C McLarty / Lunch conversations: J Mayberry, C McLarty

0:00 And, but actually, I feel islanders are hard to come back to. They're both going on and on about this, this, and I don't want to repeat it because it's a matter of time. Except it's too general. Yes, yes. So they have sort of a general three-variable functor isomorphic to another. Oh, yes, right. Yes, right. But, of course, there's the example that Henry Lyon is precisely how it tends to be. Yes, exactly. You're right. You're right. All right. Yes. Actually, even in the paper of Maclean, the first generative of natural equivalence, and it's amazing the choice that they are making, because this is there also, not the tensor, oh yes, even the tensor is there, this is an example of a natural equivalence, but they don't... They have examples, but they don't make them abstract. But the examples that they are giving are the important examples that will be later, in the next ten years, these examples will be made in a more formal way. You can almost recognize, for example, catheism closed scheduling, if you read the paper carefully. That's right. Concerts are viewed as implausible sets as a Cartesian postcalibur that you didn't have. I think I'm the first one to actually use that as an axiomatic definition. It's lovely, isn't it? Actually, even by quarantine status, this is a mile. It's very cool. It's remarkably mild. It's just a freak actually, Florence and their number can be very powerful. Where are you?

2:30 I'm living in France. I moved about three months ago. I'm living in Fougere in Brittany. Oh, that's great. Yeah, that's my base there. That's where I'm living. I haven't been in academic life for years. I haven't been there. You don't have to tell me your name. I'll tell you my full name. I'm sorry, you just told me. I mean, it's usually not written like that. You feel much better than I am. I forgot to bring my test. Those categories had an internal part. It's really telling you what it is. Oh, it gets much better than that. They actually have, you know, just things like smoking and killings on all of them now. Actually, I thought they were bigger than that. It's interesting, I think, that it was the same state that Russell was in. No, they're getting very nice. They're talking to the Minister of Health in particular. Well, they're right. To people who should start, this was the final level we got to ask. No, no, no, not at all. No, no, no, not at all. People like Russell were doing it all the time. Smokers are a terribly persecuted minority now. It's not as bad in Europe as it is in the US, but it's getting that way. It's not as bad. No, I don't smoke. It's okay. But I don't mind. I'm a faculty member. No, on the contrary. I'm a faculty member of the Faculty of Mathematical Normal Smokers. I've never been a smoker. Maybe it's a little bit like the conducts of the world for an activist. I've never been a smoker. I don't have a problem with that. And I have a very strong problem with that. I'm not sure where, but I remember the manners. I used to not be a mathematician, but I've been to a lot of people, or at least I could say so, would you mind if I ask? I could, but now it's this exclusive platform. I cannot go on. I'm sorry, don't be afraid. Because we were allowed to be able to bully other people, my friend.

5:00 Which I doubt if I could put into words, but I think I can, because I know a great many women in totally different walks of life. I play tennis with different doubles players and different singles players. Maybe 35 different women and ones of my detectives and others. I think it's a very expensive program. I don't know the way she... There's something kind of wrong about this. It's the same as inventing the practice. Very, very, very many white folks. They're tired of the history. But, um, I think we should all buy from a pharmacy a ceramic cigarette that they give to people who are trying to break the habit of smoking just a fold. They were all sold out in restaurants, and all of the other people were like, oh, I can't believe it. And, you know, it was the idea of the thing more than the actual story. No, it's just the fact that it doesn't have an excuse to make and prosecute other people. It's amazing, I'm afraid. Well, I think maybe I'll force the room among these women to get themselves toy cigarettes and see if they can have a drink. I like the idea. The rule defines how, which takes complete into complete already, but the left adjoint within the restricted rule is the completion of. It's very easy because I am never tempted to want to empty out and give any advice whatsoever. I'm a literary critic, haven't I? I wouldn't want to be dictated. But in most situations, if you don't think about functional mathematics, you just wonder what's going to go through our categories of stories, categories that you don't think enough about, I'm not sure how to talk about them.

