Anthony Leggett

Williams:

Okay. So, let’s start at the beginning.

Leggett:

Okay.

Williams:

Talk about where you were born, and when.

Leggett:

Yes.

Williams:

What your family was doing.

Leggett:

Okay. I was born technically just inside the borders of London. In fact, in Camberwell. We were living just outside the borders, but I was born in the hospital inside, and that was on the 26th of March, 1938. My parents were both schoolteachers. My father was English. He, as far as we know — his ancestors came from the area of Hampshire to the southwest of London. They had, in fact, been village cobblers, shoemakers, for many generations, but my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, had broken with that tradition. And he was actually a greengrocer, or market gardener. My mother was ethnically purely Irish, and her parents had, in fact, immigrated to Britain from Ireland. So, let’s see. So, I grew up — until about — there were some fairly complicated movements when I was very young, which I don’t really remember. During the war, we were evacuated from the London area to far west of the London conurbation, near Windsor, in fact.

Williams:

And “we” is you and your siblings, or —

Leggett:

Well, I mean, yes.

Williams:

Eventually. [laughs]

Leggett:

That’s right. I was the oldest of my family, yes. So, during the war, we were evacuated to Englefield Green. It’s on the far west of the London conurbation. It’s really almost in the countryside, in fact, right on the edge of the countryside. And so, I spent my first few years mostly there, and then when I was — let me think. I’m trying to remember. It would have been about — well, okay. Not ’45 — after the end of the war. So, I would have been 7. Then we moved back into the house we’d originally had, which is just outside the southern border of London proper. It’s still part of London conurbation.

And so, I originally went to school at Englefield Green, and then to a school in Upper Norwood, which was the area where we were living. At the age of 10 or 11, I guess, I took the so-called 11-plus exam, as it was in the U.K., and as the outcome of that, I went to Wimbledon College. My family are Catholic, so Wimbledon College is a Catholic school, as well as the two private schools I’ve been to. And actually, I spent only 19 months I think probably at Wimbledon, because my father then got a new job, and the new job was teaching at a school called Beaumont, which was again a Catholic school, but it was a public school. It was public in the British sense, that is, fee-paying. Now, we were [laughs] not in that class, so we could not have afforded to go there, but my father made it a condition of his employment there that I and my two brothers could both attend Beaumont, so eventually, we did. And so, I spent the years from 11 to 17, I suppose — yes — at Beaumont. For the first four or five years, I was a day boy, which meant that I commuted in daily. That was not the case for most of the boys there.

Williams:

It was boarding for most of them.

Leggett:

It was a boarding school, and most of the students were boarding. And my last two years, I did actually board, in fact. I was somewhat ahead of my peers in terms of academic performance, and so it was roughly — I guess at the age of 13 that I or my parents had to decide what I was going to specialize in, which stream I was going on in school.

Williams:

Wow. That seems very young. [laughs]

Leggett:

[laughs] Indeed. Indeed it does. In fact, looking back, I have to consider myself extremely lucky, because for most people, having to make that choice basically determined, at least to a large extent, their careers for life. So, I did my studies. Now, my father was actually a teacher of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

Williams:

Really?

Leggett:

My mother didn’t — she had had a year or two in teaching, but she was a teacher in mathematics also. But neither of them put any pressure on me to go into that area. And in fact, in those days, there was a very definite pecking order. [laughs] The least prestigious area of all was science.

Williams:

Really?

Leggett:

You have to remember the dates we’re talking about.

Williams:

Yeah, that’s true.

Leggett:

We’re talking about Britain in the early 1950s. Okay?

Williams:

That’s interesting. That’s just a bit shocking to someone now, where sort of the narrative is so different.

Leggett:

Oh, yes.

Williams:

The sciences reign supreme.

Leggett:

Yes. So, as I say, science was at the bottom of the pecking order. Above that a little came mathematics, then there were history and modern languages, and so forth, and finally right at the top came the classics stream — “classics” meaning, in those days — well, Latin and Greek languages and literature. That’s, of course — it’s not logical but a matter of history. [laughs] Anyway, I seemed to be academically reasonably able, and therefore in some sense, it seemed a natural thing for me to go into the classics stream, and my father has no objections to that whatever. In fact, I think he rather encouraged me to go into that.

So, I spent my years — 11 through 17 — at Beaumont. My main area of specialization was the classics, but of course, I did have courses also in history, modern languages, and also a certain amount of elementary mathematics. No science, at least not officially. No science of any kind. No physics, no biology, nothing. Eventually, I got to the point — this would have been in the fall of 1954, I guess, when I was 16 — I got to the point where I had to apply for university. In those days, it was pretty easy by comparison with what it is now [laughs] in the U.S. If I recall correctly, you were allowed to apply for a maximum of six different places, but the different Oxford and Cambridge colleges counted as different places. So I, in fact, ended up applying for three Oxford colleges and three other universities. I had to take an exam, I remember, in December of ’54 to qualify for Oxford. I not only qualified to get in, but I also qualified to get a scholarship, which was quite important.

Williams:

And that was still in classics.

Leggett:

That was still in classics.

Williams:

You were still heading that way.

Leggett:

Yes, that’s right. So, the degree in Oxford, which I applied for, was the so-called — well, okay. Its technical name is Literae Humaniores. Everyone calls it “Greats” [laughs] for short. It really has no logical coherence. It exists for historical reasons, as a lot of other things do in Britain.

Williams:

Yeah. Oxford in particular, perhaps. [laughs]

Leggett:

[laughs] Oxford in particular. Yeah. And what you do is you study classical — that is, Greek and Latin — languages and literature for the first five trimesters. The course is four years, so 12 trimesters. The first five trimesters, you study Latin and Greek languages and literature, quite intensively. We did get to the point where I was supposed to be able to write poetry in classical Greek, [laughs] and so on and so forth, and I made a shot at it. Then second —

Williams:

Did it have to be good poetry, or [laughs] just…poetry.

Leggett:

[laughs] I’m sure it wasn’t. Then, for the last seven trimesters, you did an equal mix of ancient history — again, “ancient” meaning “Greek and Roman” — and philosophy, and that was the degree. And what I think would be perhaps particularly shocking to someone in 2020 in the U.S. was the way in which this was assessed. You had this one examination on the first half of the course, after five semesters. Well, okay. I mean, if you did badly at that, it wasn’t really too fatal. But then, you were examined on the second half of the course, all the seven trimesters, in a series of three-hour, closed-book exams. It was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, with only the morning, afternoon, morning, afternoon, only the weekend to interrupt it. I mean, not surprisingly, the population of the local psychiatric hospitals went up rather considerably in that time.

Williams:

Yeah. I mean, I can’t imagine how it couldn’t have. [laughs]

Leggett:

[laughs] Luckily, at least at that point, this was water off a duck’s back for me. I seemed to thrive on that system, and I got a fairly good grade on that exam — as good as I could reasonably hope for. However, of course by that time, I’d had to start thinking about what I was actually going to do in life.

Williams:

Right. You weren’t going to compose Greek poetry for your career, probably.

Leggett:

No, that was not the [laughs] — not a way of doing business. So, you know, what with the options — well, the first thing I did obviously — and I started to really become conscious of this, I suppose, towards the middle of my third year of that four-year degree. And so, the first thing I did was to look around to see what my fellow students in this degree had been doing and gone on to do, and so forth, and most of them had either gone on into the British service. In those days, at least, the greats course was a big sort of funnel into the British civil service. Or, of course they had, mostly gone on into teaching, either at a high school or often university level in one of the subjects they studied at university. Classical languages and literature, ancient history, or philosophy. I thought briefly about going into the civil service, but that really didn’t seem what I was cut out for. I mean, I just didn’t have the right combination of talents, I think, at all. So, I mean, I was sufficiently [laughs] unimaginative that that really just left academia. Frankly, I think had I had a little more experience outside academia at that point, I might well have ended up doing something totally different. Right? Being a rock climbing instructor [laughs] or something of the kind.

