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Join us on our quest for the extraordinary!
Sam McKee (@polymath_sam) has 9 university qualifications across 4 subjects including doctorates in history and philosophy of science and molecular biology. He researches both at two British universities and contributes to both space science and cancer research. Meet fellow polymaths and discipline leaders working on the frontiers of research from all over the world. Be inspired to pursue knowledge and drive the world forwards.
Watch and share interviews with professors, lecturers, researchers, engineers, scientists and astronauts, right here! We talk to the most extraordinary people working on the frontiers for humanity, driving research forwards and changing the world that we live in. We dive deep with thinkers, academics and true icons - many of whom you won't yet have heard of.
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www.sam-mckee.co.uk
Polymath World (00:01.336)
Hello and welcome back to the Polymath World channel and I'm delighted today. We're going to be talking geophysics with a fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Bob White, is Professor Emeritus of Geophysics and Earth Sciences at Cambridge University. He is a fellow of St Edmunds College at Cambridge. He's a research fellow of Emmanuel College at Cambridge. He's a fellow of the Geological Society and he's led a research group on Earth's dynamic crust. So this is going to be really interesting.
I've met Bob a couple of times and I'm delighted that you've come to join me here today. Thank you so much Bob White.
Bob White (00:36.557)
pleasure to be with you. Actually I'm not currently a research fellow of Emmanuel, I'm at St Edmund College now, a former research fellow. It's bit difficult to be a fellow of Emmanuel once.
Polymath World (00:41.238)
of former research fellow
Excellent. Do you have a lot to do with Cambridge University still? Are you involved with any teaching or research or publishing?
Bob White (00:59.563)
Yes, well, like all academics, it's a bit difficult to stop. My wife often says, am I really retired? So I've still got an office and I go in. I try to limit it to one day a week and I still help with PhD students, which is one of my passions, actually. It's what I've done through my career. And I still do fieldwork in Iceland, which is a beautiful place to do fieldwork. So, yeah, I still do those things.
Polymath World (01:11.886)
Hahaha.
Polymath World (01:23.5)
Wow.
Bob White (01:27.329)
But the difference is I can do as much or as little as I want. So it's a pretty privileged position, really.
Polymath World (01:34.882)
Yeah, what a wonderful situation, but you've definitely earned it. I mean, there's so much I'd like to get into. Really interesting story, really interesting career. But let's start from the beginning. That's what we always like to do. Geophysics is an interesting field to get into. So were you playing with rocks in quarries as a child? What did childhood Bob White, future geophysicist, look like?
Bob White (02:00.449)
What did I do? I like the outdoors. I camped, cycled a lot. Actually a lot of my generation, we didn't have phones and televisions and that sort of thing. Didn't have a lot of money. So I used to cycle around the countryside and I was in the sky, went camping a lot, just loved being outdoors. I didn't specifically collect rocks or anything, although occasionally I saw a nice one. So I had no intention.
become a geologist or a geophysicist. But the truth is I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate. Well actually I should go back one step because I went to a comprehensive school and I applied to Cambridge and didn't get in and then I was going to go somewhere else and then I got my in those days A level results and they were about as good as they could be.
So I just phoned up the college in Cambridge and hey, will you take me now? said, OK, yeah, we will. It was all pretty casual. But he said you should go off and do something for a year. So I went off and did, as a research assistant at Berkeley Nuclear Laboratories, which was amazing, which was near where we live. That's why I went there. But to work in a real research laboratory as a 17-year-old next to a nuclear reactor was really fun.
I sort of got a passion for research just through that gap year, actually. didn't go travelling around the world because we didn't in those days. So then shall I carry on? I went to Cambridge and I went to do physics, actually. And to be honest, physics was quite hard. And even by the end of your course, you got up to the sort of physics they were doing in the 1950s. But
Polymath World (03:37.527)
Yes, yes.
Bob White (03:51.245)
Cambridge is unusual in that you have to do four different subjects. You do natural sciences. So although I tended to do physics, I ended up doing physics plus maths plus geology plus something else, fluid mechanics, I think it was. And actually the geology was much more fun than the physics and it was easier. And it was an exciting time to be doing geology because it was the plate tectonic revolution when people...
came up with all these new ideas of how the earth worked. And a lot of that work had been done at Cambridge and we were being taught by people that know, they only did it a few years earlier, less than a decade before I was there. So they were talking about how it worked and by the end of your course in geology, you were reading research papers. So you were right up at the front, you're being taught by people at the front. Plus you spent a lot of time outdoors. You went on field trips and...