7:30 On the other hand, the obvious problem they make is that some of the tensor in a given situation seems to be in the order of a logical complexity, but also there is a category theory to play there, that Alex used to talk about, not just in the day, more or less, but I mean, I don't know if you can see it, but I don't know if you can see it, but I don't know if you can see it, but I don't know if And it was so pivotal to understand the philosophical connotations that I came to speak in politics in the universe that it's been very much this way from the outside to the universe outside of science. I organized a college in Cambridge about 12, 13, 14 years ago, and I have been working with them ever since. The point is that you could have a Cartesian, given any Cartesian's talent, he's going to be here, he's arriving, he's going to be here, he's going to stay in the hotel, he's not going to count, he's not going to count, he's going to stay here, he's going to be speaking in a couple of days. The general degree itself is not the same as an external degree, because an external degree is the powers of the category. For example, all the maps in the world between one and I, which is quite different from I itself, so in some sense that's the big difference between inaccessible and much more mundane things, is this fullness of the intrusions. Not the Cartesian closure. We want Cartesian closure for both, but... And then, in order to get a Cartesian prose category on pedigree, he must have produced a collection of universes.

10:00 In other words, in terms of traditional sub-theory, that is, indexing your cardinals by ordinals, Cartesian closure only gets you up to the sub-bill omega, whereas the universe gets you up to the first inaccessible. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your attention. These are small categories. These are simple formulas. Yes, but they're not only categories, you say. Well, is the universe itself a category of snets? Well, no, of course not. Category means small. So therefore we call it metacategory. That's what he does, yes. If you think in terms of what a model of the theory would be like... If you take a model of Gödel-Berenice, V is an element of that model. Therefore, it must be a set.

12:30 This is completely confusing. It's a convention introduced by von Neumann, which even Gödel and Bernice were ready to totally reject in 1963. They said, well, what is this? Are there proper classes or are there not? There are certainly subclasses of the universe defined by formulas. These may or may not be representable by elements of the universe, so if you call the universe, you might as well call it the category of SES if you like, so the category of categories and the category of universes are all comparable, these are just formulas. Good morning, in what ways do you say it's not strange that we've got it? Well, just on the level of the thousands and others. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no From the category, convenient system, logical system for foundations of mathematics. Normal. I was just saying, I just noticed this lately, a meeting from Neumann. Neumann apparently introduced this convention that said to something that's a member of something else. So, in a way, this is a convention so the membership symbol serves two roles. Factual membership has also been the only definition of distinction between mathematical and math. Whereas, and then, Gödel and Bernays in their formulations, they carried over that same convention. And most categorites consider this to be an auspical theory, but it's, you know, something to be accepted as eternal law. So, it was pointed out recently that in 1963, Gerlo and Bernays were actually corresponding with Cornelius. Partly in response to problems with soldiers that grazed in Warsaw in 1959.

15:00 They immediately really assumed that, well, what we have to do is look at finite types over the class of all sets. So you'd have this Cartesian closed category where v is a certain object, but the general properties would be no different, really. Just that some things were presentable inside units, and so they were ready to accept that. They were going to throw away that thing that convinced them immediately. This is why I think this is just a convenient system. I was struck by this. Mike was defending Harvard. They have a whole foundational framework in mind. And they know that their teacher's teacher showed it was the right one. But they don't know how, because their teacher knew how. They have no idea of the origins of their own idea. But it's true, Friedman does try to come up with new, stateable reasons why ZF is the one and only thing. But for the most part, that's already known. That's the reason it's turning into a financial system. Well, he's got this thing that everything that's a mathematical interest is already in D of 9. Almost everything, except these graph theoretic results that are equivalent to the one consistency of some kind of large particle. The one thing you can say for Harvey Friedman, he's the one guy around who does actually try and find new and mathematical, real mathematical reasons to do it. He doesn't just have to do a feat like a man does a deal, because he learned it from the speech of people.

