So it’s like inventing NMR spectroscopy, or infra-red spectroscopy, or quadrupole resonance spectroscopy. Mössbauer spectroscopy was a new one. Well, I thought that was terrific. I had been interested in solid state chemistry. I could immediately think of many problems in solid state chemistry, particularly mixed valence compounds, where you couldn’t work out the valence from chemical ways, Mössbauer would tell you there’s some iron in 2+ state, some iron in 3+ state, some of the iron atoms are magnetic, others are in centrosymmetrical environment. And enormous amount of new range of studying defects in solids, migrations in solids, and the structure of co-ordination compounds. So willy-nilly, although I was a main group element chemist, I found that I was getting interested in co-ordination compounds.

That is the story of how I got interested. It says the importance of Gordon Conferences and how, by collaboration in this way, one can get into a new field.