Williams:

Right. But you just didn’t have the mental landscape to really think…

Leggett:

That’s right. I was very immature…

Williams:

…beyond. Yeah.

Leggett:

…in retrospect.

Williams:

How old were you when you finished at Oxford, or when you were —

Leggett:

When I finished my first degree, I would have been 21.

Williams:

Oh, yeah, very young.

Leggett:

Well, given that I had no experience outside of academia, it wasn’t very hard to change. So, it had to be one of those three. And you know, I had enjoyed all of those subjects, but the one I’d enjoyed most — and I think perhaps done best at — was philosophy. So, the first thought that had occurred to me was: well, I will go on. I will go try to get a postgraduate degree in philosophy, and I will eventually get my doctorate and apply for some kind of position at a university. And in the U.K., at least, philosophy is not taught as a subject in high school, so it had to be university. And that would be my career, basically. Hmm, so I started thinking about this, and [laughs] when I thought about it, somehow, I didn’t really want to do that.

Williams:

Well, that’s [laughs] —

Leggett:

[laughs] Now, like I said, if I had been a bit more mature, it might have occurred to me that maybe I didn’t want to go into academia at all. But that really didn’t occur to me, and so it had to be something wrong with philosophy, as such. And so, I started trying to turn it over in my mind, and think to myself, “Okay. Why don’t I really want to become a professional philosopher?” And I came up with the conclusion eventually that is, well, in philosophy — at least, as it was practiced in Oxford in those days, and I suspect it probably still is [laughs] to a large extent — what counted as good or bad work seemed to depend so essentially on the precise turns of phrase you used or the — and even more, frankly, on your colleagues’ opinions. And there didn’t seem to be any kind of objective touchstone there. And I gradually began to feel that I wanted to work in a subject where there was some kind of objective touchstone of whether what I was doing was good or bad work — whether it was sensible or not. Now, I had actually — one of the many bits of serendipity in my career, one of them was that after I’d got my Oxford scholarship in December of 1954, I had two semesters to kill. In those days, there was nothing like Peace Corps or the British equivalent. I did try — and sort of rather sporadically — to look for some kind of job outside the school, but it didn’t work. So, I was basically stuck in school.

It just happened that there was this old priest who was retired, and it was only — he was living at Beaumont, [laughs] because he had to live somewhere. But he, like many of the clerical teachers, had not been a schoolteacher all of his career. This is quite regular among the clerical staff at Beaumont. Some of them had been parish priests. Some of them had been missionaries. And in this case, this particular priest, Father O’Hara, had actually been a university teacher for part of his career at a small Irish university. He’d written a well-regarded text on a particular branch of mathematics. And he came across me in the corridor one day and said, “You seem to have quite a bit of time on your hands.” [laughs] (He guessed, right.) “Well, it so happens I have quite a bit of time on my hands. Why don’t you come along to my room a couple of hours a week, and I will show you some interesting things in modern mathematics?”

Now, you have to remember, the mathematics I’d had was really pretty rudimentary. I’m not sure how it would compare with the standard U.S. high school system, but I suspect it was considerably less than what you would normally cover. So, I thought, well, I have no particularly good reason to do this, but I have no particular reason not to.” He seemed quite enthusiastic, so I went along to his office or his room for a couple of hours a week, and he gave me a sort of Cook’s tour of modern mathematics. I’ve forgotten most of it. [laughs] I forgot it fairly quickly, but gradually — I was not used to this kind of thing, and gradually I realized not only that I could do the problems, which he encouraged me to do, but I actually rather enjoyed doing them. Well, I mean, after that — so, I’ve forgotten all about it, basically, for four years — but when I had to think about a career, the first thing that occurred to me was to become a mathematician. And then I remember very clearly saying to myself, “No, I don’t want to become a professional mathematician. Why not? Well, because by the very nature of the subject, in mathematics, if you’re wrong, it means you’re stupid. I would like to be able to be wrong without being stupid.” [laughs]

Williams:

[laughs] Okay, I like that.

Leggett:

Now, I should say there’s a — I’ve had some pushback from professional mathematicians on this one. [laughs]

Williams:

But that was your thought, in the moment, that shot you away.

Leggett:

Yes. In other words, I — you know, I want to be able to work in a field where I can make some non-trivial conjectures about the way the world works, and then either myself find out or get my experimental colleagues to find out whether it’s right or not. And that’s how I eventually came to think about doing physics.

Now, as I said, although my father was a physics teacher, I’d essentially had no — I can’t put my hand on my heart and say, “I had no physics whatever,” because after I got my Oxford scholarship — again, that’s two semesters — for want of anything better to do, I did go along to one of his classes for a semester, but it was — I don’t know, it was intermediate mechanics or something. The other students in the class had been doing this stuff for three or four years. I hadn’t. I mean, it almost literally went in one ear and out the other. So, I don’t think that had any effect, actually, so essentially, I was starting from scratch, completely.

Well, the first step, of course, was to persuade some university to accept me into a second degree in physics, a totally outrageous idea. I had no background, and displayed no ability, etcetera. I assumed from the start that it was hopeless to apply for anywhere except Oxford, and in fact, even to apply to my own college in Oxford. At least there, there were some people who knew my general background and abilities and so forth. So, the person I got — obviously, I had a contact in my tutors, and I’m a “Greats” student, and they gave me some help in finding people, luckily. The person who really had to be the sort of initial gatekeeper for my career was a young Australian physicist named David Brink. He’s actually still alive, as far as I know. He’d only recently come to Balliol. Balliol is the college at which I’d done my undergraduate degree. In those days, most Oxford — we’re talking about the late ’50s, ’58, ’59 — those days, most Oxford colleges didn’t actually have a tutor in theoretical physics that was distinct from general physics. However, Balliol was a bit ahead of its time, and it was one of the few colleges that had decided to employ a teacher specifically in theoretical physics, and David Brink was the first person who they employed.

So, it basically fell on him to take the very first judgement on whether this was a totally crazy idea. And so, what he did was he gave me a copy of a book which I still cherish, by Courant and Robbins, called What is Mathematics? and asked me to read two or three of the chapters, and when I came back, he gave me a sort of informal exam on them. I basically read it over the long vacation at the end of my third year. He gave me this sort of mini exam, and on the basis of this, concluded that it may be not crazy. And so, Balliol would have admitted me, in fact. Well, then the problem was, of course, I didn’t have any money. [laughs] And I had had this four-year scholarship from — a government scholarship to do the “greats” degree. They were not going to be particularly ready to give me another…

Williams:

Pay for another one, yeah.

Leggett:

…undergrad degree. At this point, another of the Oxford colleges came to the rescue. There was another college, Merton, which had a number of scholarships, and these scholarships are normally given — they have a number of peculiar features. First of all — well, it’s not very peculiar — but these scholarships are given for post-graduate work. They generously decided to waive the condition and give it to me for a second undergraduate degree.