17:30 If you question these things, they just think, you haven't been reading the newspapers. You know, you're behind the times, that's all. There's no answer to these questions. It's just that the answer is already known. I mean, the other day when you were saying that the context of that exchange between... Interesting, because that remark about performing at further times over there is immediately following a remark that they heard that somebody... Some guy is trying to develop. Yeah, Gödel apparently heard a rumor in 1963 that somebody was developing the foundation of mathematics based on the category theory. There are some people who thought that. Then Feberman, in the footnote, concocts a whole explanation for this, which is obviously false. Because, he says, when Lear's paper was published in the potential of the National Academy, Wiggle was a member of the National Academy, therefore this must have passed through his hands. The paper wasn't submitted until late 64. The discussion happened to me in the same month I was actually writing the thesis. How persuasive is that? I think Wiggle was the one who found those universes by his time loops. I just want to see what these guys were wanting to do.

20:00 Well, we're heading off to the academia. Well, like all great things... You think you know them, but when you get up close to them, they're quite different. Pregnant remark. Well, we'll leave you guys to make thoughts. Is there anything else you need on the admin side from me before I disappear? I don't think so. Okay. See you later on then. See you later. Okay, perhaps we could... Do you want to go out to dinner tonight, André? Or have you got plans already? Perhaps. I still have to prepare. Of course. Okay, that's why I wanted to leave you in peace. I don't know how it's going to go. I might discover that I have to do a lot of work. Okay. Beer, because it's the same with me. Yeah, sure. I know. I understand. No plans right now. Okay, we'll leave it like that. Anyway, thanks very much. See you. Yeah, it's okay. No, I just wanted to check there wasn't anything that I needed to do on the academic side. Some conditions, you know, on what he called exact categories, which were not exactly the, you know, full abelian category actions. Somebody in a math review note in 1955 said that the term had been used, but not in print, by... Hell, I couldn't remember who. And Bill thought it might have been Grotendieck who first used it. No, a lot of people think it might have been Grotendieck who first used it. And Grotendieck announced that he came up with it independently of anyone else. And it's just not true.

22:30 But it's not as early as 1950. Oh, it is in MacLean. It actually uses him. Well, that's what I said to them, I thought, because I'd heard it from you. But I got kind of lots of... What he calls a medium category is basically just what we call an additive category. But what you call the billion-five category has equalizers that are also co-equalizers. It has suits of substance. It's a pokey device, but it's very much one maybe-five category. It really isn't a billion category. With some further conditions, some infinitary conditions on subsets. Not the ones that we look like now, but it's the other way around. And Joyal was saying that an incredible amount of... I mean, the Eilenberg-McLean general theory of natural equivalences already gets very close, not to the definition of closed categories and any offensive products of categories. Examples rather than definitions, they're almost all in there. But the next ten years of category theory really, really up to Kahn are already virtually in that paper, which is interesting. And he was saying that that is one of the themes of his talk, and how far that was motivated by topological considerations almost entirely. One of the things I'm going to say in my talk is that a real turning point in 1950... He gave the categorical definition of product. That's not the important thing. It's true. Because that was the first place you actually see products of the blind. Sorry, who's that? On the client. On the client, yeah. ...is that he dealt with finite limits and co-limits. In Eilenberg and Crane, you officially only have limits and co-limits of directed sets. Okay, so a product is a limit of a disconnected set, so it's not officially there. But what really matters is allowing finite limits and co-limits, which officially were allowed, but what really happened is Eilenberg and Crane thought that things like kernels and... All of these products were so simple they didn't need categorical definitions, but the plane in 1950 decided they really should have categorical definitions.

