Robyn Williams: Merry Christmas. Robyn Williams with another Science Show. This week we begin a four-part series with some great Australian scientists. Next time I'll talk to Professor John Lovering, the former Vice-Chancellor at Flinders, then Dr Oliver Mayo, the numbers man from Adelaide, and finally Dame Bridget Ogilvie of the Wellcome Institute and much else.

This time one of the most decorated men in Australian history, Lord May of Oxford. He's been chief scientist in Britain, president of the Royal Society of London, he's won prizes equivalent to Nobels, and he's got the OM. The Order of Merit is one of those awards that is so special. If you knock back the others, you won't say no to the OM, trust me. I talked to him at the Royal Society about his very lucky life.

Robyn Williams: One thing puzzles me, Bob, and that is of all the ologists, you know, physicist, chemical engineer, chemist, mathematician, what kind of ologist are you?

Robert May: I'd say I am a scientist with a short attention span. I think there are different kinds of people in science, not just theoreticians and experimentalists but people who like to pick on one problem and devote their life to it, people who accidentally stumble across something, and I like to get in early when you can do nice simple things that are important and then, as the field grows and it becomes more a matter of important and systematic elaboration, I find that less congenial. It's not that I go around deliberately thinking of what is a different thing to do, it's just that my scientific career from the fact that it even exists onward has been a sequence of accidents.

Robyn Williams: Yes. So what is the essential ingredient that has been the secret of it all? Is it a maths?

Robert May: I wouldn't say it's mathematics to put a label on it. Mathematics is ultimately no more than thinking very clearly about something. And I like puzzles, but in the sense that I like thinking about complicated things, asking what are potential simplicities hidden in them, and expressing that tentative thought in mathematical terms and seeing where it leads me in testable ways.

Robyn Williams: In many ways what you describe seems to be the kind of qualities a young person, a child has. Did you have that kind of interest when you were very small?

Robert May: I don't remember how I thought when I was very, very small, but I can tell you from when I was very young I was a fairly solitary child, and from when I was fairly young I really did enjoy mathematical puzzles and puzzles of other kinds. There is a connection.

Robyn Williams: What about the family influence, your mother, your father?

Robert May: My family influences are slightly complicated and I don't want to go into it in detail, but basically my father, his family moved from Northern Ireland, they were Protestants, his father was involved in the Orangemen and they got out because in fact some IRA people turned up and said if the family didn't clear out within the week, they would come back and kill them, essentially. A week later they were on a boat to Australia, and he went from middle-class prosperity to living initially in a place in Newcastle with a dirt floor. And I think it marked him.

I never knew him. Michael Kirby very kindly last time I was in Australia brought together some people who had known my father. Michael Kirby himself had known him because his law firm engaged my father as a sort of mentor. In his middle and late 20s he was seen as one of the brightest people at the bar, a rival of Garfield Barwick's. By his early 30s he had collapsed in alcoholic ruin...

Robyn Williams: The other bar.

Robert May: Yes, you couldn't hire him because you wouldn't know whether he'd turn up. My mother divorced him when I was seven, and this is in an era when good middle-class people didn't get divorced. And I essentially never saw him, so the last time I saw him I was 17, and I only saw him once or twice in my teens. And in retrospect I regret that. It wasn't realised as clearly then as it is now that alcoholism is not necessarily a character fault, it is a disease. It's the reason I'm a teetotaller, not because I have any disapproval of it, but I look very like him.

Robyn Williams: You've never touched a drop.

Robert May: I have his gift of the gab. My mother on the other hand, her own father was an engineer, and if you go back to her grandfather, my great-grandfather, one of four brothers from Scotland, from Stranraer, who built the Queen's University Lanyon Building in Belfast. They were the stonemasons and the quarry masters. And when they finished that they emigrated to Australia, the four brothers, and they built the GPO and Customs House in Sydney, and they owed their quarry down at Moruya. And they were very prosperous, although that had faded away by the time it got two generations down the line. So that was my mother's background. And I grew up from the age of seven with my grandparents and my mother and my younger brother. I went to Sydney Boys High, third generation, grandfather...my mother went to Sydney Girls High, and one of my great uncles was the architect of the school.

Robyn Williams: I've always heard that Sydney High was supposed to be one of the really great schools. Was it?

Robert May: Well, I'm a chauvinist, it is. My wife Judith, who grew up in Manhattan, is of the opinion that every other Australian she meets went to Sydney Boys High, and that's based simply on empirical facts. It was in the era of grammar schools where the top schools in Sydney were unambiguously the state schools, and it drew its intake from the eastern suburbs, and that's also where the Jewish diaspora out of Shanghai ended up. It had a lot of really bright people, and it had superb teachers.

The teachers I had in high school were uniformly excellent, and particularly one of the really formative influences in my life was the chemistry teacher, a chap called Lenny Basser, who now has a prize in Australia, a federal prize named after him because the Education Minister a few years ago wrote to various Australians asking for stories about their teacher, and he found that a Nobel laureate and the president of the Royal Society mentioned the same person.