I think one year at university I spent more of the year under Canvas than I did indoors, which you can do in Cambridge because the terms are so short. There are only eight weeks. There's only 24 weeks of, just in case you wondered whether I'd bunked off university, there are only 24 weeks of term. So I spent more than 24 weeks under Canvas. So that was really fun. I sort of got into it by accident, but then I did a PhD with
Polymath World (04:55.031)
Ha
Bob White (05:16.071)
of the people that invented seafloor spreading actually, Drun Matthews, and that became geophysics so I ended up doing physics and geology actually, although I came at it through the geology route. So that's my career and how I got into it.
Polymath World (05:30.381)
Gosh, I'm missing.
Yeah, well it sounds a part accident part a series of fantastic events that followed each other taking you that direction. What kind of places did you go to as a student?
Bob White (05:45.921)
Yes, well, I was doing marine geophysics, which meant working at sea on research ships. And I had the good fortune to go all over the world, actually. spent most of it in the Indian Ocean or the North Atlantic at that stage. I think I didn't go to the Pacific. Somebody else took that cruise. So, yeah, I saw places which in those days, this was the late 70s.
well mid 70s, it was really hard to go to. I went to Amman which was a closed country but the ship docked there and because plate tectonics were so new and there been very little work at sea and know two-thirds of the world is covered by water, by ocean, in my PhD I found a new plate boundary which was amazing you know that people didn't know about before and everywhere we went you know
you'd be the first person to look at it and you found new things. It was very exciting. So I was very fortunate just to be able to do that as a youngster really. And I mean the strange thing was that quite soon by the time I was, suppose, how old was I, would have been late 20s, early 30s, I was the chief scientist on these ships which were, they're big ships, know, they can't have 50 people on them.
and they're full of grizzled seaman, know, tough seaman, and it was this youngster telling them what to do, because I was in charge of where we went and what we did. The master of ship was supposed to just go where I said, and he just made sure it was safe. And I didn't try and sink the ship somehow. So again, that was pretty amazing. You know, I had that both responsibility, but also possibility of doing things. So, you know, I was deciding where we went and what we did for.
Polymath World (07:28.29)
Ha!
Bob White (07:38.542)
for a typical cruise which lasted four weeks usually. So that was enormous fun.
Polymath World (07:43.277)
Gosh, amazing. Yeah, so was that your route straight out of Cambridge? You became a chief scientist in the field.
Bob White (07:53.23)
Pretty soon, immediately after I left Cambridge I went to America for a postdoc on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where there's a big oceanographic institute there called Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. So was there for a year and then I came back to a position in Cambridge and yeah within a few years I was chief scientist on the ships. Yeah, I don't think it wouldn't happen today because
These ships are so expensive and these cruisers are planned many years in advance and they're usually consortiums of different people and you have to use them 24 hours a day so you're doing all sorts of things. Again, I was just in the right place at the right time and it wasn't sort of a planned career move, I just enjoyed doing it. So it's a full opportunity of doing that and it was fun, great fun.
Polymath World (08:44.901)
I can sense just hearing from you that you really really did enjoy it. Could you tell us more about what the research looked like on the ships? Geophysics on the seafloor, what does that look like for those of us that don't know better?
Bob White (08:50.23)
Yes.
Bob White (09:00.971)
Yes, well, geophysics is really geology, but geology that's happening today, right? As it happens now, that's the only difference. And of course, if you're looking at the seabed, you have to do it by remote sensing. can't. Well, you can go down, but it's really difficult to go down and look. So what we were doing was was sailing along. And one very obvious thing is just mapping the shape of the seafloor. So these were unknown areas. And you can tell an awful lot from.
shape of the sea. You can see volcanoes and you see places where the sea bed is pulling apart and that sort of thing. Places where it's getting buckled up where it collides with the continent. So you can see all that just from the shape of the sea floor actually. But we were also looking deeper than that. We would send sound waves down which would echo off, well they'd echo off the sea floor but they're very low frequency and they go deeper than the sea floor. They go down to depths of
well up to 20 kilometres deep. So you could see the structure under the sea floor as well. And a lot of what we doing at Cambridge was building new instruments because there was nothing, you couldn't go to a shop and buy it, you know. So we had an amazing team of technicians who were building recorders to record the seismic waves that you could put on the seabed, they could record the magnetic field and all sorts of other things. We were recording the heat flow through the...
the sea floor which can tell you about where volcanism is happening and so on. So this was amazing, we were deploying new instruments and every time you make a new instrument to measure something new you discover something new. Certainly at that stage that was the case and actually I think it is still the case. So I think the equivalent today would be the Mars lander or something you know where you're
you're landing new instruments somewhere nobody's been before and you're discovering new things just by quite simple measurements really in many ways but technically very difficult. So that was fun.