25:00 Exactly the conceptual term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's the term from seeing category theory as just an additional piece of machinery and seeing it as an organized framework. And so they don't, of course they're not going to define Cartesian closeness. Even if the very idea occurred to them, they'd say, well, what matters is the examples. And the examples are easy enough to see in their own terms. But then through the 50s, they come around, well, no, what matters is that you can say this in a systematic way. My students are never going to recover from this goddamn conference. Actually, I noticed that last night. Mind you, if you hadn't mentioned about your bloody feet, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. But when I got in last night and took my shoes off, I suddenly noticed, yes, my feet are actually quite raw after. I sure noticed about my feet. I was just glad for the explanation, isn't it? Well, it is the irregular surfaces you have to walk on. The genre of transformation. Really interesting. So you know the first time he ever learned it was just taught him as a kind of rule of thumb recipe and then he had to teach it himself. And he realized just how incredibly rich and deep geometrical structure is involved. Very interesting stuff. And that's what he works on, you know, getting the whole thing into the framework of the fiberbundle. The best thing to make out is that math is considered extremely prestigious by philosophers, and that's why they tolerate the continued existence of the philosophy of math, which apparently has nothing to say to anybody, because these philosophers of physics, they all get, you know, they're all on the plane, they get great jobs, they're from conferences. And they know a hell of a lot more math than the philosophers of math. A lot more math. Certainly this wouldn't be true of somebody like Alex. I mean, he knows a great deal more math than any philosopher of math.

27:30 Well, I don't mean any mainstream Neo-Fregan type philosopher of math. And this guy knows all about math. Gauge bundles and the whole of most of sheath theories and cohomology because that's the machinery that they now use in this very abstract geometric quantization. Right, defamations of Poisson manifolds, you use a lot of very high-level differential geometric machinery. And here are all these people wondering, all these physicists wondering, is this really math or really physics? Yeah. But among philosophers you can tell it's not math, because it's not about day-ray versus day-difference. Ah, yes, you're right, which is in fact the first one we turned up, isn't it? Thank you very much for your time. ...was explaining it to me, and it involved a lot of cutting-edge stuff in homotopic theory, and this is the way that a lot of the subject has been going, via derived categories, and, I mean, he really is a smart guy, Andrew Joel, no question about it. He's asking Bill... Who is he? Not Richard. Yeah. No, he's the University of Quebec. Oh, is he? Which I'm sure at the time was a lower prestige. ...to change what the prestige of the... He feels very strongly that he is the only much older.

30:00 Oh, he's an impressive guy. La famille Joël. He must have done the stuff on, you know, the Joël semantics a bit... I mean, he must have been very young when he'd done that, because he can't be more than in his fifties now. I suppose he might be sixty, but he can't be much older, he can't be older than that, so he must have made a certain place. Yeah. Yeah, he was a quick guy and he was around. There are some interesting people that we don't hear of because they were algebraic geometers or logicians or something, but they're really supportive categories here, eh? He also comes across as a really nice guy, too. I mean, obviously those are just first impressions for me, because he was incredibly patient with me. Well, he couldn't have been kinder in my opinion. I stumbled in attempts to ask him about the morning call. I even thought I'd got a glimpse of understanding after listening to him, which is to be honest more than I'd ever done from when Bill's talked about him. But he was saying that the homotopy category is a bummer because it doesn't have any... it appears to be a really bad category. Conventional category, and yet it's obviously an absolute... and it's got to be in some sense a really good category. So maybe there's something in the category and that's what this derived category of stuff is trying to... I'm just trying to kind of articulate a broader framework for general category theory, which I was really interested in, so I'd like to learn more. Yeah, I thought it would be a screw-top. She wasn't really much on the ball, was she? I suspect that was more likely just sheer inattention on her part, rather than an attempt to actually scam you. Because the place was so crowded. Because the place was so crowded. I hate to say it, but when I was looking at her, the speed of service, I began to think of that idea of the electrical cattle prods they were talking about.