Michael Baker, who was the tutor — he was the just a general tutor, not a theoretical physics tutor — in Merton, and basically, he was my advocate, I think, for this. He died a few years ago. He’s another person I owe a lot to. The other interesting [laughs] feature of this particular scholarship was that it had been endowed by an alumnus but said alumnus had graduated probably sometime around [laughs] 1830 or 1840, I think. In those days, needless to say, political correctness was not quite what it is today, so it was very clearly specified in the terms of the original scholarship that this was to be given to students who were Anglo Saxon and Protestant. [laughs] I think they didn’t even specify that they were male, that was completely taken for granted. [laughs] Anyway, I was neither. I was Catholic, and partly Irish.

Williams:

Irish, yes. [laughs]

Leggett:

However, of course, you’d imagine by the late 1950s, the college got pretty embarrassed about this, and so they didn’t want to throw the money away, so what they did — I think it was a rather sensible decision — they said, “Well, look. If we get an applicant who does satisfy these conditions, well, fine, we can use the money that this alumnus bequeathed to us for this. If we get a candidate who’d otherwise have qualified, but fails on grounds of religion or ethnicity, then we’ll pay for it out of our own funds. And that’s what they did. So, I got a Domus scholarship. But that was very generous of them, anyway.

But the worst hurdle actually was neither the academic admission nor the financial support. It was the military draft. Now, you see, Britain had had the military draft during World War II, and for the succeeding years. It was known that the last intake was going to be 1959, which is exactly the year when I graduated from my first degree. So, I come up to my draft board and say, “Well, you guys, you know, I’ve got four years deferment to do my first degree. I’d like you to give me another two years of deferment so that I can go on and do a second degree.” And of course, they [laughs] look at me and say, “Well good Lord… we know what you are up to”—

Williams:

…cross-eyed. “What are you getting this degree in?”

Leggett:

That’s right. “Here, all you want to do is get out of the draft altogether.” Which, of course, [laughs]…I did. At that point, another bit of serendipity: October 1957. A — rather epoch-making event happened in October ’57, which was that the former Soviet Union put up the first Sputnik. It was like you got this thing going, “pop, pop, pop, pop, pop” across the sky. If anyone in the world looks at it, knows that this is not put up by Britain, it was not put up by the U.S., it was put up by the Soviet Union — so this huge outcry goes up from all the politicians and pundits and journalists and so forth: “How come the Soviet Union has got ahead of us in this incredibly important technological enterprise?” Well, they got the answer very soon: because we’ve encouraged all our best brains to go into useless things like classics, not into useful things like physics. [laughs] Absolutely — you know, that wave was exactly made for me to rider, basically. So, I was able to apply for this military deferment. My teachers obviously wrote me some good letters on that, and I got my —

Williams:

Yeah, so you started afresh, essentially, with the physics degree.

Leggett:

Yeah, absolutely.

Williams:

And how did you find it?

Leggett:

Somewhat confusing. [laughs]

Williams:

I’m sure.

Leggett:

I was simultaneously doing stuff on pulleys and blocks sliding down, inclined planes and so forth, basically the stuff that people in high school have done their third or fourth year, and at the same time, starting to work on quantum mechanics, which was at least part not a big part — but it was part of the undergraduate degree in physics in those days. So, I was trying to remember this material from various different levels. Moreover, I had to do it in two years. This was because of the special Oxford requirement that if you were going to get a classified degree, it had to be within six years of your first matriculation. So, I had four years, and then two years. I did want to get a classified degree, so I had to try to do it in two years. With help from other people, I did.

Then, the final exam — again, it wasn’t quite as bad as in “greats.” I think we had 10 rather than 14 closed book exams. But it was still pretty stringent. And I thought at one point, I was just going to totally fail. That was really a bad scene for me. You know, because I felt that so many people had put their trust in me, and I just couldn’t let them all down.

Williams:

Right. Well, it was such an intense time. You only had two years to essentially get expertise in an entire field that you hadn’t really been exposed to. I mean, it was quite amazing.

Leggett:

That’s right. So, there was this very, very black moment that when I [laughs] — I probably could have shot myself or done something. Luckily, I didn’t have the means. But anyway, luckily I managed to sort of pull it out and recover, and I did not, as it were, score the very highest distinction, which would have been a straight first, without an oral. I had viva’ed first, which meant that they had to — I had an oral exam to — as I thought, at the time, the oral exam was to distinguish between a second and a third, and so that was [laughs] between the first and the second, and I got the first. So that, of course, was a big relief.

Williams:

That worked out. Wow. That’s incredible. So, you took the exam. You passed. Then was graduate school the obvious next step, or did you again try to think about other things?

Leggett:

I don’t think I really did, at that stage, at least. I did take for granted that I was going into graduate work in physics. Again, my choices were rather limited. I didn’t think it was likely that any university other than Oxford would really be prepared to look at me seriously — Oxford only because I knew individuals. So, I started looking around, first of all, for a topic. And in those days, basically at Oxford, there were three main areas which people were working in. One was what in those days was called particle physics. These days, it would be high-energy physics. Actually, high-energy or nuclear one would have to say these days. The terms have got some —

Williams:

Fudged together, yeah.

Leggett:

The second was what would now be called low-energy nuclear physics, which is actually the subject which my original Balliol tutor, David Brink, was involved in. And the third was condensed matter. Well, in those days, we called it solid-state physics. So, I looked first of all at low-energy nuclear physics, but it seemed to me that most of that had been sort of mined out, and that the problems which were being investigated were not really that exciting. I think I’d still — in some senses, I think that [laughs] was accurate, in retrospect.

So then, there was high-energy particle physics, high-energy, and I asked around, and I was told by people who were working in that area: well, this really is a bit of a doldrums, in fact. There’s nothing really exciting going on. As a matter of fact, had I waited another six months, a lot which is very exciting would have been going on. I might have ended up there, but I didn’t.

Williams:

At that moment, there wasn’t.

Leggett:

There wasn’t. So, that left condensed-matter physics, and condensed-matter physics, I now had to try to find an advisor. Neither of the people who had been most helpful to me in my undergraduate career — that is, David Brink at Balliol and Michael Baker at Merton — neither of them were theoretical condensed-matter physicists. I decided I was not cut out for experiments. Again, I’m not sure that was, in retrospect, entirely right. But that was the decision I made at the time. So, I looked around for theoretical condensed-matter physicists to advise me, and the one person who was really very laid-back in his approach to students was Dirk ter Haar.

Williams:

Yes.

Leggett:

Now, Dirk was a Dutchman by origin. He’d done his own doctorate with a famous Dutch physicist during the war. He then had come across to Britain, worked at St. Andrews for a few years, and eventually ended up in Magdalen College in Oxford. His policy was basically to take pretty much anyone who wanted to apply to him, but then to throw them in the deep end. They really had to fend for themselves. So, after I’d been Dirk’s student for a few months, I pretty soon got the message that it was going to be up to me, not just to solve my thesis problem, but to find my thesis problem in the first place, and if I couldn’t do that, well, I wasn’t going to get my degree.

Williams:

Yeah. So, he wasn’t sort of — no weekly meetings, no “give me updates” —

Leggett:

Well —

Williams:

Or, was it more you were giving to him, and he —

Leggett:

Yeah, we had these weekly meetings, but [laughs] if I remember rightly, I mean, these mostly turned into anecdotes about some Russian colleagues he’d known, and things like that. He didn’t seriously try to take an interest in what I was doing.

Williams:

Right.

Leggett:

So, again — incidentally, there’s something like around 50 percent of his students never got their degrees, but I think that for those who didn’t, most of them ended up doing something that was — so much happier than they would have been doing academic physics. Some of them were extremely successful in other walks of life. So anyway, I did eventually get my degree.