Polymath World (11:00.833)
Yes.
Yeah.
Polymath World (11:08.543)
It sounds incredibly exciting. It must have been a really dynamic time. I just wonder out of curiosity here, did you spend any time in submersibles? I mean, did you really go down at all?
Bob White (11:21.311)
No, I never did that. I don't think I'd want to actually, to be honest. I mean, it was quite hard work. Not in my specific research group, no, there were about typically about 20 of us research students and technicians and so on. I don't think any of us did that. We were all looking at it from the surface. But.
Polymath World (11:23.213)
Right?
Did you have people in your teams that...
Bob White (11:46.954)
you can tell an awful lot from the surface and you can cover a lot of ground. If you get down in a submersible you have a little porthole which is six inches across or something and you just see a tiny bit of the seafloor so we could map huge swaths of the seafloor and we're working 24 hours a day so we'd be working four hour shifts and then you'd rotate and then you'd bring it back home and you'd probably spend several, well many man years.
Polymath World (12:08.375)
Wow.
Bob White (12:15.157)
analyzing the data afterwards while you're
Polymath World (12:22.421)
Yeah, we'll continue to focus on your research for a moment, your field work. You mentioned the North Atlantic. Were you working much with things like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge? Obviously, further across you've got really deep places like the Marianas Trench and things like that. Were you mapping large swathes of these really important features?
Bob White (12:49.953)
Yes, we did a lot of work on mid-Atlantic ridges. some others in my group worked in the Pacific, but I worked mostly in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic personally. So we look at those. We're also looking at places where the continents are crashing together and oceanic crust is going under the oceans. These are the places you get big earthquakes and volcanoes. So we did a lot of work on those as well. And I guess the work which was
which had most impact, I should say, I'm trying to think of the right word, was we found places where the mantle underneath the crust, the crust of the earth is quite thin, well thin in geological terms, oceanic crust is only about seven kilometres thick, which is thin compared to the thickness of the earth, and it's very viscous underneath, it's called mantle underneath it.
And there are places where that was much hotter than normal, they're called hotspots. And when you pulled apart above one of those, you get a huge amount of volcanism. And that's what's happening in Iceland. And that's why Iceland is above water. It's actually a piece of the middle Atlantic ridge, goes right through the middle of Iceland. But it's way above water. mean, it's about three kilometers shallower than it ought to be. And that's because there's this hot material underneath. And that's why there's so much volcanism there. All of Iceland is just...
volcanic rock. There's many, many, I think there's 20 active ones at the moment. So the contribution I made was understanding how that happened and how it produced huge outbursts of volcanic rock. And it wasn't just the Iceland, it was quite a lot of other places around the world where you could produce 10 million cubic kilometres of molten rock in a very short period. These are massive outbursts.
sort of thing that they worry about with Yosemite now. I mean the Yellowstone hotspot people worry about happening there, although probably won't in our lifetimes.
Polymath World (14:58.349)
Yeah, you've mentioned a couple of other features and places here, including volcanoes earlier. So I'd love to know what volcanoes you've been to and what the kind of work on there looked like.
Bob White (15:00.012)
you
Bob White (15:13.323)
Yes, well that's what I ended up doing for the last 20 years of my career really, and still am doing now, is look at volcanoes. Mostly on Iceland which is a lovely place to be. I like going there, it's easy to get there, easy to work there. The sort of work we're doing is trying to map how the molten rock moves under the ground before it erupts. And you can do that by mapping the tiny earthquakes that produced.
as molten rock forces its way upwards because it has to make space for itself so it opens a little crack and pushes through and a crack is an earthquake, it makes a seismic wave. mean a big earthquake is a very big crack but the earthquakes that the molten rock makes are pretty tiny, you don't feel them and we looked at one for instance in Iceland not so long ago, it produced 50,000 little earthquakes and we could map them all.