And when you look into it, he taught eight Fellows of the Royal Society, and he taught us by not teaching us. He said, 'You people are going on to university, I'm not going to give you notes for the syllabus, here is a list of the syllabus topics, write me some essays on some of them. Here are books in the library I've got at the back of the laboratory of previous students who have done this.' And he would tell us stories about these people.

Robyn Williams: I see, stories. But this is a very strange didactic method. What if you got blocked or..?

Robert May: I think it was brilliant. He would tell us stories about the stock market. You can imagine, half the class loathed him because he didn't give them a nice, well indexed set of things to learn for the exam. He also coached the track team at Sydney Boys High which for 28 of the 33 years he coached it won the state schools athletic championship. It's unbelievable, and it's not that he coached them by making them work too hard, but he was always ahead of the wave in new techniques and motivating people. So one of my friends was the state high jump champion. He, like me, thought Lenny was wonderful, and the other was a more scholarly person who found him a pain in the neck.

Robyn Williams: But I just wonder, doing that to the very bright boys, letting them get on with it, did that leave the rest of the class behind?

Robert May: Well, he got very good results, let's put it that way. And he never became actually head of the science section at Sydney High because to do that you had to move to another school, and he liked being there.

Robyn Williams: Yes. I keep wondering whether some of those successes of the old days couldn't even get to first base now because none of it would be allowed.

Robert May: Yes, I think it would be different. You wouldn't, for example, have quite the way each subject the classes were streamed. People are mixed by different things. Even at Sydney High, the most esteemed characters were the sporting stars.

Robyn Williams: Back to that question of what kind of ologist you are. Was it chemical engineering at the University of Sydney?

Robert May: I chose chemical engineering. The consistent advice to me from the career adviser at the school and from anybody that I spoke to with the exception of Lenny Basser was that I should go into law because the school had a wonderful tradition of debating. Murray Gleeson was in our cohort, so we had a good rivalry with St Joseph's with Murray Gleeson. That was the main thing I did at school. We were really good.

I then only went back to it once after I left school in my second year of graduate school in '58, I thought, what the hell, just for a lark I'll try out for the Sydney University team. And not only did I make the team but we won inter-varsity, and I and the leader of the Sydney team were chosen for the combined Australian universities team which that year didn't get a trip to Britain. So that was the main thing I took away from school. And I believe it is an undervalued talent in science. Not only am I reasonably good at doing the things I do, but I'm reasonably good at presenting them in ways that people find engaging.

Robyn Williams: Scientists of course don't necessarily practice speaking like that, do they?

Robert May: My students do.

Robyn Williams: The University of New South Wales these days, they make them do a one-minute lecture on their thesis, and it really concentrates the mind.

Robert May: This debating thing is so different from the United States. You are given the topic ten minutes beforehand or maybe half an hour beforehand, and they toss the coin for which side you get. Great training. Great training for being a chief scientist.

Robyn Williams: But back to chemical engineering. How come?

Robert May: I didn't want to do law. It would have upset my mother who felt...brought a lot of baggage to it, but also because I felt law, for all its interest, is sort of about humanity's imperfections, and do you really want to spend your life doing that? So my mother was keen and most of the family were keen, there were quite a few doctors on my mother's side of the family, and the uniform advice was to do medicine, but I didn't feel like doing that either. And it was Lenny Basser who said, 'Why not do chemistry?' Chemical engineering.

So I went and talked with Rolf Prince at Sydney University who was just the newly appointed professor of chemical engineering, and he arranged for me to go and visit the Colonial Sugar Refinery to get an idea what chemical engineers did. And some of my friends were doing it and it seemed like a good thing to do, and it sure worked for me. I had lived at home, and as I say I was a relatively solitary younger child, and going to university, very luckily I had a set of friends who had many of my own characteristics, and very oddly in retrospect, essentially none of us drank, for one thing. Most of us didn't go out with girls, we hadn't sort of worked out how you did it, as it were.

But we were a very close-knit set of people who did things together, and I spent roughly half my university years playing chess or snooker in the union and just having a good time. I did not do my second-year chemistry very conscientiously because it was too time-consuming, and I used various tricks and devices to abbreviate the time, which I think required actually more scientific insight than actually doing it honestly.

Robyn Williams: Presumably you did pretty well at that, but at what point did that key element, physics, come into it?

Robert May: The first of the many, many lucky accidents that shaped my life...I always have been good at sitting exams, but I give myself the credit…even when I was in school I realised being good at exams doesn't have much to do with later life, it's a trick. It's like solving puzzles, it's a party trick almost. But I was very good at that party trick. I topped Sydney High in every subject I took, and out of the total for the trial leaving we did, the total could be 800 marks, I got 794, and the kid who came second was 100 points behind. It never occurred to me that this meant anything other than I was a better at this party trick, which is interesting.

And when I went to university I thought I would be one of the various engineers and I decided in the first year, chemical engineering. All the engineers did the same first-year course, which involved chemistry, mathematics and physics, and I did honours mathematics, honours chemistry, pass physics, but I sat in the honours class in physics because of my mates were doing that.