Williams:

Made it through.

Leggett:

At that point, of course — again, no particular doubts about going on at that point into an academic career, so I got a postdoc. So, I formulated my criteria for getting a go-ahead for a place to go for a postdoc — well, first of all it had to be really first-class in my own specialist area. Secondly, I’d been at Oxford by that time for nine years, and I thought, you know, I’m really getting in a groove. I would like to go somewhere as different as possible from Oxford for my postdoc. Well, the unique solution is the University of Illinois- at Urbana Champaign. [laughs]

So, I applied to the late David Pines, who was at that time — indeed, for most of his career — one of the leading lights in the world in my particular area of condensed theoretical — condensed matter physics. Again, I think he showed extreme faith in me, frankly. My paper credentials were laughable, really. I just had a single, one-page paper, which wasn’t even published. [laughs] I think it was submitted to the journal. That was it.

Williams:

But what about your thesis? Was it — I mean —

Leggett:

Oh, yeah, I had my thesis.

Williams:

But nothing published other than that one —

Leggett:

No. At the time when the decision had to be made, that was still in the process of being written. In fact, I think I hadn’t even really completed the second half of it. But again, well, I think Dirk wrote a strong letter for me. David — oh, incidentally, Dirk’s letter said basically: this guy is very smart, but he doesn’t really know any physics. [laughs] That’s entirely true. David said: well, we can teach him the physics, which he did.

So, I spent a very productive one-year postdoc here working — now, I was technically assigned to David Pines, but I have to say, he never put any pressure on me to follow his own lines of research. He let me have a free hand, basically. And I did manage, during that period, to do a little piece of work which — again, in retrospect — I mean, if I were really to go back to it now and ask, “Okay, how did that piece of work stand up relative to what was being done in the field at the time, etcetera, etcetera”, I would have to admit it probably was not a first, really, but it seemed like a first at the time. [laughs] That’s what was important.

Williams:

You had the confidence to keep pushing.

Leggett:

Yeah. It’s a bit like — are you, by any chance, a rock climber?

Williams:

No.

Leggett:

No. Okay. I used to be. And I always make a parable here that if you think you are doing a particular rock — climb for the first time — you’re the first person ever to have done it — it doesn’t really matter if you find out later that you weren’t. [laughs]

Williams:

Yeah. That while you’re doing it, you have that drive.

Leggett:

Yeah.

Williams:

That excitement.

Leggett:

Yeah, so basically — so I did this little piece of work. Incidentally, I got — during my Ph.D., mainly through the, I think, the good offices of Dirk, who was in fact a fellow at Magdalen — I got a junior fellowship at Magdalen. I think, in retrospect, probably undeservedly, [laughs] but it was not — anyway — and one of the things that it provided was a certain amount of freedom, and for the — so for my first — I mean, I still — I got the fellowship, I think, in the second year of my graduate work, and so it lasted for three years, I think. And so it was sort of relatively normal to go off on these postdoctoral appointments, where the college is not paying for you, but they allowed you to just take a leave of absence, and that’s what I’d done for my stay here, for the year ’64-5.

During my second year, through a complicated series of events, I decided that I wanted to go and study in Japan for a year. Now, that was far more problematic, because in those days at least, Japan was not a rich country. [laughs] And certainly, there were no obvious Japanese sources which were going to pay for me. So, if I went, it was going to be the college which had to pay for me, and at this point I exhibited, I think, [laughs] a fair amount of chutzpah and basically said, “Will you pay for me to go to Japan for a year?” And to my great surprise, they said, “Yes.”

Williams:

It’s like, “Yes!” [laughs]

Leggett:

Yeah, I think very generous of them. So, I went to — I applied to the group of Professor Takeo Matsubara in Kyoto, and he [laughs] — I guess he was always puzzled as to why I wanted to come. In fact, there was several times in later life, as it were, when we met, he asked me this question. “Why did you come?” [laughs]

But anyway, I’ll start over. So, I went to Kyoto for a year. I didn’t really get an awful lot of physics done in that year. I got a lot of other things done, [laughs] but there was one piece of work which I did during my stay in Kyoto which, at the time — well, by the time I completed it, seemed rather pointless. Basically, I was working on a thematical demagnification of some experiments which seemed to show that a particular metal, niobium, was a particular kind of superconductor — a rather unusual kind of superconductor — on which, there wasn’t a lot of theory. So, I basically did some theory on it. No sooner had I done this than new experiments were done which proved [laughs] it wasn’t that kind of superconductor. So basically, I went as far as writing it up for a couple of small articles, but basically, I thought: well, it was a bit of a waste of time. But eventually, that actually came back and helped me a lot, in fact.

The other thing I did there [laughs] partly to supplement my income and partly because I thought it would be an interesting thing to do, I got a part-time job—in Japan they use the German word “arbeit” — at the office of the main Japanese theoretical physics journal, which in those days was edited from Kyoto, Progress of Theoretical Physics. And so, I would go along to the office of Progress of Theoretical Physics, for a couple of hours each week, and the job they gave me was to look through the manuscripts which had been submitted, which were in English. Many of these were by Japanese, or in some cases, other Asian writers, and my job was basically to vet the English, and so forth. It was interesting, but at the end of the year, it occurred to me that I seemed to be in some sense correcting [laughs] the same mistakes over and over again, and moreover, these did seem to be rather specifically associated with people whose native language was Japanese. And so, I thought I’d write a little note or guide on this.

Williams:

Sort of common mistakes in English manuscripts.

Leggett:

Yeah, that’s right. And actually, as an exercise, that turned out very interesting, because it got me thinking about the general underlying patterns which are much deeper than just getting prepositions wrong, and things like that. They have to do with the sort of deep structure of the language, and in some sense, a bit of the culture as well. For example, at least traditionally, if you’re writing in Japanese, you would avoid trying to make your statements too forceful or emphatic. Unfortunately, if you try to do that in English, people would usually just interpret you as not being sure.

Williams:

Right. Yeah, they interpret that as uncertainty, or something.

Leggett:

Yeah. Again, the importance of context is much greater in general than it is in English, and so forth. So, I decided to write this little guide, and eventually it was — I wrote it originally in English, but it was translated into Japanese. It got published in various places. And I actually think, quite seriously, that’s probably been my most influential publication.

Williams:

Yeah. That’s fantastic.

Leggett:

And incidentally, very recently — just in November of 2019 — I was asked to go back to Japan and sort of, in some sense, relive some of my experiences. The Open University of Japan is making a program on my connections with Japan, and so, we went back to my old lodging and so forth. My old office, and so on… .

Williams:

Yeah, that must have been quite a trip. [laughs]

Leggett:

Yes, a very —

Williams:

Lots of memories.

Leggett:

Yeah.

Williams:

So, I have one kind of aside question.

Leggett:

Oh, yeah. I’m sorry.

Williams:

Oh, no. This is wonderful. I was hesitant because it breaks the kind of narrative, but I’m very curious. I mean, for me to hear you talk about writing that kind of piece, and even your awareness of the culture, the language, all this — I mean, I relate that back to your training in the classics and to your wider awareness of that.

Leggett:

Yes.

Williams:

I mean, do you feel like for you — with you, these kind of dual streams that you had — your early training and then the transition to science — do you think that that’s changed the way you do science, or changed the kind of questions you ask as a scientist?

