities for transcribing stuff and also of course this is one of the things which together with your published work with your articles that John and his group in Bristol are studying in preparation for this meeting which they're hoping to have when you're over here hopefully in January or February of next year. Assuming that you know that the IHES people get their act together. Send out the invitation. I think I mentioned to you I'm going to be there at the IHS from the 19th to the 22nd of May because they've got the first of these 50th anniversary meetings, which CART is very kindly giving an invitation to, which I'm going to be recording, videoing for the archive. They haven't even got the dates mailed down yet for their one in September. Also, what they're having on biology and on life sciences in December, so I think it may be some while yet before they get this thing, the Groening meeting, nailed down as to dates, but I will underline to him that it is pretty important to try and get the dates decided as soon as possible so you and other people can start making plans. That's what he told me. That will be specific with our Great Peaks legacy. And the idea is that there will be a panel of speakers talking about different aspects of Great Peaks work, about the fields that he worked in or he founded, that you would be the person invited to give talks on topos theory, and there will be two talks, one reviewing Great Peaks' own work and then another giving a survey of the fields it stands today. And that's what he told me. That's the plan.

45:00 But the scientific committee is Pierre Cartier and two other people, whose names I'm afraid I can't call to mind at the moment, who are at the IHES and that they have to report to Le Guignan. They've definitely got the funding for the meeting and it is definitely going to go ahead, but as I say, when they're going to get it nailed down as to date and send out invitations, I don't know. But certainly when I see him... Well, it'll be a couple of weeks' time now. I will do what I can to light a fire underneath them. Yeah, I'm hoping to dig up some more about Goethe's. Ah, yes, that's another thing I was going to ask you about, and about what I'm afraid I got into the very bad habit of misdescribing as this memoir, but which in fact was simply this list, as you described it, of Jack Duskin and other people. Yeah, there was that little... Well, I understand it was a fairly large scrap, wasn't it? Well, it was made large by writing vertically and then horizontally. Yes. Yes, that's why I described it as a chart. I know it was misleading, but you can see what gave me the idea. We haven't been able to find that one, actually, by the way, because, you know, Jack had a stroke. Oh, it's lost. Oh, dear, I was hoping, because you thought it was still in his desk. Well, no, no, it may be. He had a stroke a couple of years ago. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. And so he can't quite move about, and he wants me to help him. Well, it would be a very important document, I think, if you could retrieve it and ensure that it's copied and preserved, because you're probably the one person who can give us a pretty good idea of what you think was going on in Grotenbeek's mind as regards this extraordinary visionary program for the re-conception of logic, or for bypassing logic via...

47:30 Relationship of ring classifiers of different theories. You gave me a kind of glimpse of the scenery I remember when we were talking in London three or four years ago and it sounded such an incredible visionary program it certainly does deserve to be to be to be given a great deal more recognition even if it does remain just that the kind of visionary program. We'll keep digging. Yeah, I think that's very important. I hope you will do that. In a few days, there's a meeting in London. Yes, it's next week, on Wednesday of next week, so I'll be there. Any specifics, any comments? Oh, I will make sure I keep a very careful record of everything, and as I said to you, I'll send you a CD of all the talks, probably a couple of days at the most, after the meeting. You should also be, in fact, able to see the whole thing on the... The website of Imperial College, they do a video, they did a video of their previous meeting in January, and the guy who did that got it online within about, so if they do the same with this, it should be online by the, well, certainly by the beginning of June, but you'll have my CDs of it before that anyway. By the way, the guy who was in Petras that I was telling you about, the guy I was excusing over, Richard Kozicki, is going to be there. He sent me an email a couple of days ago. So it's quite interesting to talk with him. Loopy Foam, I guess. Loopy Foam, yes. I think he can be cured of the Loopy Foam effect. Besides, as you said yourself, it may be that axiomatic adhesion space, the study of that, will be foam. Speculation is rigorous. I've never really taken Wheeler very seriously as a philosopher. But, you know, if there is anything to this idea of foam, it's a cohesive background idea that should go along with combinatorial and all that as possible models, perhaps.

50:00 But I've not had time to read any books, but apparently there's a book by... He's one of the big people, that's indiscreet. ...where the reviews say that what he does there basically, with the crucial conclusion being, once again, the... A tiny paper by Paez, supposedly quantizing the... I mean, it's all a gigantic upside-down paper. Yes, it is. It's exactly that. But this is... I mean, they're really hot to... they're passion... they're desperate to promote this discreteness business. But really, when they quote St. John, they're not joking. They're sort of saying that they want, above all, scientific correctness to be damned, because that's the beautiful concept. Yes, well... The general ideological current, oddly enough... No, it's a very strong current indeed, and as I say, I think one can see the ideological undertow of this current, as you say, it takes us back to Kronika. Anyway, you're certainly right, there is a huge, they've made a kind of huge emotional investment in this with pre-space or... Which, again, comes back to the point I was making earlier, the reason for my question to you about why these ideas of Sorkin and Baez were, you know, space is just a kind of complex order and one can do everything in terms of partially ordered sets because you can prove, you know, for some, but it seems to me that it's only in very restrictive cases.

52:30 This is not an extensive quality. Yes, no, but they, of course, had... Denying that there is any intention. This is essentially... In my language, that's what's going on. They say, oh, there's only extensive quality, no intensive quality. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's precisely what they want to claim. It's just a subjective road. The various choices of how St. John's words are to be phrased. It's not enough, the external quality. Extensive quality is not enough, really, to... As always, Bill, it's always extremely heartening to talk to you. I've rescued myself there. I've actually invented language that's been effective. Okay, I'll work on the catalogue, I'll work on the project of trying to find a definite, with the prospect of getting hold of some funding for it, for this project of the transcription of these recordings and the preparation for an intensive session in 2009, and I'll certainly see you in Calais. I'll give you a call as soon as I get back from London. Okay, take care. Oh, there was one other thing. Um, Bob Walters. Did you, did, did, did the people in Como ever manage to get this video to work? They haven't gotten it to work yet. They haven't gotten it to work yet, oh dear. I got some copies, I can see about it. That's what you told me last time. I was going to contact him to see whether there was anything that we could offer to do. Well, I told him. I'm sure he's got competence. He may be. On the other hand, it may not be the easiest place in the world for... Well, anyway, if there's anything at all that we can do, because there is a guy who is working on the website for this archive, who actually seems to me to be very good, because, you know, I've been going around, passing the begging bowl around, and we've managed to get some funding from these people in Sweden, and it's only the Seed Corp paper website, and the guy I've got, you know, doing the videos for that, does seem to know all about these things, and he might be able to say if they need it. As you say, they've probably got their own people.

55:00 Don't give up on that because it's really important we should have a record of those, we should have a record of what you said in that meeting. Exactly, exactly. Well it's obviously there, it's just a question of getting the thing to work. Okay Bill, take care, love to Fatima, and I'll speak to you next week as soon as I get back from London. Take care, cheers.