We are going out to have a party after the last exams so I turned up, I thought, I like taking exams, it's an interesting game, I'll take the exam even though I haven't swotted for it. I sat in on, and I ended up getting a prize that was awarded for chemistry and physics. And to take it…and for me, because we were not at all well off, you know, I used to walk from the railway station up to the university to save the tuppence on the fare, it was worth a fair amount of money but it was contingent on doing second-year physics and chemistry.

So I got permission...chemical engineering too had a high failure rate and I was advised against it. I did second-year chemical engineering plus physics in order that I could take the prize. And I continued to do well and I came to the attention of Harry Messel, a second hugely lucky accident. Harry Messel had been brought into Sydney and into a rather moribund physics department, to be honest. He had brought the outside world, and in particular he had brought together a world-class trio of theoretical physicists.

My intellectual grandfathers are three of the resonant names of physics of the golden age. My thesis supervisor was Robbie Schafroth, himself student then assistant of Wolfgang Pauli. Stuart Butler, who got his PhD in that golden group around Rudolf Peierls in Birmingham after the war, with Freeman Dyson and so many other...Sam Edwards...great people were his contemporaries. And John Blatt, who had just written the definitive text on nuclear physics. Vicki Weisskopf, the first director of CERN. A wonderful group of people!

Harry had brought them together, Harry was so good in getting good people and letting them go. In fact you know there's an old adage in Australia; the reason the physics department at Sydney was better than Australian National University, unlike most departments, was because Titterton never appointed anyone who was better than him, and Harry never appointed anyone who wasn't better than him.

Robyn Williams: Tell us about Harry Messel.

Robert May: It's amazing how vital he still is at 80. I think he came because he saw it as an opportunity, first to Adelaide, then to Sydney. And the things he did are really almost beyond imagination. It was a different world. Nobody went looking for private foundations to fund things. Nobody went headhunting with the aggressive zeal he did. So he brought in a bunch of really distinguished people and he also brought in pots of money, and then unlike many people who bring in money and then want to control how it is spent, he simply gave it to people to get on with it.

I never knew him to say he would do something that he didn't do. Just hugely, again, grateful to him because, as I will say many times, my life would have been entirely different if it hadn't been for that accident. And in the third year, again, against all advice, you are invited to major either in pure mathematics, applied mathematics or physics, and I majored in all three. I remember John Blatt telling me, 'This is crazy.' And basically when I said, 'But I think I can do it and I'd like to do it, I just enjoy the subjects.' He said, 'Well, you should be left in your folly.' And indeed I topped all three.

And then I had a decision; am I going to go on and do physics honours and think about life in academia, or am I going to go back to engineering and think about a life doing something down-to-earth and much more focused? And to a degree that I think too many graduate students these days don't appreciate, I give myself credit for at that time…so I'm 19, I recognised that there is no recipe for being a successful creative scientist. It is relatively much easier to be a good, useful, professional, employable engineer than to embark on this journey into the unknown.

And furthermore I also saw, and it is perhaps an unkind observation, this is a profession that makes tough judgements about you and has clear hierarchies. So you're going into something where you have no guarantee of success and it is not all that well paid, but on the other hand it was clear to me that Blatt, Butler and Schafroth were having such a good time. And I just decided it was worth a shot.

Robyn Williams: This is The Science Show on RN and I'm talking to Lord May, Professor Robert May, the former Chief Scientist in Britain and president of the Royal Society of London about his amazing career, which continued then in America.

Robyn Williams: Okay, here's a boy from Sydney, with not necessarily worldly qualities, landing in a place like Harvard which is not only a great centre of scholarly achievement but also in terms of social activities fairly demanding. How did you get on?

Robert May: First of all I did discover going out with girls, sort of slowly and clumsily. But also, again, I fell in with a very happy small group of friends. And also the faculty...I was in the division of Engineering and Applied Physics and they were in the habit of all going out together at lunch, and I had done a really rather good thesis and I gave some seminars shortly after I arrived at Chicago and Duke, I was offered a couple of assistant professorships and I was actually offered an assistant professorship at Harvard fairly early on and I said no, I am determined to go back to Sydney. But they gave me a lectureship and I did teach courses, and I used to go out to lunch with these people. So that was one very nice, warm but professionally advantageous thing.

But secondly I had this group of graduate student friends because they were more my age than the faculty people, and in particular a chap called Gerald Guralnik who, interestingly, along with Tom Kibble here in the UK and Higgs of the Higgs Boson, two years ago the American Physical Society gave its award essentially for the ideas of the Higgs Boson which were simultaneously arrived at by three different groups, the first of whom was not Higgs but was Kibble, Guralnik and Hagen. The other two groups proved the result in a special gauge. Kibble, Guralnik and Hagan had done it two years earlier, but Kibble is a really modest, meticulous person. He said, 'We're not publishing it until we have proved it with gauged generality.' So if you go to the website of people comparing this unusual…six people get the prize that it is thought may go to no more than three for a Nobel for the discussion, well, if it's going to go to any three, which three?