Leggett:

Yes. Certainly, I think the philosophy part of the “greats” course did. And I think at a really superficial level, it simply made me much more skeptical than many of my colleagues. I mean, I always say that philosophers are always asking two questions. One is, “What do you mean?” And the second is, “How do you know?” [laughs] And many of my fellow physicists don’t really ask these questions as often as I think they maybe should. So, that has a lot of sort of fairly superficial — I think it’s probably a bit deeper than that, but — I don’t know quite how to put it, but somehow, if you have a — I mean, I haven’t ever been subject to a course of psychoanalysis, but I would imagine if one has, you never again see the world in quite the same light, and I think the same is true probably of a sort of very rigorous degree in analytical philosophy.

You just — I don’t know, like using a new muscle you didn’t know you had, in a way, I think. So yeah, I think it had a big effect.

Williams:

That’s very interesting. Okay. I just couldn’t let the moment pass, because I’ve been curious about that all the way along. But kind of timing-wise, after Japan, does that bring you to Sussex? Was that your next stop?

Leggett:

Not quite, no.

Williams:

Quite a winding path.

Leggett:

I had a sort of roving year, in which I spent some time in Oxford. I went to Harvard for a few weeks. I came back here for a few weeks. I went to a summer program in Aspen in Colorado. But it was time for me to try to get a sort of permanent, or hopefully permanent, job.

And so, there was this — I decided, again for no particularly deep reasons, that my future would lie in Britain rather than — it didn’t seriously occur to me to try to stay here in the U.S. at that point in my career. In Britain, basically there were three generations of universities. There were the Oxbridge, basically. That was basically it: Oxford and Cambridge, in effect. There was the red brick universities, which were set up during the 19th century. That’s places like Manchester Imperial, so on and so forth. And then there were the so-called plate-glass universities, which were set up in the ’50s and ’60s. And one of the plate-glass universities was Sussex, and it just happened that first of all, there were a couple of people whom I knew from Oxford and physics: a theorist, Roger Blin-Stoyle, and an experimentalist, Douglas Brewer, and it turned out they both took up positions at Sussex, and that was an encouragement to go there. The other encouragement was that Sussex claimed, at least, to be a sort of very experimental kind of university. They were going to do things in a new way. Whether they actually ended up doing it was entirely a matter of debate, but it seemed at the time to be true.

So, I did apply to Sussex. My original appointment at Sussex was as an assistant lecturer, I guess, but in those days, even—we’re talking here about 1967, in fact, in those days, even basically an assistant lecturer carried tenure, in effect. And so, I did end up at Sussex. I stayed there for 15 years, until the end of 1982, when I came across first temporarily to Cornell, then here to Illinois.

Williams:

And what was — I mean, life as a lecturer there, in terms of teaching and research — what kind of colleagues were you working with?

Leggett:

Yeah. Well, first of all, teaching. Certainly, by comparison with a modern North American research university, and even by comparison with many of the existing British universities, the teaching load at Sussex, in terms of content hours, was heavy. If I just forget about graduate students and just think about undergraduate teaching I was doing, it was anything from 12 to 15 hours per week. That’s different things. In my case, it would be mostly small-group tutorials, some lectures, and in the case of my experimental colleagues, of course they’d be supervising labs and so forth. But it was actual contact hours. You know, you actually were there with the students. So, that was heavy.

Williams:

Yeah. And were you teaching all in your field, or across physics?

Leggett:

No. No, in fact, I deliberately made it my practice to try to teach pretty much across the whole of the undergraduate spectrum. I ended up — I didn’t quite make it, and I ended up never teaching practical electronics, which is something that’s rather natural, because it’s not something I’ve been particularly good at. The other odd thing is that I — never at Sussex, or for that matter actually, here at Illinois — ever taught any sort of standard introductory course on quantum mechanics. I have taught it, but I’ve taught it in Africa. [laughs] There’s no particular reason. It just happened that I didn’t get around to it.

Williams:

Just the weirdness of —

Leggett:

But just about everything else in the Sussex undergraduate curriculum, I did teach. And I deliberately did that, because I felt that — and I do still feel — that if you’ve had to learn a subject from scratch in order to teach it, you’re going to be far more conscious of the difficulties the students have.

Williams:

Right. You don’t have the sort of genesis amnesia about how you learned something or what the challenges are.

Leggett:

No. That’s right. I mean, if you’ve been doing research in the subject for 30 years, [laughs] you probably shouldn’t teach it. [laughs]

Williams:

Actually, yes. [laughs] I would agree with that. Wow. That must give you such an interesting perspective on physics as a field, to have touched so many different facets of it.

Leggett:

Well, yes, it was very useful. And eventually, I was actually invited to write a popular textbook — not a textbook, a popular book on physics. It was in the Opus Series. They have a Problems of Mathematics, Problems of Chemistry, and in my case, Problems of Physics. So, I actually wrote that, and certainly, my background was very useful in doing that.

Williams:

Of course. Wow.

Leggett:

So, that was the teaching. As to my research, well, I’m not sure to be honest, in retrospect, whether this was a sort of — how to put it — my own rose-colored kind of spectacles or what, but my understanding from — it must have been the general ethos at Sussex in these days — and we’re talking about the late ’60s and early ‘70s and so forth — my understanding was that really my primary job was to teach, and if I could do a good teaching job during the week, I would go home on Friday evening and feel I’d earned my salary. If I then wanted to, during the weekend or the evenings or the vacations — if I wanted to do research, well, the university would encourage it, and they’d provide all the necessary secretarial and library resources and so forth. But it wasn’t really an integral part of my job. And I actually think that was incredibly valuable to me. I think quite honestly, I would not have had the same research career as I’ve had, had it not been for that time. That’s sort of the understanding I’m feeling.

Williams:

What did that provide to you? I mean, was it a sense of freedom or curiosity?

Leggett:

Yeah.

Williams:

I mean, what was the —

Leggett:

You know, I could afford to — I mean, I contrast that with the sort of pressure that young people in my area, under these — not just here in the U.S. Also in China, and also in Britain, etcetera. You know, you have to get a minimum number of papers published, and published in high-impact journals, or somebody won’t go on to the next stage in your career. In my case, you see, I basically had tenure from the word go. I could afford just to basically think about what I wanted to think about. And I think it was marvelous. I was very lucky in that.

So, I did — originally, I just continued in the area, namely in certain aspects of low-temperature physics, in which I’d been working as a postdoc, and so forth — I’d authored some papers, etcetera, etcetera. But then toward the summer of 1972, when I’d been five years at Sussex, I was beginning to get rather bored by this, and at the same time, becoming a lot more interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics. I don’t know if this means anything to you, but basically, [laughs] I mean, the situation is that we’ve had this — quantum mechanics isn’t just a theory, really. It’s a whole new gestalt — a whole new way of looking at the world, which is totally alien to classical physics. People think — you know, what people think of the sort of spectacular changes in thinking that modern physics has brought, they think about things like special relativity, general relativity, and then maybe quantum mechanics. Special and general relativity are not that revolutionary. In some sense, they’re very impressive, but they’re basically the natural culmination of classical physics. Quantum mechanics is something different — totally different again. And no one — I mean, quantum mechanics was basically formulated in something relatively close to its modern form in the mid ’20s. That’s nearly a hundred years ago now. And we still haven’t really got to grips with it. [laughs]

And so, it’s still — and so, you know, throughout this whole period — and in particular, when I became interested in it was in the ’60s, it’s been basically a fight — and “fight” is not too strong a word, I think — between two camps. One camp basically says, “Well, it works. We have these sort of recipes for applying it. Shut up and calculate.” [laughs] That’s a phrase that people use. The other group says, “There’s really something to worry about here. There are some really rather deep problems. Perhaps we’re not really understanding the structure of the world as we should,” and so forth. And I was gradually drawn to the latter camp. And so, this is, I think, primarily due to one of my colleagues. He’s an unusual person: Brian Easlea. Unfortunately, he’s now deceased, but he was a contemporary of mine at Sussex, and he had himself been influenced by some of the thinkers in the latter camp. And it was he who, I think, convinced me that there was something to worry about.

