Another person I greatly respected was George Porter. He became Lord Porter, who was the director of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, and he was really a great man too. He worked with lasers, very, very bright flashes, very short, and worked on brief chemical reactions, particularly photosynthesis, I mean how leaves get energy from the sun, use the sun’s energy to be converted into energy and he had the idea, you know, that you could solve the problems of energy on earth by having artificial photosynthesis so there was a sort of practical outcome to this and photosynthesis in plants is pretty inefficient, I believe it’s less than 10%, so his work was really aimed at increasing the efficiency of those processes in industry, if you like, for getting energy from the sun, but he was also a theoretician. I mean he understood chemistry, this kind of chemistry, in a way I just haven’t any grasp of at all but again he was a leader. He ran the Royal Institution, which is very much aimed also at the public, the lectures go on still, which was started by Faraday, a lovely little lecture theatre, and it’s a wonderful organisation and George was its head for, I suppose, at least 20 years and I did lectures there, a lot of lectures. I gave Christmas lectures and about seven discourses where you were locked into a room just before the lecture and having to gaze at a crystal ball while you get your ideas together. There were all sort of customs like that in the Royal Institution. That was a great thing. And I think it’s worth mentioning here, how far should life, particularly in science, be completely informal, not wearing a tie, not bothering about any sort of conventions, how far should it be constrained, you know, by conventions? If you were in a Cambridge or an Oxford college, you have to wear a gown and you have to be fairly formal, at the same time you have informal discussions mixed up with the formal ones, it’s a sort of mixture, and I think this is an interesting thing, that the customs and your sort of having to wear the right sort of tie at dinner and this sort of stuff, in a way, imposes discipline and links you to the past with its people that one can look back on and admire. At the same time it can be a bit irritating, oh, golly, have I really got to put a black tie on tonight? And I find that sort of mixture, particularly in English life, rather interesting. One the whole it works well and somebody like George Porter who ran the Royal Institution really had it right. I mean he could put on his dinner jacket or his white tie, which we used to have, and at the same time he could be informal and just have, you know, joke with the boys or go sailing in his boat with them, this sort of thing. And it’s that mixture, I think, which is really important.