down at, we tracked it from seven kilometres depth up to the surface until it erupted. So it's quite a useful thing to be able to do to see when eruptions might occur. But it's also really interesting to see how the molten rock is moving through the earth to come out the surface at the top. And mostly I've worked in Iceland and I've worked on quite a few volcanoes as they erupt actually, which are amazing things to see if you're up close.
hard to describe. They sort of assault all your senses at once. They're beautiful and hot and bright red of course as you see on photographs but they're also very noisy which surprised me. I like jet engines when it's coming out from the top and they're also very smelly as a lot of sulfur comes out the top. So they assault all your senses at once you know the smell and sight and sound all at once so they're just amazing things to have the privilege of being close to.
and one of the things geophysicists do is they have conferences and you know my colleagues are in I don't know medical science or something say I'm going to a big conference in Manchester next week and I said yeah I'm going to a conference in Vanuatu which is in the Pacific Ocean and they always have these conferences in places where there's
Bob White (17:35.224)
things going on where you can go and see them. So you have your conference indoors and then you have a field trip for a couple of days with local experts taking you. So yeah, Vanuatu is one of the amazing volcanoes I've been to as well as Stromboli and now I can't remember the words, loads of them. know Tenerife even is a volcano. You've been on holiday there, that's volcanic rocks as well. The Azores, they're all volcanic, Iceland's all volcanic. Hawaii I've been to.
Polymath World (17:58.648)
Yeah.
Bob White (18:04.309)
several times, volcanic of course. So yeah they're all around the world and they're quite nice places to have conferences and field trips.
Polymath World (18:12.853)
I imagine you're selling the dream very, very well now to prospective students who might be listening. I completely understand your enchantment with Iceland. I flew out to a conference in Los Angeles last month. of course, following the curvature of the Earth, we flew right over Iceland on the way there and back. And I just took so many photos out of the window. I thought it was the most amazing landmass I'd ever seen.
Bob White (18:20.301)
Yeah.
Polymath World (18:40.609)
It had everything packed into one beautiful space. was incredible from the air. The glaciers, the ice, the mountains, the volcano and the coast were all just all there next to each other in this just beautiful, beautiful place. How many times do reckon you've been out there?
Bob White (19:00.895)
It is beautiful and I'm glad it was clear for you. don't know, somebody asked me this recently, it's probably 50 or 60 times. I've been going once or twice a year lately. And it's just as beautiful on the ground as well. When the weather's bad actually, when the weather's bad it's not very nice but it changes pretty quickly usually. No, it's beautiful and the people are really...
Polymath World (19:13.069)
Yeah, wow, what a...
Polymath World (19:23.265)
Yeah, that's just wonderful. Yes, I've heard that too.
Bob White (19:27.885)
The people are really nice. I really like Icelandic people actually and we've got some really, really good friends that we've known for many, many years. And I think it's because they are an isolated country really. There's very few of them there, there's 300,000 there and they nearly all know they have a friend of a friend that they know from wherever you meet anybody. And because they're so isolated, they just help each other all the time. And, you know, I've been in...
I've been in a car on a remote track and we'd gone through a river too fast and got some water in the carburettor, which is not a very good thing to do. And we're stalled, we couldn't get going. a couple of cars came along and they're obviously going to a wedding somewhere because they're all dressed in their finery. And you only see a few cars a day, actually. They stopped, they towed us up to the top of the hill, pushed us down, towed us up again, pushed us down until the engine started and off we went. And then they went off to their wedding.
That's just very typical of Icelanders. If you need a bit of help, they'll help you, whatever they're doing. They are lovely people as well.
Polymath World (20:38.817)
Iceland is obviously very famous and important for genetics because they've got a small population and they take that healthcare system very very seriously so genetics wise Iceland's been very very valuable and I keep hoping I'll get a genetics conference in Iceland that I can go to and get funding to go to just so I have an opportunity to visit. But back to Cambridge for a moment. Have you spent a lot of time teaching?
Bob White (21:01.419)
Yes.