Williams:

Yeah. So, what did that — I mean, were you guys sitting next to each other in the office, and things would just come up? Or, did you get coffee and have deep conversations about this? I’m just curious about the mechanics of like, when you say, “I started to question.”

Leggett:

Well, I think it was actually — Brian gave a sort of informal mini-course, in fact, on this. And up to that point, I’d been a member of the “Shut up and calculate” camp. [laughs] There’s a nice quotation which — by a rather famous person in this area — written just about when I was beginning to think about this in the mid ’60s. And he said basically, the average physicist feels that all these problems — problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics — have long ago been resolved, and he will easily understand how, if he can spend 20 minutes to think about it. [laughs] and that had essentially been my attitude, but Brian did give this course, and it set me a-thinking, got me worried, and eventually I decided that I — eventually, I decided that I’m going to try to spend more time on it, and I planned to stop doing low-temperature physics. [laughs]

Exactly at that moment, a colleague of mine, Bob Richardson from Cornell, with whom I had some previous correspondence — he wasn’t completely a stranger — came by Sussex. Third piece of serendipity. The reason he came by Sussex in that particular moment — nothing to do with physics. It was simply because his wife was a good friend of the wife of one of my colleagues from Sussex, and they just wanted to get together for a chat, etcetera. And so, he came by. At that particular point, I was on a climbing holiday in Scotland, and for some reason, I had to call back. Some trivial administrative thing, but I had to call back to the physics department at Sussex. And someone mentioned to me that Bob Richardson was calling — happened to be coming by on a particular day. And if I were around, he’d like to talk to me. I had to make a decision whether to come back a day early to talk to him, or not. Again, it’s total luck basically, but I decided to come back.

Williams:

Yeah. You could have kept climbing, but instead — [laughs]

Leggett:

[laughs] and sacrifice my last day in Scotland, so anyway, I decided I would come back. And he told me about these incredible new experimental results, and that really set me thinking. I thought: look, maybe I should just postpone going into the foundations of quantum mechanics until I am sure that quantum mechanics is still working. I knew these very unusual circumstances. So what I actually set out to do — quite consciously, originally — was to construct a proof that if standard quantum mechanics and what we call standard statistical mechanics — if they were working, then these experiments just couldn’t be right, as it were. So, in other words, if the experiments were right, one of these things had to be wrong.

Williams:

Right.

Leggett:

Well, [laughs] it didn’t quite work out that way, or you’d have heard about it.

Williams:

Right, but that was your starting premise for exploration.

Leggett:

Yeah, that’s right.

Williams:

Fantastic.

Leggett:

So, I started thinking about it, and I think literally — so, I was lying in bed at night, and I lay awake thinking about it for about three weeks running. And eventually, I hit upon an idea, which seemed to be promising, and it did seem to work out. I published a short — as a matter of fact, what happened was that I was doing this work in June and July of 1972, I guess. I always get my years mixed up here, but I think it was ’72. And there was a big low-temperature conference coming up, which was quite clear that this was going to be a major subject of discussion. I wasn’t going myself, but one of my colleagues from Sussex was going and wanted to present some ideas there. And so, that was the first presentation. But then, I wrote a short paper and got it published.

But after that, at that time, the fall semester was coming up, and I had a pretty heavy teaching load, as I’ve explained. So, I basically didn’t do a lot on it for about eight months, and then in the spring of 1973, Bob Richardson invited me to come to Cornell, his base, for a month to try to direct the experimental work. And that was just invaluable. Basically, I was free of any kind of — at that point — free of any family responsibilities. I just spent 16 hours a day just thinking about this. That was a marvelous time, actually. And I did eventually manage to construct a reasonably satisfactory theory of what was going on in these experiments.

Williams:

So, you had a sort of very deep, intensive dive into wrestling with the issues, and that helped.

Leggett:

Yes. I did, really, I think. Yeah. And I was able not just to explain the existing experiments, but also to make some predictions for other kinds of experiments which they hadn’t yet done and hadn’t thought of doing.

Williams:

Which then confirms your general model.

Leggett:

It did work out, yes. Of course, that was — you know, it was just one stream, and there were other people working on other aspects of the problem, and eventually, it all sort of came together and made a — I’d say it actually came together rather fast. Compared to — which, perhaps says [laughs] — to be perfectly honest, it perhaps says it wasn’t really all that revolutionary. In some sense, we were relying on ideas which were there, in some sense, already. But it did come together fast. I mean, by about the summer of ’74, I think, one would say that most people were convinced we had a reasonable understanding of what was going on.

Williams:

Wow. Yeah, that is pretty quick. [laughs] Do you think some of that, too, though had to do with — I mean, it sounds like you were really drawing on a very international network of people…

Leggett:

Oh, yeah.

Williams:

…and schools, and resources, were all pouring a lot into it. So, it wasn’t just a handful of you. It was —

Leggett:

No, that’s right. I don’t… I certainly drew very strongly on my colleagues at Cornell, and then — this would be about the actual…

Williams:

Exact times. That’s fine.

Leggett:

…timetable, but yeah. I did go to Japan for a second time. I met my wife, who is Japanese, and I got married in the late spring of ’73, and I went off to Japan for nine months. And one of the people I met there was a person who, at the time, was a graduate student, Shin Takagi, and I was able to get him back to Sussex as a postdoc. And he’s been one of my — in fact, one of the few substantial collaborators. Much of my work over my career has not been collaborative, in fact. But he was very, very —

Williams:

Yeah. Do you think that that’s unique to you or is that a phenomenon of theoretical physics — the theoretical piece of it, which tends to be more individual.

Leggett:

I think it’s — no, I think it’s a much more personal thing. Nowadays, if it’s experimental physics, you don’t think you know, but in experimental physics, [laughs] a typical collaboration might be hundreds of people, quite literally. In theory, it’s not quite that extreme, but typically nowadays, I think you’d find that the average number of authors on a theoretical paper is maybe three or four. And I tend not to do that, mostly.

Williams:

Yeah. So, can we jump a little bit in time and talk about coming to Illinois?

Leggett:

Yeah, sure.

Williams:

So, about 10 years before that still, but you were in Sussex, continuing to work, and then you had connections here.

Leggett:

Yes.

Williams:

But how did you come to be here? What happened?

Leggett:

They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. [laughs]

Williams:

[laughs] Well, that’ll do it. So, they came to find you. It wasn’t a —

Leggett:

What happened was that sometime in 1981, 1982, I guess, the MacArthur Foundation — are you familiar with the MacArthur?

Williams:

Yeah.

Leggett:

Yeah. Okay. Well, you know that they’re best known, I think, for their so-called Genius Grants, which are made specifically by the foundation to individuals. In 1982 or thereabouts, they decided to add a somewhat different strategy. They decided to give a certain amount of money to various universities, and I think all in the Midwest, actually, because MacArthur did have a strong sort of midwestern connection. And these universities — this was enough to fund a distinguished chair. And the idea was that these universities were to look for a particular candidate, but they were to make the selection, not the foundation. And I guess the different universities to whom this grant was given handled it in different ways, but here again, at UIUC, what they did was they invited different departments of the university to submit, as it were, a bid naming an individual who was not currently here, but whom they’d like to attract. And physics nominated me, and I won the competition, as it were. So, they got first shot. So, sometime — this would have been in the — you know, it was actually in the spring of ’82, and I was in Beijing at the time. [laughs] I got this call out of the blue, saying, “Would you be interested?”