32:30 In some cases, it might be in there. Well, I'm surprised for raising productivity, because those would be the same raising. She has a gift for her attention. I think that's... And I like to see people develop. Yes, that's right. That's what it's all about. And you know, that's just what education should be about, Colin. That's what it should be about. We're trying to get a good content. Oh, no. Oh, no. That's bad. Well, as opposed to pedagogy, as opposed to creating a good learning environment, they want to convey content, ideas. This is, this is really, um, this is a problem, it's a problem. It's a generational problem, let's face it. It's a biological solution to this. Well, when you want them to come out with actual facts, and use random specifics at the end of the course, which it's been proved they can't do anyway, we're being bloody mightily sarcastic. I mean, well, obviously you realize that. No, I don't, I really don't understand what you're, are you, uh, is it a, uh... And yet, it never is. Why is it never? Well, I'm sorry, but this has got to be significant. This has got to be significant. Male domination. And that's one of the main reasons why standard orientation is counterclockwise. Really? Why isn't standard orientation clockwise? Well, it's because they want the penis to stand upright. I didn't thought of it! Here, I had this. Well, you know, if I lived in Canada, I probably would. In Canada, there's no licensing requirement. Ah, yeah, okay, I suspect that what Bill has said is in line. Yeah. Well, don't know. I just wouldn't ask, I just, whatever you do, don't offer Bill's imprimatur to this guy. Do you think you can call Bill's attention to it?

35:00 Uh, I think probably not. It begins with a B. It's not broad enough. It requires him to rethink the whole front end. Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, a lot of people say that, but I just... You know, in fact, this guy did worse than Johnson. Johnson said, I refute him thus. I used to say, this isn't a reputation. But here's a guy trying to refute Kant by claiming that what Kant said was true is. I can't believe that's not real. Wait, not only can't you, you shouldn't. The point of the issue was... In good words, you can't try. I think the point of the issue was, the preface is going into the action. Because the point of the issue was whether you could tell that he was cooking with his left foot or his right foot. Ah, that would have been a subtle point. That's a subtle point. I'm no conscientious about that, but I don't really understand the shift yet. He did shift. On handedness in space. Between 1760 and 1782, he developed his views on handedness. So you think the final views are in the protogon? I don't know how to put it. But that's your guess? Yeah, yeah. I think that section 13 is the one trying to space-camp the concept. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's saying things in relation to the whole thing. It's a picture of what holonomy was, but at the same time it's implicitly there, isn't it? That's impressive. It's incredible. No wonder Vial, Herman Vial, had such a reverence for him. Well, Vial actually misunderstands the argument. Yeah, it's true. He does understand the argument about incongruous power and class, but it's still... But on the other hand, he did understand holonomy. He's the guy who learned to develop the idea. I mean, you could read Kant that way. He attacked Kant for saying that the difference between left and right can't be explained, except by concept construction. But Kant didn't really, that's not, the essential point is not that the difference can't be explained, because it can.

37:30 You interchange the incongruent counterparts by a mirror reflection. It's an objective property of intuitive space. You can't define that, because any definition you give would apply mutatis mutandis to the left hand of this. It's a really curious business, this business of inner automorphisms. We always give rise to this kind of problem. The color has similar effects. You know, about what you see, what I see as green, is the same. If I could see through your eyes it would look blue. But that's obviously another one of these automorphic problems. I can't quite figure out why it doesn't work for size. Well, if Julian Barber's right about conformal symmetry, then perhaps in some sense it does work for size. Well, I mean, what's the difference between size and orientation, whatever you call left-handedness, orientation? What's the difference between those One thing is that the size transformations, it's not the continuity, but it's the continuous motions. Connectedness, the continuum, the orientation is there. Although now with supersymmetry scaling is this other thing. It turns out there's two metrics on space, and they're sort of inverse to each other.