Bob White (21:07.819)
Well, yes, I mean, one of the nice things about a university job is you get a mix of things. So you get teaching as well as field trips, as well as research. So I've done my share of teaching. I've also done my share of marking exams, which is my least favourite thing. And now I'm retired. I don't have to mark exams anymore. I think students may think taking exams is pretty horrible. Well, I think the staff think marking exams is pretty horrible as well. It's just...
not much fun. mean when I started they would write their names at the top of it so you knew who it was and you'd mark it. Good for them, they've done well you know or we should have known better than that. But now they're all just anonymous by numbers and so to be honest it's pretty boring marking them actually. But I don't have to do that anymore. But a lot of my teachers have been... Yes, well it comes about when you retire. Yeah a lot of my work has been teaching
Polymath World (21:56.397)
Congratulations.
Bob White (22:04.685)
graduate students, PhD students, so I've been really really lucky to have a huge co- great cohort of PhD students. I think the last count was over 50 and you know a lot of them have become family friends as well through the year because you spend a lot of time you know if you're away on field work you're all crammed in a hut together and you're cooking and eating and sleeping together and working together and you get to know people and that's really nice and
a few cases I've got to know their parents as well quite well because their parents are rigged up and say how's little Johnny doing you know. You know enough to be friends well not not just that but just to just to be friends with them really so yeah so that's been a huge privilege actually so most of my teachers been through graduate students rather than undergraduates but but both have their both are fun yeah.
Polymath World (22:41.719)
You
Polymath World (22:49.517)
Lovely.
Polymath World (22:57.997)
Terrific.
Polymath World (23:02.349)
I'm interested as to what are the big unanswered questions or big areas of interest in geophysics sort of now and going forward what are the sort of the big gaps and interesting aspects of the field that are still yet to be discovered do you think you could walk us through the the frontiers perhaps?
Bob White (23:24.683)
Well, I think the big issue is climate change, which is one of the biggest existential threats we face, actually. And it's a threat not to those of us so much in high-income countries, you know, where we're sitting now in Cambridge and Britain. But if you're in a low-income country on the other side of the world, you're the one who will suffer if there's droughts for three years successively, you know, or if there's floods or wildfires or rising sea level.
You don't have the resources to protect yourself from them in the way that we can just build the Thames barrier higher if sea level goes up as we are doing. the ethical issue is that they're the ones who are suffering most, but we're the ones that benefited from burning fossil fuels and caused the problem, really. So I think that's a big moral and ethical question. So it is a frontier.
I think actually it's not so much frontier scientifically because we pretty well understand a lot of these things. The issue now is getting governments to do something about it and for the public to realise that although they think they're only one person, what they do does have an impact as well because what we all do together has a bigger impact. I think climate change, if you go into geology or geophysics, there's a huge important future for that.
Environmental geophysics generally, know, water, clean water to drink is a real issue in many parts of the country and water for irrigation and growing crops, many parts of the world I mean. So that's a big issue that you can go into. I mean, I guess 20 years ago, 30 years ago, everybody would go after geophysics, a lot of people go into the oil industry. Well, that's not happening that much now, but.
A lot of the skills that the oil industry has for multiphase flow underground are needed for the future, know, for geothermal energy, for hydrothermal energy, and maybe storing excess carbon underground, carbon sequestration to get it out of the system. So.
Bob White (25:38.062)
It's a huge area actually earth sciences is so you know I do encourage people to do it because it's it's it's fun It's exciting, but it's really socially relevant as well and really important because you know the way we're going to get out of this fix is is through applying science to the problem as well as getting people to change Those are the two big issues. I think The broader sort of technical thing. Yeah, the broader technical things. We're getting pretty good at
Polymath World (26:01.25)
suddenly.
Bob White (26:08.023)
predicting volcanoes and where eruptions will occur. And generally you can get out of the way of volcanoes, not absolutely always, but generally you can. The thing we can't do is predict earthquakes, but we can know where they occur. We're getting pretty good at knowing where they've occurred now because we have a long record of recording them now. So you can build buildings that don't fall down.
that's perfectly feasible and people die because there's been shoddy building usually because they haven't stuck to building codes which are in force in those countries because they've cut corners. Not always but often that is the case. So earthquake engineering and so on is important. I suspect we never will be able to predict exactly when one is going to happen actually because
There things called critical stress failures, so you build up the stress and you build it up and build it up and suddenly it just fails. So predicting exactly when that failure will happen is really, really difficult and generally not possible, I think. But we can mitigate against it, we can build so things don't fall down. So I think those are big frontiers. I think there's big frontiers on the other planets as well. I think if I was going into it now Mars would be really exciting place to be.
be working because they're now doing the sort of studies that were being done on earth 50 years ago. Just finding out the very basic things about how the planet works and what's happened to the water and where the water might be and so on. So there are interesting academic questions but as always a lot of the academic questions eventually become socially useful answers I guess as well.