Williams:

Wow. That must have been kind of a shock, if you didn’t have any sense of it. [laughs]

Leggett:

Yeah, it was. And my first reaction was, “No, I’ve got deep roots here in the U.K. Why would I want to pull them up and move?” But then, there were actually two factors which operated, I think. The first was, in fact, I got a pull — you know, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I got a pull from this side. I got pushed from the U.K. side, [laughs] because this was the early days of the Thatcher government, and just at that particular moment the — well, this actually may not have been the exact time, but the Thatcher government was being very unpleasant to the universities in the U.K. They were — I think it was not — they were sort of cutting them in the money. Governments do have to cut money sometimes, but they were — and they made it quite clear they — quite frankly, it was a bit like the current U.S. administration we have right now. They made it clear that they simply didn’t value what the universities were doing, and that they simply regarded them as a sort of cash cow. And this meant — this, plus the threat of redundancy (being fired), had a very bad effect on the atmosphere in the British universities. People were always looking over their shoulder to make sure they were not the ones who were going to get fired, etcetera, etcetera.

Williams:

Right. So, you start to feel kind of precarious there.

Leggett:

Yeah. So, that was one factor. But the other factor is a more subtle one, actually, because initially, despite this, I’m sort of resigned to the political situation, it’s going to go away eventually, so I’ll stay on, and hope for better things. But they said — when they made this invitation to me, they said, “Look, even if it was only a five percent chance that you might accept this, why don’t you just come across for a few days, and we will show you the place,” etcetera, etcetera, “and then you can make up your mind.” And [I brought] along my wife and my daughter, who was at that time 3 years old. “Bring them across, and you’ll see what it’s like.” So, I thought, well, they’re really pulling out all the stops for me, even though I do feel it was about five percent. [laughs] Still, why not? This would have been in the late spring of ’82, I think.

And so, they brought me and my wife and daughter across, and [laughs] gave us a very good time, as you can imagine, and showed me all the things that were going on. Interestingly, they made a huge effort to show me all the extra little things they thought that could possibly be of interest to me in physics. They didn’t think of showing me the things that go on in other departments that might have been of interest. [laughs] I later discovered, when I got here, that there were quite a lot of those, in fact. Anyway, they didn’t — and suddenly, they said, “Okay, try to give us an answer within six weeks.” So, I went back to the U.K. with my wife and daughter, and I thought, you know, I really have to give this a bit of consideration, given that they’d spent all this time and trouble on me, etcetera, etcetera. And eventually, as I went on thinking about it, I realized that the mere process of seriously thinking about this had in some sense disoriented me sufficiently that sometime within the next 10 years, I was almost certainly going to want to leave Sussex. And I thought the chances of getting anything half as good as this were almost totally negligible.

Williams:

Right.

Leggett:

So, let’s go. [laughs]

Williams:

Grab it while it was there. Oh, that’s really interesting. They, by forcing you to consider the possibility of leaving, they kind of shook you up a bit.

Leggett:

Yeah. It’s a deliberate psychological tactic. [laughs] It was interesting. Incidentally, the first of the three of us who expressed a clear preference: my daughter, at age 3. She said, “I want to go to America.” [laughs]

Williams:

Well, she got her way, didn’t she? [laughs] Yeah. And you’re happy you came? You’re still here, so —

Leggett:

Yes. I don’t regret coming here. I enjoyed my time at Sussex, and I think I probably would have enjoyed it had I stayed there. Actually, Sussex, in some sense — how to put it — well, it wasn’t the most restful place to be in the ’70s, and so forth. In fact, [laughs] we had a rather bad reputation among the British public. A lot of political eruptions and so forth going on there, but it was okay.

Williams:

What do you think are some of the best things about being here at Illinois, professionally?

Leggett:

Well, I mean, I have very excellent colleagues, very excellent support. You know, the administration — at least in physics, here — is really top class. I can travel. I’m very free. I mean, I was also traveling a lot from the U.K. at that time, also.

Williams:

Right. Yeah. You seem to have been traveling your whole career. [laughs]

Leggett:

Oh, yeah. Yes. I think I’ve probably traveled as much as most of my colleagues.

Williams:

Yeah. What about students? Have you had the chance to mentor many Ph.D. students or undergraduate students?

Leggett:

Yes. Oh, yes, both at Sussex and here at UI. Some of them have been extremely good.

Williams:

Yeah. Good. Do you feel like the teaching and the research piece complement each other?

Leggett:

Well, yeah. Actually, that is a big difference from Sussex. As I say, my understanding at Sussex was that teaching was my main duty, and research was a bit of a sort of add-on, if you like. It’s a bit different here. I certainly feel there’s more pressure on me to — and rightly so — to spend a fair amount of time on research. But I never really feel there’s any particular tension. I feel I basically get as much out of my teaching as I do out of my research.

Williams:

Yeah. Well, you clearly have the drive to answer questions and think about things. [laughs] So, that doesn’t surprise me that a research agenda would be up your alley, so to speak. Okay. There are a couple of big things we haven’t talked about yet on the recognition side, which is the knighthood and the Nobel Prize. Can you just briefly touch on when those happened, how they came about?

Leggett:

Well, I mean, I suppose. I was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with two Russian colleagues, in 2003. So, it was about 30 years after I originally did the work. In the case of the two Russians, it was much longer. One of them, it was 59 years, or something like that. It was a long, long time. And in fact, I think in this particular case, the Nobel committee, as it were, stretched their usual guidelines a bit, because they — I had not collaborated in any way with these two Russians. And although the topics were loosely connected, they were really not the same.

And I mean, if I were totally honest, giving the other two a prize for early work on superconductivity — I don’t feel the words “BCS theory” means anything to you. No? Okay. BCS theory is what we used to think was the theory of superconductivity, and it was done right here at the university of Illinois of Urbana-Champaign in the late ’50s, in fact. But this was — these two Russians had actually done important things on superconductivity way before that. And as a matter of fact, there was a third person that I think really had done pretty good work. I also have took his share of the Nobel Prize. [laughs] I feel a bit of guilt about that. Anyway, so that was — I got that in 2003. And fairly shortly afterwards, I was offered the knighthood. And I received it in 2005, I think, if I recall.

Williams:

Yeah. I’m just personally curious. I mean, obviously very few people have won this. Is that the kind of thing that you kind of know it’s coming? I mean, do people through the grapevine, or is it a surprise? Do they call you? [laughs]

Leggett:

One or two of my colleagues had told me that they were nominating me for the Nobel Prize, but as a matter of fact, these particular colleagues weren’t even in physics. [laughs] So, I didn’t really think that was particularly important to them. So, I mean — you know, I probably can’t say it never occurred to me, but it wasn’t something I would have expected.

Williams:

It wasn’t really on your radar.