My thesis was on superconductivity. Robbie Schafroth my supervisor had had the critical insight before anyone else, and this is an unambiguous matter of record, that a charged gas of bosons would be a superconductor. That redefined the problem. How do you get pairs of electrons, which are fermions, to be effectively bound to be bosons? The Sydney group had an idea of how you could do that. They wrote it up, send it out for review. Bardeen, of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer, sat on the paper, delayed its decision for 18 months and then rejected it. My thesis was to work on that, and it turned out the idea wasn't good anyway. And so during my second year of my thesis, Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer produced the explanation. In my view, the Nobel Prize, had Robbie Schafroth lived, should have gone to Bardeen, and one of Cooper and Schrieffer, and the third one had to be Robbie Schafroth.

Robyn Williams: Bob Bardeen ended up getting two Nobel prizes, didn't he.

Robert May: Yes, he did indeed.

Robyn Williams: Okay, Judith at this time, what was she doing?

Robert May: Well, I met Judith on a blind double-date with Gerald Guralnik who was dating Judith's best friend. They were both undergraduates at Brandeis, which is a relatively unusual example of a newly created university that is of some distinction, on the outskirts of Boston. And we went on this date, at the end of which I was rather taken with Judith, and I said would she like to go to the Harvard Yale football game for which I happen to have a spare ticket on Saturday, and she had promised to play tennis with one of her acquaintances from school who was visiting. And she gave me what seemed to me an excessively circumstantial reason she couldn't and left me with the impression she didn't want to go out with me again, which rather upset me, but anyhow.

Later in the week, Judith, who had been hoping I would call her back, her friend from the double-date told Gerald that may be Gerald should tell me that Judith would like it if I called her back, and thus...and not a long time after that I was going back to Australia. It was a period of about six months we knew each other. During that time we both became convinced that we would like to get married, but Judith was quite a bit younger than me. The day I met her she was 17 and I was 23, and her background couldn't have been more different. She grew up in Manhattan, she went to music and art, her parents were Jewish, her mother was the first woman professor at City University. Joan had no idea at that time...you know, this was back in the early '60s...that women had academic careers, and in fact she has just retired from the University of Maryland where she ran the women's studies program, and they named an annual lecture after Joan Korenman. So, an interesting nexus of stuff.

On the other hand, as I say, I did feel that as our backgrounds were so different and Judith was that much younger, that what we ought to do is I ought to go back to Australia and leave it alone for six months and then see if we still wanted to do it. Judith thought this was a dreadful idea but we did it, and after six months I wrote and said, 'I hope you still want to do it.' And she did. And her mother came out with her and we got married, and it really was one of the...as I say, it's the best and single most happy accident that ever happened.

Robyn Williams: Now she is a Lady May, who'd have thought.

Robert May: That's right. Well, we both regard our subsequent life as highly improbable. But after I've accidentally got interested in problems in ecology, which was very much encouraged by Harry Messel. And again, Harry had been telling me, interestingly, for quite a few years when I came back that I ought to bring physics into biology. And so he was very pleased when I did. And the first thing I did there is one of the most important things I've done. Why was I even thinking about it? Charles Birch, whom everyone in Australia should know if they don't, head of biology at Sydney, a wonderful man who was one of the founders of social responsibility in science in Australia...

Robyn Williams: And the Club of Rome.

Robert May: And involved in all these things, and also in a very un-ego-gratifying way in the Vietnam War. In discovering what I was being conscience-stricken about and socially responsible about, I had read a book by Ken Watt on ecology and resource management. And in it was a clear articulation of an emerging theoretical notion in ecology. You've got to understand, ecology is a very young discipline. The word is only 100 years old. The oldest professional society, the British Ecological Society, is just about to celebrate its centenary. And its first half-century was largely descriptive, a little bit of theory.

At that time there was a belief, articulated by one of the founding fathers of theoretical ecology, Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale, that complicated ecosystems, things with more species and more interactions among them, would, by virtue of that complicatedness, be more stable. And Hutchinson had formally asserted this as one of the fundamental principles. Ken Watt set that out and then very commonsensically he said, pretty contrary to common experience…to cut a long story short, I proved a rather nice theorem that is a generalisation of a physics theorem due to Wigner , and I am delighted that my name is now coupled, it's the May-Wigner theorem.

He proved it for a special kind of symmetrical matrices, but I said let's imagine an ecosystem where each species by itself would be stable. And I prove an interesting generalisation of the theorem that said such a system will remain stable provided the number of species times the average number of species they are connected to, times the square on the strength, is less than one, one is the normalising [time to recover], otherwise it will collapse if N is big. And that turns the whole thing on its head and it really sets the agenda for ecology because it says in the real world we see a lot of complicated systems. Ecosystems are the winnowed product of evolution, they are not random. What are the special structures that they have to reconcile exploiting more niches and having more species and being more complicated, with robustness against disturbance? And we are still working on that, although we made a lot of progress, particularly with the experimentalists. That was the first thing I did, one of the most important.