Polymath World (28:00.333)
Have you had much crossover with any space science over the years yourself?
Bob White (28:01.517)
Not always, but often.
Bob White (28:09.227)
No, I haven't myself. I mean, I say it's an exciting thing, but the lead time for these space explorations is really long. think that's one of the really difficult things. And you have to work in a team with, you know, hundreds of other people. it's not quite the same as I was describing to you earlier, where just a small group of people could have a major impact.
Although I suppose there are still, you know, somebody has an insight into the data and actually can revolutionise how you understand how one of the planets works. So there is still that opportunity, but the field work, I think, is obviously much more difficult than it is on Earth. So personally, I haven't had that sort of interaction because probably it was happening towards the end of my career, so it wasn't the stage to get into that sort of thing anyway.
But one of the places we work actually in Iceland is where they trained the moon landings, the moon buggies. the terrain is not dissimilar actually. they try out there, make sure the wheels didn't fall off when they went over rugged lava flows and so on. So a lot of the NASA training was done around one area we work in Iceland already.
Polymath World (29:22.338)
Wow
Polymath World (29:27.949)
That's amazing. Yeah, I love watching those old videos of them sort of traipsing around volcanoes, learning to spot different rocks and things like that. You're a fellow of the Royal Society and you were made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1994, so 31 years, amazing. Tell us how that came about and what being a fellow of the Royal Society means and what role does that play in your life and your work?
Bob White (29:36.94)
Hmm.
Bob White (29:56.46)
Well it was very kind that I was elected. I mean it's a slightly mysterious thing because when you're elected you think you know why me and not lots of other people that are also really good and work really hard so it's a privilege and you know I'm very grateful for that. It's done by a small committee who look at various people who have been nominated and get lots of referee comments from around the world saying you know what has this chap done is it?
worth recognising. So that's the process of how it works. I think it's a great organisation because it supports a huge amount of science, supports a lot of postdoctoral appointments. My daughter-in-law, married to my son, actually has Royal Society of Fellowship, which is supporting her in doing her research. And that's been really...
help of her and they're supporting women particularly, well not just women, but they're supporting women who've had career breaks and they sort of take account of that and help them get back into the workplace which is really good because you know in a world where at least 30 years ago the men would just carry on working the women would look after the children it's very hard for women to to advance their careers in the same way as men could so they take account of that and you know I'm
They're really good at doing that. They write really good reports. They lobby government, know, particularly on things like climate change and genetics. You know, how should we regulate some of the genetic possibilities that are coming up? Should we regulate them or how should we regulate them? So I've got a huge regard. It's completely voluntary organization and all these scientists work immensely hard voluntarily.
on various committees and putting forward reports and sort of assessing who they can give awards to and so on. So yeah, it's a good organisation and it's been going a long time. It was founded in the early 1660s under a former Charles, Charles II actually. And it really probably was the start of science as a professional organisation because they published one of the first
Bob White (32:19.479)
journals, one of which is still going since 1660s. So it's got a good track record. It's got a great history behind it. And I think it's done a lot of really good things. I mean, the sad thing is that more people can't be members because it's sort of, or can't be fellows actually, because it's restricted in numbers.
No, it's been a real privilege to be part of the Royal Society and I think as an independent, authoritative scientific body, it's really, really important for our country and wider than just our country in talking about things like climate change and genetic engineering and pollution and all sorts of things like that. The equivalent in the USA is the National Academy of Sciences and they work together quite a lot between them.
Polymath World (33:16.417)
Yeah, incredible. It's, I think, sort of alongside the Nobel Prize or those sorts of things, it's the highest honour for a scientist to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Society. You're also a fellow of the Geological Society, so how long have you been a fellow there and how did that come about?
Bob White (33:34.798)
Yeah, I wouldn't say being in the Royal Society is anywhere close to being a Nobel Prize winner. But it's nice for you to say so. Yeah, I'm a fellow of the Geological Society since I was quite young. That's a bit easier to get into. You just have to pay your subscription really. You can be a fellow. Well, I think they have to take another degree or you are competent in the subject.
Polymath World (33:54.816)
Alright.
