[Q] How do you think we should bring back, bring together the reductionist side of things and the more imaginative side of things? Is that, is that...
Yeah. I suppose I'm a bit depressive about this. I don't actually think you can do it all that well. It's mainly... you know thyself, as it says in Delphi. I mean you, you have to know that both elements are important and I do think of it as a sort of... parallel but separate process. You... the scientific side, the reductionist side, is very clear to me. I mean, I don't know if it's clear individually, but it's clear what you're supposed to be doing and want to do, and it does seem to me, in its nature, pretty Popperian. You're setting up hypotheses, which you are successively trying to demolish. You know, I mentioned these early books. I remember in Arthur Eddington, Nature of the Physical World, I read when I was about 14 or 15 or something, and he's talking about science and he says it's like a chap doing a jigsaw puzzle. You come in one day and say, 'Ooh, that's a nice bit of blue sky there,' and the chap says, 'Yes, it's lovely, isn't it? Really lovely blue sky', and you come in a week later and you say, 'Oh, what's happened to that sky?' he says, 'Oh it was sea, there was a boat on it'. And I think that's exactly what we do in medicine all the time and I... I, actually I feel as a conscious thing that as you're sort of walking along the corridor trying to think what's going on, you're trying to consciously balance those probabilities and in recent years, with far more investigations... there's... I was talking about the noise in the system, and I know I very often, quite often with a difficult problem, I'm not pretending all medical problems are difficult, but I'm talking about the difficult ones – I actually mentally quite often, having seen the patient, had to mentally stand back and say: now look, there's all these things about his blood this, and his chest that and his this the other, and the other and this germ blood culture and I sort of think to myself: how do I actually see this problem? Now, you could say that is integrationist, but I think it's really just trying to put the reductionist thing in a kind of context. But, no, I actually don't see them very much together, the two halves. No. I see them going along properly at the same time.