Robyn Williams: And Charles Birch's reaction to that?

Robert May: He was the co-author of what was then the world leading text on ecology, Andrewartha and Birch. But he was also identified with the view that there is no place for mathematics in ecology, it's all about looking at nature. The wonderful thing about Charles, I told him what I'd done, and he said, 'Well, you know I think mathematics doesn't have much to say about ecology, but who knows who's right. My friend Ken Watt, whose book you've just read, would really love that. Write it up, send it to him, come and give a seminar in biology.'

And so I did all that. I had a nice letter from Ken Watt. And then I had already arranged later that year to go off on a roughly 18-month sabbatical at the plasma physics laboratories at Culham here in Britain where we are talking, and then across to the Institute for Advanced Study to do some astrophysics things with my friend John Bahcall. But I was already interested in these things, and Charles wrote to Richard Southwood who was the head of a very interesting group of people at Imperial College Field Station out near Virginia Water, and he wrote to Robert MacArthur in Princeton saying there's this physicist person you might be interested in talking to.

During the roughly eight or nine months I was at Culham, I read more ecology and I did some more things, and somebody the other day reminded me, the chap who's currently the secretary general of the Third World Academy actually, Mohamed Hassan, a lovely bloke, he was there on sabbatical also, he remembers my saying this is probably going to be the last physics seminar I ever give.

And then when I went to Princeton I went to talk with Robert MacArthur. After we'd been chatting for about ten minutes, one of Robert's colleagues came in, Henry Horn, and called him away to the phone. MacArthur at this point had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and told he had probably less than a year to live, and I knew that, he knew that. He had said to Henry Horn, 'There's some physicist person that Charles Birch thinks I might be interested in, I'll give him ten minutes, but I don't have that much time to waste, so come and call me away.' He came back and we talked for another hour and a half. This is a true but amazing story. It couldn't happen today I don't think, even at Princeton.

At the end of that he said, 'You do know I'm going to be extinct in about a year? And I'm very keen to find my successor.' And this after all was the person who was seen at that time already as the pre-eminent architect of theoretical ecology in the States and maybe everywhere. He said, 'The person I really wanted to get is Jared Diamond, but he is wedded to the West Coast. Would you be interested in coming here to take my professorship?'

Robyn Williams: Wow.

Robert May: And I said, 'That's gobsmacking, but I really like Australia and I'm happy in physics, I'm going to go back there.' And he said, 'Look, give a departmental seminar so people know you.' And I gave a departmental seminar. One of the things we had talked about as a problem he'd been thinking about to which I can instantly see...he wasn't much of a mathematician...to which I could see the solution. So we published a paper on that. And I gave a departmental seminar which went down well, and the chairman, John Bonner, more formally offered me the thing and I more formally declined it. I went back to Australia and I wrote the monograph on stability and complexity in model ecosystems, which…I'm not into citations, but I happened to look it up the other day and it has about 5,000. So, not bad for a monograph in ecology.

Robyn Williams: Of course the implication of that is if you've got a very, very big complex population, that if you reduce it, even with little creatures you can't see, you know, elements that you don't take any notice of, at a certain point if you reduce it too much the whole system can break down.

Robert May: Yes, as a one-sentence summary, that's a good summary. Robert MacArthur also said to me, 'Write all this up as a Princeton monograph.' So it was the fourth in a series he had started that has been hugely influential, and which, in later years after I had moved to Princeton, my wife was the commissioning editor for. She ended up knowing more of the community than I did.

I went back to Sydney, did that, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that this was what I was going to do now because I had stumbled into something to which my particular talents, which in some ways would have been more suited to the '30s in physics with the beginnings of the computer age in physics, I'd stumbled into ecology in its golden age for theory, as it were, and I seized that.

But then the people...Ralph Slatyer in Canberra said, 'Why don't you move to Canberra and join the ecology group there?' And it was Judith who said, 'Look, if were going to move, wouldn't it make more sense to move to Princeton? It's a more central place.' I would never have had the energy to do that. She just thought...as you will see later on, it was she behind moving to Britain too. And so we did that. What I did is I pick up the phone and I rang the chairman, John Bonner, and I said, 'Have you fixed on Robert's successor or are you still looking?' And again, I swear this is true, it couldn't happen today. I said, 'I've changed my mind, I'd like to do it.' He said, 'Great.' That was our negotiation.

Later on when I was the vice president for research I would spend hours putting together packages to attract people, and dickering about retirement things and so on. I never even asked about...wonderful. And I moved there. It was a wonderful place, very small. Consistently ranked, and still today, in one of the top six in ecology in the country, but at that time it was one or two orders of magnitude smaller than anywhere else. There were only four faculty. After I had been there for a few years, while I was on sabbatical the GM thing all erupted...

Robyn Williams: Genetically modified crops.

Robert May: Gene splicing and all the fuss at Harvard where the council forbade the laboratories to work on this subject because it might be dangerous. While I was on sabbatical I was put in charge of the committee in Princeton that was to look after that, and I have for all my life avoided being chairman of a department. I'm too selfish. And I hadn't had much experience of chairing things, so this was my first experience. Judith remembers my coming home after the first meeting of this rather contentious committee and sitting on the stairs in our house and saying, 'I don't know how I'm going to do this.' And I thought about it and I talked with people, and I ended up...the whole thing went rather well.