Bob White (34:04.203)
Not quite so difficult.
Polymath World (34:04.289)
Yes, that's terrific. We love polymaths here, we love interdisciplinary side of things and you do have a role in the humanities as well. You are the director of the Faraday Institute, also in Cambridge, the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion named after the incredible Michael Faraday, of course, a name many will recognize for his incredible role in the history of science.
So could you tell us what the Faraday Institute is and what your work and role has been with them?
Bob White (34:37.485)
Yes, I founded it with a colleague, Dennis Alexander, the two of us founded it in, I think it was 2006. And we did so really to reach our fellow scientists. He's a biologist and I'm a physical scientist, so we sort of cover the range of science between us, if you like. And we just wanted to be able to tell our fellow scientists that you didn't have to throw your brain away to be a person of faith as well, in our case, Christians.
And that was one of our main objectives really and we purposefully didn't Found it in in a theological Department or a divinity department because all of our scientific colleagues would say well They would say that wouldn't they if they're in divinity and they probably wouldn't listen to us So we founded it outside that and one of the advantages of Cambridge is that has these colleges as does Oxford which are
also polymath, they have people from lots of different subjects and so that was a great place to found it. We actually grew a bit too big for college because our income was getting rather large compared to the college so it unbalanced it so we became independent in 2017 I think it was. So we're an independent charity now. So as I say our main objective is to show you don't...
science and faith go actually hand in hand. think you get a much richer view of the world if you look at it through the eye of science and through the eye of faith as well, then you do look at either on their own. And we do some research, we do quite a lot of education, youth and schools work, published book, think we've, not just us two, but there's been about 140 books published by the Faraday Institute. There's now about 18 people working for it.
And I first Dennis, my colleague, directed it and I was associate director because I was still working as a full time professor of geophysics. Then when he retired, I took over as director. And then when I retired, I've handed on to somebody else who's now the CEO, if you like, the director. But I'm the chair of the trustees, which has the ultimate authority over, guess, as is the case with any charity. So, yeah, so I still do.
Bob White (37:02.957)
quite a lot with them. I give quite a lot of talks on science and faith to schools and other organisations, sometimes around the world still, so I get to see some other places still. And we have a youth and schools work as well, which is quite strong. So it keeps on going. And I think it's doing a useful job showing, as I say, that orthodox or conventional science
has something to say and that faith has something to say about it. And there are some places where they work very closely together and climate change is one of them where the science and the Christian understanding of stewardship of the earth come closely together, work together very closely. So I've been doing that since 2006 now, so I'll probably carry on for a bit and still on gargoyle and then I'll pass on to somebody else.
But it's got well established now and it's I think being a useful body in the world. It records all the seminars and all the lectures. So there's a great catalog all free to download. I think we've had 1.2 million downloads of those over the years which anybody can access. And what you'll find is lots of top scientists from around the world who are also Christians talk about how
Polymath World (38:18.135)
Wow.
Bob White (38:28.641)
talk about their actual science and then how their faith impacts on how they do it and what the results are and so on. So it's great resource if you Google Faraday Institute you can find all these things and there's some short papers you can download on all sorts of topics like the age of the earth and that sort of thing which I think are useful.
Polymath World (38:49.781)
Yes.
Yeah, we had, I spoke to Professor Paul Ewart on this show a few months ago, who's been involved in the past as well. And I've been very impressed with the Faraday Institute from the moment I heard about it, because this isn't a religious sort of proselytizing or evangelistic sort of organisation. It's very much an academic understanding and research organisation. And the quality and the calibre of people you've had who've
lectured and spoken and contributed or written academic articles is staggering. must be one of the, if not the best, organisation for addressing questions about science and religion in the world in terms of the calibre of people. So yes, I echo your encouragement of that. Just in terms of advice for...
for young people listening who would be really interested in getting into geophysics as a discipline. What would you recommend? What advice would you give them?
Bob White (40:00.834)
Well, actually, I'd say this of any academic studies you're doing, know, do what excites you, actually, if you possibly can, if you have that opportunity. But it's good to have a solid ground. If you want to go into science, I'm afraid you have to be quite good at maths. You have to do maths if you want to be a physical scientist. Maybe you're a biological scientist. You might get away with that.
Polymath World (40:23.245)
Biology is for people who aren't great at maths but still want to do science is the running joke.