40:00 For once, one sense of energy has the metric that we have, in which strings are very small and galaxies are very large, but there's this other kind of energy that has an inverse metric where the strings are very large. Brian Greene explains that in the book, and I don't have one other than that, but I'm looking forward to it. Well, is this Brian Greene's kind of semi-popular book, this thing on the elegant universe? Yeah, elegant universe. Yeah, it's a lovely book. Yeah, well, it's not semi-popular in the end. It's got a bunch of vignettes that really only researchers could be interested in. It's a neat book. He's doing a television program. Well, I saw a show, a show on the general status of string theories. And that's where I learned about these particle experiments where they're hoping to see a failure by two of spin conservation in some interaction, and that's when the graviton has leapt into the vault. There are even people who, as I understand, are now trying to use the, you know, the bulk space picture in the string, more accurately, in this kind of, the way that the bulk space appears in this. And the holographic principle stuff as the explanation for the relative state interpretation of quantum mechanics. You don't need the many worlds I've ever read at all. It's just that the thing goes into some enfolded stake in the bulk space. The diagram of the bulk space. There's a German guy who's able to talk about that. He was a philosopher, but he clearly knew a hell of a lot about physics. Simon Saunders and Harvey Brown and other people clearly. I mean, he'd written a book on gauge theory, and the guy knew what he was talking about, and he came out with this very interesting interpretation, saying you don't need any of this Everett, Baroque ontology, many worlds to understand the relative state interpretation. It all fits beautifully inside the holographic principle and cutting-edge string theory. If they can make it do it, I see it. The talks I've seen on string theory are all about, we don't know this can't happen. We also don't know it can. What about Hawking? What was he doing in physics? Well, he came and gave a target case. You have to pay for him to fly his plane over there.

42:30 I mean, he's got... Sure, sure. He came and gave a target. He talked about current situations in string theory. But he talked about, yeah, we've got these extra large dimensions, but the whole impetus now is to try to find theories where things don't really go off into them. I mean, originally, the basic idea was we're going to explain why gravity is so much weaker than other forces, because gravity goes off in this extra dimension and the others don't. But then they found how can gravity go off in these other dimensions wasn't a good thing. So now they decide they have to have these other dimensions together with mechanisms to keep anything from going off and do them. You're going to look like a Heath Robinson. Well, I wonder if there is an enormous amount of Baroque elaborations. I don't know. I just, I always think, you know, when Newton comes up with his theory of gravity, everybody wants to know how does it work. And even Newton speculates on how it works. In one famous paragraph he declines to speculate then. He just gets floated as if he never speculated in principle, yes. Yes, the present tense, I do not. I do not now, not I will not, not I would not in principle, but I do not. And within 30 years the wide consensus was the right approach to this is not part of trying to answer it. And 200 years later Einstein gives what's still today the best answer which is, it's nothing you could have formulated, no question you could have formulated then has this as answer. And I mean this can happen again, naturally enough, yeah. We may just be 200 years shy of a presently inconceivable answer. Of course, that's nice to say if you don't work in the department. Yeah, it is an odd situation. Not helped by the fact that obviously the subject is now so far removed from any possible experimental strengths. But also because it's removed from specific predictions. If string theory would make some specific predictions, some of them might be contestable. I thought last night you were on the verge of saying something which I rather inclined to agree with. If it makes something coherent and compelling, even though it doesn't make any new predictions at all, the experiments we've already got, which were previously inexplicable, are now applicable.

45:00 It makes sense. It gives you a clearer picture of what's going on. I don't see why that isn't... Well, that presumably hasn't done it yet. But it is arguable that quantum gravity has. Well, not in specific solutions. You can't solve the equations at all. But it has given a framework which explains where the initial singularity... Well, which might, if it turns out to be mathematically coherent, but we can't tell if it is. And that's what John was saying last night. I mean, the loop gravity, they have a good approximate argument that it's sort of pointed the right way, but on making a better approximation, it's exactly the wrong way. Because you can't solve these equations right now. I mean, I'm a Hilbertian optimist. Every problem that gets posed can be solved. But it hasn't been now. Or explained away. That's a crucial right. Yes, just like the whole point about the NP problem. If you're right about the different length of number systems, then it's an ill-posed problem. Look at the man hours of very, very, very bright people's thinking time that have gone into trying to crack it. Not to mention the million dollars that the... Actually, Peter Fry can prove it's been solved. Yeah, he's solved it. If you look at Gleason's papers up to about 1978, you can see that he's on the track of a solution, and then suddenly he goes to work for NSA for a year, and he stops working on it. Peter Fry can prove wondrous things. That's almost as convincing as my argument about Lord Porchester and Prince Andrew the other night, isn't it? And the cabinet minutes have been deep-sixed for 1959 and 1960. The conjecture is that Prince Andrew is not Prince Philip's son. Obviously, the cabinet minutes for 1959, they're portions of the murder.