The first thing I said when I was asked to do it, to the president, was, 'I would like some citizens on the committee.' And he said, 'We don't do that.' Towards the end he realised I was right and he was wrong, and he did engage with the township. And in short I was seen to do it rather well. But I thought if I'm going to do things, I don't want to be doing this committee, I'd like to do the thing that is the next step up because it was very much part-time at Princeton. So for the last 11 years I was there, '77 to '88, I was a thing called chairman of the university research board, which anywhere else would have been vice president for research.

But unlike here where being the vice chancellor or pro vice chancellor of research means sitting on endless committees all day every day, at Princeton it was sort of a day-and-a-half a week job, and my predecessors were very distinguished scientists, Nobel laureates, and it goes way back to post-war, World War II, when Princeton was ahead of the game, and Henry DeWolf Smyth, who was the person responsible for civilian control of nuclear energy in the US, coming back to the university and saying there's going to be a lot more public money on the campus and we ought to have strict rules about what we do with it. It was an interesting job. Those 11 years while I was doing that were among the most productive of my scientific life.

Robyn Williams: Which brings me of course to chaos. How come?

Robert May: Apart from the fact that some of the things that I dealt with administratively were indeed chaotic (poor joke!)…but one of the things I stumbled upon fairly early on was that some of the very simple equations that people had proposed for the way populations of animals that had discrete non-overlapping generations…you know, the fish born this year in spring, knapweed gall flies hatched this year in Widenwood, and then the same number next year…how is the number this year...of trying to understand what happened when it could give you stable solutions where if the population tended to grow when it was at low density and decline if it was at too high a density and ate itself out of house and home, and there would be some balance point. What happened if the boom and bustiness got too steep so that that point was stable? So that instead of it being like the ball at the bottom of a cup, it was like a ball on top of a billiard cue.

I could see how what at first would happen is you should start getting the thing going in deterministic cycles, up down, up down, and then they would bifurcate to give you up down, different up, different down. And I could see this cascade of period doubling bifurcations coming to a point where it just went bonkers and it just looked like random noise.

So I was wanting to write a paper on it but I wanted to know what happened there, and I happened by sheer good luck, again, to be giving a seminar at Maryland where a chap called Jim Yorke, who is the person who gave us the word 'chaos'...  Jim Yorke was a mathematician's mathematician from Berkeley. He hadn't stumbled on this cascade of period doublings, he'd been working in what we now call the chaotic regime, and he'd proved with a student a remarkable result which he called 'Period Three Implies Chaos', so he gave us the word 'chaos'.  He was a very quiet man and he didn't get enough recognition early but he did end up getting the Japan Prize, along with Benoit Mandelbrot for complexity. A very well awarded prize.

So I gave this thing, and I had written up on the blackboard outside my office in Princeton that if anybody knows what happens beyond this, please tell me. And he said, well, 'I know, and it got on there, but I didn't know this went there.' He didn't know the first bit and he didn't know the second bit. So I then pursued that further and I wrote a review paper in Nature. I sent it to Nature. It was recommended by the person who looked at it that this is too mathematical, no one is interested. But one of the senior editors, Miranda Robertson, whom I had come to know a little bit because I was already writing news and views things for Nature, said, 'Let me have a look at it.' And she looked at it and she said, 'Send it to John Maynard Smith because I think it looks interesting.' And JMS wrote a note that Miranda told me looked as if my mother had written it. And they published it, and it's my most second most cited paper, it's got almost 4,000 citations.

Robyn Williams: And of course this kind of basis, this way of looking numerically at that sort of change of populations, of diseases, AIDS, you name it...

Robert May: Huge ramifications. Mind you, it's a metaphor for really more complicated things. Simple though that equation is, it has many implications, and one of them is the flip side. If I look at something that looks random now, like marginal rates of treasury bonds, algorithmic trading means maybe part of it is a deterministic signal. One of the characteristics of chaos is not only does it look random, even though it is being generated by something that is completely known, but it is so sensitive to the starting point that you can't make predictions beyond a few time steps.

On the other hand, it does open a window to a new way of making short-term predictions. For example, in a paper I wrote with one of my ex-students, a very creative Japanese-American, George Sugihara, a wonderful person, we showed a technique for doing that, and in particular the random number generator that Von Neumann and Ulam used for generating random numbers for the first computer built, the MANIAC at the Institute for Advanced Study in '48, they used that particular equation to generate their random numbers.

George and I with our technique could tell you the next two or three or four random numbers to high precision, but we couldn't go much beyond that. George parlayed that into running Deutsche Bank Securities USA for four or five years, making eight figures in a bonus, and then, typical George, having done it for four years he decided that is more money than he was ever going to need in this or any other lifetime, and he liked being in a university better, so he's back working on fisheries in UCSD.