Bob White (40:31.143)
Yes exactly I didn't quite want to say that but there you go. Yeah so whatever you're doing try and do it as well as you can you know so if you like physics and biology and history do physics and biology and history to be honest because when you get to university you know you just want to follow what is exciting for you there's no point spending your time doing stuff which is tedious but actually having said that I mean there is stuff you have to do which you just
do and there is I mean in research actually you you people look at research see all the highlights and they see the exciting results and actually there's a lot of hard work behind that and there is a lot of grinding along analyzing stuff and dead ends and so on and actually something always told my research students when they were new I'd say you know you've just spent three years learning about all the highlights of all the things people have discovered over the past 30 40 years
Hopefully you'll find something new but it's going to be hard work and tough work and don't get fed up halfway through which most people do because eventually you know in your particular bit that you've chosen you will be the expert in the world on that particular thing. So choosing what you work on is good, so important really to do things that are important and not things that aren't. But to young people yeah just just do whatever you can do as well as you can but do it
you know do things you enjoy as well but if you want to go into physical sciences you have to have a good solid grounding in numerical stuff and computers and that sort of thing because we spend all our time on computers these days so that's helpful to do but just do it as well as you can and do what you enjoy.
Polymath World (42:24.363)
Yeah, absolutely. And if people want to find out more about you, your research, are there any books people can look up or websites they can go to? And for the Faraday Institute as well.
Bob White (42:37.771)
Yeah, well for the Faraday Institute, as I say, if you just Google Faraday Institute, there is a Faraday Institution which does research on batteries. So that's not the one you want, you want the Faraday Institute, but it'd be pretty obvious. And there's all sorts of things there that you can find and you'll find it all. PenSketch is probably one of me on there somewhere. I've written a number of books on science and faith, on climate change, on
Disaster, done one of the things that interests me is, well interests me but I think I can speak into is disasters caused by earthquakes and volcanoes and floods and a Christian response to those. So I've written a number of books which are half science and half faith which you'll find on the Frady Institute book site, there's a shop there which has those listed and I think that's a contribution where I can speak into it from both perspectives.
Because disasters are really hard to understand, aren't they, from a Christian perspective? Why does a good God allow, if he really is sovereign and in control, why does he allow disasters like floods and so on to happen? And the answer is that actually it's usually human failing, human selfishness which causes these natural hazards, if you like, to turn into disasters. And I could give you another...
talk about this for hours to you, but perhaps this isn't the moment for it, but it's in the book actually. And the Bible itself knows a lot about disasters if you look at it. were volcanoes and earthquakes and floods throughout the Bible narrative that the Israelites and Christians had to deal with and did deal with and you can see how they dealt with them and that can be very helpful as well in formulating how we ought to respond to them.
Polymath World (44:05.782)
I'm
Bob White (44:34.377)
As I say, the root cause is human selfishness, which really is sinfulness. It's putting yourself first before other people. And so if the building falls down because. Do another one, yes, on that I'd love to. Yeah.
Polymath World (44:43.553)
perhaps if we do a
Polymath World (44:47.991)
Yeah, we should do a roundtable discussion on science and religion, perhaps, someday and have you on to talk about that. That would be really fascinating with someone else, perhaps with Dennis Alexander. That would be really enjoyable. And if people want to just...
Bob White (44:56.972)
Yeah.
Bob White (45:05.314)
Yeah, he could do a lot of other things.
Polymath World (45:08.269)
Yes, between the two of you you could have the physics and the biology. If people want to find you yourself, do you have your own website or is it a Cambridge Department one?
Bob White (45:13.153)
Yes.
Bob White (45:20.941)
I don't have my own website, no, but if you look under Earth Sciences in Cambridge, I think there's an entry for me. Of course, a lot of my academic papers are published in academic journals and probably not the most exciting place to look for them, although there are some in things like Scientific American and so on, which are a bit more accessible. But yeah, but you'll you'll find them eventually if you want to.
Polymath World (45:31.159)
Yes.
Polymath World (45:46.187)
Yeah, thank you so much for taking us on this this whistle stop tour through geophysics and your really interesting career. I'm thoroughly jealous of all the places you've been to and the things that you've seen. I really appreciate your time today, Professor. Thank you so much for joining me.
Bob White (46:01.277)
It's pleasure, so we'll speak again sometime I hope.
Polymath World (46:05.078)
Absolutely.
Bob White (46:06.914)
Yeah, okay