47:30 ...and the seal for a hundred years. Didn't they think that, they thought, I guess they assumed that by that time there wasn't any question of Andrew or any of his descendants being involved in the train. Wasn't it? Well, only by one life. Oh, you mean by a hundred years from now? Oh, by then, yeah. Well, no, there wouldn't have been. In 1960 there certainly would have been. He was the second in line. So they would have kept him for probably decades. I'm assuming the only people who would ever have been told would have been, on an official speaking basis, would have been the Prime Minister and the head of SIS. I doubt whether they'd even have briefed the Home Secretary, but they probably would have briefed the Home Secretary. It is a constitutional... Well, most of the point is that how would Elizabeth tell anybody? She didn't have to. It might just have simply come out. Well, I'm assuming that the SIS... Well, if she doesn't tell anybody, it's not really out, no matter how many people say. Sure, sure, sure. It's not. If she says it is... Yeah, but the point is, if she wasn't in a position to... Well, if that isn't clear, I don't know. You'd have to check exactly what Philip was about. That is the conjecture. The conjecture is, it is awful. Terrible gossip. No, it's just that I think that this is actually a genuine, rather good, kind-hearted woman, very limited, sort of decent kind of woman, who has been trapped in this kind of... It would be pretty awful of a life situation, being crucified into being some kind of beautiful schoolgirl from the cradle, with this tearaway younger sister who's having all the fun, and there she is, and still in her thirties, and actually still at that time a strikingly good-looking woman, especially in the flesh, because she was never as photogenic as Margaret, apparently she was in the flesh, but she was really sort of gorgeous-looking. And she's got a husband who, you know, just treats her like shit, he's been playing the field, on these world tours, a swimming world. I'm screwing up everything inside and she probably hasn't had sex since Carol's got sick because she's nearly 10 years and she has the one fling of her life with Lord Portchester with her racing manager and then suddenly comes to and remembers, oh Christ, I'm the queen. What the hell?

50:00 So, in the immortal words of Ramsey MacDonald, oh Christ, what the hell do we do now, Al Wilson was fond of saying that when he was in his class, in the immortal words of my predecessor Ramsey MacDonald, oh Christ, what the hell do we do now. Yeah, but it's not a problem. No, no, no, no, no, but it's not a problem now because there's, because, because there are... One question, but Charles VIII's son, so there's nothing wrong with the genes. Except that he almost certainly was because Charles almost certainly legally married Lucy Walters at the British chaplaincy in the chaplaincy in Holland when he was in exile was validly married by an Anglican chaplain in exile to Lucy Walters and then deep-sixed her after he had to contract the marriage to Catherine of Braganza for reasons of state after he took the throne Which was ironic because, of course, they never had children. I mean, he left, you know, he left pastors all over the place, which is very interesting. But half the great families of England were descended from him. In fact, there's this story that during the 19th century, the Queen Victoria went to stay with the Duke of... And after they, she stayed for a couple of days by the fire, and the Duke of Buccleuch actually pulled out, because they had it in the movements, actually pulled out the copy of the marriage, it wouldn't have been a marriage certificate at that time, the actual copy of the marriage deed between Charles and Lucy Walters, which of course would have proved that he was the legitimate descendant. ...constitutionally because the whole point is that it's a constitutional monarchy and the sovereign reigns by virtue of William III, 12, no, the Cap 3, the Act of Settlement of 1701, and not by right of any descent. The legitimate secret guideline was overall...