Robyn Williams: Here's the puzzle; you're wonderfully set up at Princeton, getting on famously, why would you ever want to leave?

Robert May: Why did we leave Princeton? I do believe, certainly at that time and probably still now, I rather chauvinistically believe it simply is the best place to be a faculty member or student of any university I can think of.

Robyn Williams: Princeton?

Robert May: Princeton. It has a very strong faculty. It doesn't have the distraction of any professional school, no medical school, law school, business school. And everyone teaches undergraduates. It is not a status symbol, even if you wanted it to be, not to teach undergraduates, you are not allowed to. And it was probably my most productive time of life. Nonetheless, Judith and I felt having been there for 16 years we should really think about doing something different while we still have the energy and while people would still want to hire us. And we thought quite hard about going back to Australia, there were some interesting opportunities, and we thought about coming to Britain where we had our friends. And we decided on the whole that Britain would be the most different.

Robyn Williams: Okay, you've got a very successful academic career, even running a big team of researchers. What made you think that that was a good preparation for doing something so difficult as being a Chief Scientist in the bureaucracy?

Robert May: Well, I'm inclined to say my friends fall into two categories at the time. There were those who were absolutely gobsmacked that the civil service would choose me to do this, and there were others for whom it confirmed their belief that the civil service didn't have a clue what it was doing. But I myself never felt it was all that astonishing. It is true that I had spent a life essentially avoiding any form of engagement with administration, so I didn't have the background for it. It came out of the blue to me when the headhunters got in touch with me.

Bill Stewart, my predecessor as chief scientist, a very nice man, had been instrumental in appointing me to the Joint Nature Conservancy Commission, that people suddenly realised when they split the Nature Conservancy into the four country agencies there were some things that were international. So I'd had an acquaintance with this sort of committee work, but even so, it was gobsmackingly out of the blue.

But the headhunters rang me, and it was Saxton Bampfylde who are one of the priciest and I think myself one of the best, and Saxton himself interviewed me, had to tell me what he thought it was about and why he thought I might do it. And he actually said to me in the interview, which I thought was rather strange, he said, 'I looked at all the people and I think you're the best.'

Robyn Williams: There's no question you've got the intellect, but did you, Robert May, have the diplomacy?

Robert May: I never did and I don't.

Robyn Williams: And how did Tony Blair and how did the other ministers react to that?

Robert May: First of all the committee that appointed me, it was Robin Butler, the permanent secretary in the Cabinet office, the chief Sir Humphrey, and then two external advisers, one of them was one of Margaret Thatcher's much more informal chief scientific advisers, Nicholson, and the other was somebody who had been chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence and then rector of Imperial College, Ron Oxburgh.

One of the questions that was put to me, Robin said, 'If you do this you will be called upon to defend government things that you disagree with. Do you think you could do that?' And I said, 'It would depend. I would not ever misrepresent the science because my job would be to speak truth to power, and if I disagreed with the science...on the other hand, if it was strictly a policy thing that I could set in context, my debating career is, after all, if I go way back to my youth, to be given a topic ten minutes beforehand, arbitrarily which side, and make a case for it. So I do have the skill if it's needed and if I think it's appropriate.'

Robyn Williams: A good lawyer.

Robert May: That's right. And Robin himself, an astonishing person, he was the top scholar and the top sportsperson at Harrow. It was clear that I liked playing games though, and he used to walk me to the lift, and Robin was...I think he was a flanker in rugby, he looked like a sportsperson, I don't, and he said, 'What are your sports?' And I had to explain they were wimpy things like tennis. Again, I was lucky, I was lucky that the job even existed, because it was part of the Labour Party manifesto under Kinnock to create instead of this ad hoc, ad personam chief scientific advisor with a staff of two or three, the proposal was to create an office adequately staffed of 100 or so people, bring the research councils under its aegis and make the person a permanent secretary level appointment, Sir Humphrey. And when Kinnock lost the election, William Waldegrave persuaded John Major to implement it, so I was the first appointed that way. And I had a lot of good luck in that John Major was the minister and that William Waldegrave at that point too was the treasury secretary, much responsible for budget things, and indeed we even conspired on some of the ways he wanted me and him to combine in helping persuade his colleagues in a way where we weren't seeming to combine.

Robyn Williams: Of course many of your friends when they heard that you'd been appointed imagined that you'd go to Whitehall and you'd tell them that they were all talking crap. So how did they react to that kind of bluntness?

Robert May: I did on rare occasions. I didn't so much say they're crap, I may say that more recently, that's more British, I was inclined at that stage still to be saying 'that's bullshit'. And I do remember a meeting in the Cabinet office where I said, 'That's absolute bullshit.' And as we went out William Waldegrave said to me, 'I suspect that's the first time anyone's ever said bullshit in the Cabinet office, but it shouldn't be the last.'

Robyn Williams: Yes, if I remember rightly, I remember seeing something in Hansard where Lord Waldegrave was actually speaking critically of climate change. And this was a bit puzzling for someone who had been a science minister. He seemed to be quite strong and not to go with the political tides. Did you find many people go with the political tides?