Leggett:

No, and in fact, the call came at…5:00 am. Well, they have to make the announcement on a particular day. I think it’s the first Thursday in November, or something like that. And they have to make it at noon, Stockholm time, which is 5 a.m., I guess, Champaign-Urbana time. So, the call did come through at 5 a.m., and my initial thought was, this has to mean, as usual, my in-laws in Japan have got the times the wrong way around, as they always do. [laughs] People ask me, “Did you think it was a hoax at first?” And it did cross my mind, but then what I think really convinced me it had to be for real was that after they had made this rather formal announcement. Thus guy, a member of the Nobel Physics Committee on the other end of the phone, said, “I should warn you. You’re going to be getting a lot of calls from reporters over the next few hours, so you should figure out how you’re going to deal with that.” That’s not something a hoaxer would think of. [laughs]

Williams:

Yeah. That was pretty serious. [laughs] Well, thank you for indulging. I had to take that chance — just be like, “What does that look like?” [laughs] I didn’t know they had to call at a certain time.

Leggett:

Yeah. In some cases, it is rather random, the process. Sometimes, I think they don’t even get hold of the person before they —

Williams:

Yeah. I mean, I can’t imagine — you’re not always by the phone, and if it’s 2 a.m. —

Leggett:

Incidentally, one thing that struck me was that they didn’t actually ask me whether I would accept the prize or not.

Williams:

Oh. Interesting. They just assumed.

Leggett:

I guess so. Maybe it was just too late by that time. [laughs]

Williams:

[laughs] Right. They don’t want to risk it. They just hand — we hand these out.

Leggett:

Yeah. I think they have actually tried several times, in fact, and I just slipped through.

Williams:

Yeah. Interesting. Very neat. Well, I’d like to ask a few just kind of less biographical, and more just kind of reflective questions.

Leggett:

Sure, yes.

Williams:

I mean, you’ve been in science for a long time, and the Academy for a long time.

Leggett:

Yes.

Williams:

I mean, are there things that you tell your students or tell other young people who are thinking about the Academy versus jobs in other fields? What kind of advice do you give?

Leggett:

Well, one piece of advice that I tend to give my students, and I think in some sense, how appropriate it is does depend on the context somewhat — but it’s: think seriously about getting a job, assuming that you want to go on in some kind of an academic life, and you are interested in research and so on. But think of getting a job at a small liberal arts college, where your main job is going to be teaching, as I conceived mine to be at Sussex. Some of the — in particular, one of the areas in which I’ve tended to do a certain amount of work, in the foundations of quantum mechanics — at least until, say, the last 20 years, most of the leading figures in that field, or at least within the U.S., were actually at these small liberal arts colleges.

Williams:

Interesting.

Leggett:

And that was simply because this is not a fashionable field. You know, if you’d tried to do it at a major research university, you probably wouldn’t have got funding, and so forth.

Williams:

Yeah. That’s really interesting.

Leggett:

So, yeah. That’s one thing I tell them. Then, other things I try and tell them — I have this sort of list of things that I say.

Williams:

Yeah. I’m sure you’ve had lots of students. Yeah.

Leggett:

Look. Always try to follow your own curiosity, and don’t worry too much if other people say, “Well, you know, everyone knows that. It’s well understood.” If you don’t understand it, then beaver away at it, and don’t stop until you think you’ve got something which satisfies you. Then, again, don’t worry too much about reading the existing literature. Read enough that you realize, as it were, what the problem is and what the general background is, but don’t feel you’ve got to read all the 200 papers that have been written in the last 10 years on that subject. Just go at it, in some sense, from scratch, and when you come out at the end, if you’ve got something, then of course, you do have to go back to the literature and see if other people have got the same. But it’s very unlikely, actually, that it’s done exactly the same as you have. You’ll certainly learn something from doing it the independent way.

Williams:

Yeah. That’s great.

Leggett:

Again, don’t — nothing’s wasted, if you’ve done an honest calculation, even if that doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, write it up properly and just put it away in a drawer. Make sure you do write it up properly, while you still remember it. [laughs]

Williams:

[laughs] You won’t remember it two years from now, what you were —

Leggett:

Put it away in a drawer, and I’ll bet that 10, 15 years down the road, it’ll come back and help you out. That’s precisely true with this little bit of calculation I mentioned — the one I’d done in Japan, in fact. That was exactly what helped me out when I had to think about the Cornell experiments a few years later.

Williams:

Yeah. And you couldn’t have known. That’s beautiful. Those are all, I think, pieces of advice that would also apply to non-scientists, so I really enjoyed that. [laughs] They’re about good thinking. Right? They’re about good, curious living.

Leggett:

Yeah, sometimes…

Williams:

I really appreciate that a lot. This question is not maybe as clear. I hope it’s not too vague. I mean, what do you think about — I don’t want to say “science” as a field. I’m going to say physics — physics, as a field of inquiry, in terms of where it’s heading, the kind of work you see being done.

Leggett:

I think probably some of the most interesting applications of what I might call a physicist’s way of thinking might be way outside of what we regard traditionally as physics. I mean, already they’re happening, to an extent. I mean, you have econophysics, and sociophysics, whatever. And for example, I’m just wondering — again, this is very vague and speculative — I’m wondering whether some problems in neuropsychology might yield to something of a more physics-based approach. [crosstalk]

Williams:

Interesting. Yeah. Do you see — is most of that kind of work happening in university settings? Is it happening outside of the Academy? Both? Where are you seeing that?

Leggett:

Difficult to say, but I suspect it’s happening, let’s say, in places where there isn’t too much day-to-day pressure. As I’ve already said, I mean, I get worried about this aspect, particularly in the case of young people, or even in the case of more senior people. The continual pressure to publish, and publish in high-impact journals, and on and on, is really, I think, very destructive to real scientific advance. And so how exactly one copes with it, particularly at the junior level, I really don’t know.

Williams:

Right. There’s no obvious answer.

Leggett:

No.

Williams:

Interesting. Okay. Is there anything else you would like to talk about, or think about? Things that have come loose in your mind through all these questions you’ve had?

Leggett:

I think one experience that I have had, which in a small way — which most of my colleagues, at least those who actually grew up in industrialized countries, haven’t had — is of teaching in a third-world country. Ghana.

Williams:

Yeah, that’s right, your time in Ghana.

Leggett:

Yes. And I think that was quite important for me. I think perhaps the main practical lesson that I drew from that was that the kind of educational system that has been developed in countries like the U.K. and the U.S. is probably not the most appropriate for a country like Ghana. It has to be much more hands-on. If you like, much more unglamorous maybe, [laughs] but much more practical. Because these — quite frankly, in a country like Ghana, the universities have to play a role which, in industrialized countries, there are all sorts of specialized organizations playing. Now, when the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, which is where I was working, they wanted to organize a 25th anniversary celebration, and they wanted to raise a flag. Of course, they had no flagpole. [laughs] The flag had to be designed by the Fine Arts department. The flagpole had to be erected by the Engineering department. [laughs] You couldn’t get in a whole load of professional people to do it.

Williams:

Right.

Leggett:

And that’s pretty typical. These things, one sort of takes for granted in industrialized countries.

Williams:

You can’t just order it off Amazon and make it happen. Yeah.

Leggett:

That’s right. And so, I think the education system really has to try to reflect that.

Williams:

Yeah. I was interested to see you’d been in Ghana. My research is in Kenya.

Leggett:

Oh, really?

Williams:

I’ve never been to Ghana, but yeah, that was interesting to read about that perspective. Very good. That’s the end of my questions.

Leggett:

Okay.

Williams:

It doesn’t have to be the end of the interview. [laughs] We’ve gone through most of the things I had thought about wanting to talk about.

Leggett:

Yeah. Okay.

Williams:

Okay. Well, good. As long as you feel satisfied, I’m satisfied. [laughs]

Leggett:

Yes.

Williams:

Good.