Matthew Cobb

But it was all these, it covered absolutely everything, you know, from flowers to fairy stories to explanations of science.

And in particular, it was aimed at kind of preteens, and it is so clearly written.

And that's what he took from it.

Not only the ideas, including the, you know, because it was a British book about the empire and all the rest of it, but the clarity, how to write clearly and simply words.

about science.

And that's what he always tried to do.

And yeah, that was definitely the most important book he read.

And then the two inspirations that led him to make this shift in 1947.

So you've got to remember, he's born in 1916.

He started a PhD on what he described as the most boring topic in the world, which is the viscosity of water under pressure, because he was a physics student.

Starts that in 1939.

War breaks out.

His lab gets shut.

A German landmine falls on the equipment he built, so it was all out of... Couldn't be done anyway.

He then does various things during the war.

He works on mines, making mines that blow up ships.

After the war, he does something rather mysterious that I still don't know about, really, in naval intelligence.

And then in 1947, he's read one Linus Pauling talk about X-ray crystallography, and he's also read Schrödinger's What is Life?, which again says you can use physical methods to get at the gene, to understand biology.

And he decides there are two things he's really interested in, what he wants to study.

He wants to understand the nature of consciousness, and he wants to understand the nature of life.