Robert May: I'm very surprised at that, because one of the things I did quite a few years ago and early on when I was in the Lords...Thursdays are reserved for typically two debates, and there are various ways you can put things forward, it's sort of a competitive process, and they are typically 2.5 hours each, and I put one forward for climate change. This is before the legislation. So many people signed up to it that it was given the whole five hours. And in that there were some of the naysayers like Nigel Lawson, and in that William Waldegrave spoke, chastised...and he made a comment critical of Nigel Lawson, in a sense saying you don't really understand what you're talking about, whereas many of the people you are criticising do.

Robyn Williams: So what do you make of someone like Lord Lawson, with whom you sit in the House of Lords, who has for many, many years, having been Chancellor of the Exchequer, a brilliant man, but nonetheless talks about climate change consistently over the years as if it is highly questionable. What you say to him?

Robert May: And particularly amazing more recently is Andrew Turnbull, who I always thought of as a very sensible person. He was the Cabinet Secretary, a civil servant, not a politician. So his career was taking advice from people who knew more about it than him, and he is right up there as a denier. Polly Toynbee wrote an extraordinarily cruel thing about him.

I do find it puzzling, but I do have one perhaps unsound potential explanation. These people are all economists, and more recently I've come to learn a little bit more about economics and I realise it is very largely (and I don't mean this in a sarcastic way, it's just a statement), it is largely faith-based. It doesn't have much in the way of testable hypotheses and things. It does have things in the way of simple models but they tend to be grounded on beliefs, and the discussions they have would have been a more familiar in Socrates' Athens than in today's scientific colloquium.

And so I have some sympathy that just as you may believe in perfect markets or general equilibrium or hidden hands, you could have a belief that the climate can't do that. That is a charitable explanation. There are less charitable ones, that it ultimately derives from other kinds of motives.

Robyn Williams: So what happens when you go into the bar, in your case drinking orange juice, and talk to people like Lawson and talk to people who have been critical of what you know is the effective science? What do you say to them?

Robert May: Nigel Lawson is a very nice and interesting person to talk to about other things, he really is, he is a very bright person, and there is no sort of animus there as I see it, despite the fact that he can say very unkind things in a very graceful and forceful way. What do I say? I simply try to explain to people that here are the facts upon which this is based, here is a community that surely you can't believe you've got 10,000 or more people signed up to some secret pledge to misrepresent the evidence, that essentially 99% of the people who work in the subject recognise uncertainties about timescales and other details but have unanimity in that putting a million years worth of fossil fuel carbon back into the atmosphere each year is thickening the greenhouse gas blanket and is going to make a difference, and you should listen to them.

Robyn Williams: In fact when you were here as the Royal Society's president you took a somewhat more belligerent role, did you not, where you thought you should actually meet the critics of science up-front?

Robert May: I felt that the Royal Society should be more involved in public affairs. It was something that the people who by and large were in favour of my being president expected, but not everybody approved. When I was Chief Scientist I persuaded Tony Blair and the Cabinet Secretary that the best way to have an enquiry into mad cow disease was to get some scientific peer who had not been involved to get a group of scientific experts to give an analysis of lessons to be learned.

Meanwhile the civil servants in the various relevant ministries, they agreed temporarily to that until they were borne in upon them by the permanent secretaries in the relevant ministries that there would maybe be law cases coming out of it, and that it would be much better to have a legalistic enquiry that would go on for years until everybody was safely retired, although I don't think they actually uttered that argument.

And we had the Phillips Inquiry which went for several years, cost something like $30 million, produced a shelf of books like that. It was a good inquiry but it re-endorsed the guidelines that said admit uncertainties when you have them, and gave a beautiful example of the difficulty in doing that in that its own report asserted unequivocally that the rogue prion had come as a spontaneous mutation, a controversial idea that's probably not right but was held by one of the three people on the committee.

Okay, coming back then, one of the first things I did when I became president at the Royal Society, that was now at the time when we had foot and mouth, and this time the Royal Society put together a committee at the government's request, chaired by Brian Follett, a small committee, produced a report in a little less than 12 months, if my memory is correct, cost 1% of the Phillips Inquiry and produced a very nice effectual report. Before it even convened it recognised that if it were to recognise vaccination as being used more next time, it would be a good idea to have the EU export rules changed. And to that end, before it began it met with the relevant people in the EU and had an EU observer sit with it, and as the report was published, the EU rules were changed.

That was an example of aggressive engagement to be useful to government that not everybody had a clear conscience about that I think was useful, and not everybody was happy with the sometimes quite in-your-face comments that the Royal Society or its president made, particularly held by the head of the press office Bob Ward whom I found immensely valuable. He had the knack of being able to capture my voice so he could write things that I got the credit for and didn't have to do the work and I think the kinds of things that we did were entirely appropriate.

Robyn Williams: I was talking to Lord May of Oxford, at the Royal Society in London. Bob May is now Professor in the Department of Zoology in Oxford. Next week, Professor John Lovering, Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University in Adelaide.