52:30 By parliamentary legislation, it says that the throne, state dignities, blah, blah, blah, etc. of this realm shall devolve to and remain forever in the body of the most excellent ladies of hire, Electress of Hanover, and her heirs forever being Protestant. And incidentally, it does say that being a Protestant, nowhere in the Act of Settlement or any other constitutional document does it say that the sovereign is required to be a member of the Church of England. In fact, the first two Hanoverian sovereigns were not. George I and George II were both Lutherans. They never attended the Act of Settlement. That's my point. That's precisely my point. They were headed. No, they were not. They were supreme earthly governor of the church. Only one sovereign in English history ever claimed the title of head of the church. That was Henry VIII. Elizabeth and her successor... No, it didn't. No point did it ever say. Fid Def, that's something completely different. You're confusing. That was the title which the Pope conferred on him for his book against Luther when he was still a good Catholic. Which, of course, in his eyes, he remained to his dying day. I mean, Henry was never a Protestant or a Lutheran, but he was, in his eyes, on the kind of Gallican principle, head of the Church of England, but the only sovereign who ever claimed the title. In fact, that's the reason why the, I forget which of the articles, of the 39 articles it is, why the article, it was about the fifth article of religion of the Church of England, sort of states categorically, you know, sort of, Jesus Christ is the head of the Church. I'm sure it would have encouraged what you probably call the clowns of Somerset who formed the Monmouth army. Well, at that point that was irrelevant because, of course, when the Monmouths were out there, it was a clear issue about legitimacy. It was a clear sort of genetic issue because the legislation is 1701. The Act of Settlement is 1701. So these are pain matters. But the ironic point is that the Duke of Buccleuch and Queen Victoria both missed the point entirely, that the Queen reigns by virtue of parliamentary and by an act of parliament, and by no superior instrument, and certainly not by... Subtitles by the Amara.org community

55:00 It's a question of what suppositions people had in mind when they made that settlement, which is the reason that the Duke of the Clue allegedly, according to the story, put the document in front of her, sort of showed her the document and then graciously placed it in front of her. Well, not really. He's a duke. He's a duke. He's a generous gesture to his social inferiors. Remember that the Whig aristocrats always looked down on the monarchy as their social inferiors. And he's not interested. That's a great point, isn't he? No. The world is happening. Right now, we can't help it. That's right. And that would be very much the temperament of kind of great weird grandees. You could imagine Russell doing the same thing. I don't mean Bertie, I mean his grandfather. Although actually you can imagine Russell doing the same thing. You know the splendid story about... He would have made a good joke. In fact he made a good joke to the king when the king gave him the OM. Well, you know, Lord Russell, I'm awarding you this award. I don't know whether you want to say that stuff a bit, but I'm awarding you this award. But I must say, it's an early copy by people who are strong. But I have to say, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do. You have advocated and indeed done in your life many things which in my view it would not be at all a good thing if they were to be generally done. That's the way that sort of we grandees speak to kings and queens. Yes, that's why of course they were Whigs in 1688. They must be one of the great leading Whig families. The Medfords, the Russells. Who was he in Dryden?

57:30 Who was Russell? Who was the... He's not Zimri, is he? No, sure. Zimri was... Zimri is the butt of Brydon's best joke. Was everything by stars and nothing long. And in the course of one revolving moon was the chemist fiddler. And buffoon. That is superb. Dryden is very underrated today. His translation of the Aeneid is absolutely brilliant. I read it about three years ago. He's not even rated in American universities. His translation of the Aeneid is, I think, I think it is actually better than anything in Poe. You know, Poe is technically the more perfect poet. He's technically more perfect than that. But both of them are. They are. Both, even both. He's got greater. But, I mean, the idea of wit and clarity is gone. So you've got to have your feelings on your sleeve. But the dried-in-a-knee idea is yet afraid to strike.