Flowers International Podcasts

Scientists are sometimes accused of diminishing the beauty of the natural world by explaining it in terms of scientific ideas and processes. Not so, according to the late Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who says knowledge about the inner structure of flowers only adds to the excitement, mystery and awe of nature. A very passionate Richard Feynman will be In Conversation with himself this week. TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Good evening and now for some more movies or in fact a movie about a man. Richard Feynman in conversation with himself. Hello, Im Robyn Williams so why listen once more to this legend of Caltech, Los Alamos and the topless bar. Why? To note the last couple of nights of the play QED starring Henri Szeps of the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney with other dates we hope elsewhere in Australia. Its all about a man with pithiest down to earth approach to everything, especially education. Hes the most extraordinary person youre likely to hear on those subjects. Dick Feynman died long ago but not before he was recorded on film and sound tape. This is from the Science Show I broadcast way back in which Dr Feynman, Nobel Laureate talks in conversation to himself. Richard Feynman: All the kids were playing in the field and then one kid said to me see that bird, what kind of a bird is that? And I said I havent the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is. He says its a brown throated thrush or something, he says, your father doesnt tell you anything. But it was the opposite, my father had taught me looking at a bird he says, he said you know what that is, its a brown throated thrush but in Portuguese its a (pronunciation) in Italian a (pronunciation) he says in Chinese its a (pronunciation) in Japanese a (pronunciation) etc. Now you know all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when youve finished with all that youll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird, you only know about humans and different places and what they call the bird. Now he says lets look at the bird and what its doing. He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it, I remember this, it had a ball in it and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved. So I went to my father and I said say Pop, I noticed something, when I pull the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, it rushes to the back of the wagon and when Im pulling along and I suddenly stop the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. And I said why is that? And he said, that, nobody knows he said, the general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard. And he says, this tendency is called inertia when nobody knows why its true. Now thats a deep understanding, he doesnt give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something which I learned very early. He went on to say if you look close youll find the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon but its the back of the wagon that youre pulling against the ball, but the ball stands still or as a matter of fact from the friction starts to move forward really and doesnt move back. So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways and seeing that indeed he was right, the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forward, it moved backward relative to the wagon but relative to the sidewalk it was moved forward a little bit. Its was just that the wagon caught up with it. So thats the way I was educated by my father, no pressure, just lovely interesting discussion. MUSIC I have a friend who was an artist and he has sometimes taken a view which I dont agree with very well. Hell hold up a flower and say look how beautiful it is and Ill agree and he says as I and others can see how beautiful this is. But you as a scientist all take this apart and it becomes dull and I think that hes kind of nutty. First of all the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions which also have a beauty, I mean its not just beauty at this dimension of one centimetre there is also beauty in smaller dimensions. The inner structure, also the processes the fact that the colours and the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question - does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms, why is it that it is aesthetic, all kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds - I dont understand how its suppressed. Robyn Williams: As a junior physicist Richard Feynman was asked to go to Los Alamos to join the Manhattan Project to build the bomb, it was an enormous step. Richard Feynman: It was a completely different kind of a thing, it would mean that I would have to stop the research in what I was doing which was my lifes desire to take time off to do this which I felt I should do in order to protect civilisation of you want OK. So that was what I had to debate with myself, my first reaction was I didnt want to get interrupted in my normal work there was also the problem of course of any oral thing involving war I wouldnt have much to do with it. But it kind of scared me when I realised what the weapon would be, since it might be possible there was nothing that I knew that indicated if we could do it, they couldnt do it and therefore it was a very important to try and co-operate. With regard to moral questions I do have something I would like to say about it because the original reason to start the project which I had was the Germans were a danger, started me up on a process of action which was to try and develop this first system in Princeton then at Los Alamos was to try to make the bomb work. All kinds of attempts to redesign to make it a worse bomb and with any project like that you continue to work trying to get success having decided to do it. But what I did immorally I would say was not to remember the reason I said I was doing it so that when the reason changed which was that Germany was defeated, not a single thought came to my mind at all about that, that that meant now that I had to reconsider why I am continuing to do this. I simply didnt think OK. The only reaction I remember, perhaps I was blinded by my own reaction was a very considerable elation and excitement and there were parties, and people got drunk, and a tremendously interesting contrast of what was going on in Los Alamos at the same time as what was going on in Hiroshima. I was involved with this happy thing and also drinking sitting on the bonnet of a jeep and playing drums and excitement running all over Los Alamos at the same time as the people were dying and struggling in Hiroshima. I had a very strong reaction after the war of a peculiar nature, it may be from just the abominance of it, or maybe for some other psychological reasons Id just lost my wife or something but I remember being in New York with my mother in a restaurant, right after, immediately after and thinking about New York and I knew how big the bomb at Hiroshima was, how big an area it covered and so on. And I realised from where we were on 59th street if you dropped one on 34th street it would spread all the way out to here and all these people would be killed, and all the things would be killed and that wasnt only one bomb available but it was easy to continue to make them. And therefore that things were sort of doomed because already it appeared to me very early, earlier than to others who were more optimistic that international relations and the way people were behaving was no different that it had ever been before and that it was just going to go out the same way as any other thing and I was sure therefore that it was going to be used very soon. So I felt very uncomfortable and thought, really believed that it was silly, I would see people building a bridge and I would say they dont understand, I really believe that it was senseless to make anything because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway. But they didnt understand that and I had this very strange view of any construction I would see, I would always think how foolish they are to try and make something. So I was really in a kind of depressive condition. MUSIC To do the really good kind of physics work you do need absolute solid lengths of time. When youre putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember you get this feeling of very much like building those houses of cards and each of the cards is shaky and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again, you dont know how you got there and you have to build them up again. And if youre interrupted and kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together you put the stuff together, its quite a tower and its easy to slip, it needs a lot of concentrating, that is solid time to think. And if youve got a job in administrating anything like that then you dont have the solid time. So I have invented another myth for myself that Im irresponsible, Im actively irresponsible I tell everybody, if anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions no, Im irresponsible, I dont give a damn about the students. Of course I give a damn about the students but I know that somebody else will do it. And I take the view let George do it, a view that youre not supposed to take OK because thats not right. But I do that because I like to do physics and I want to see whether I can still do it and so I am selfish OK, I want to do my physics. Im not responsible but other people think Im able to do, I dont have to be good because they think Im going to be good and somehow I could relax about this and I thought to myself I havent done anything important and Im never going to do anything important. But I used to enjoy physics and mathematical things and because I used to play with it and I used to do things for the fun of it and only that afternoon when I was eating lunch some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria which has a blue medallion on the plate, the Cornell sign and as he threw up the plate and it came down it wobbled and the blue thing went around. And I wondered, it seemed to me the blue thing went around faster than the wobble and I wondered what the relation was between the two so I was just playing - no importance at all. So I played around with the equations of motion of rotating things and I found out that if the wobble is small the blue thing goes around twice as fast as the wobble goes around. And then I tried to figure out if I could see why that was directly from Newtons laws instead of from the complicated equations and I worked that out for the fun of it. And then I went to Hans Bader and said hey, by the way Ill show you something amusing and I explained this to him and he said to me thats very amusing and interesting but what is the use of it? I said that doesnt make any difference if its of any use Im just doing it for fun of it. And then Bob Wilson whos the head of the nuclear lab had some kind of instinct or something because it was the same day that he called me and he told me that when they hire a professor at the university its their responsibility what the professor does and its their risk and if he doesnt do anything, or he doesnt accomplish anything its not his thing to worry about that. They have taken the risk, theyve put him in the environment and I should do whatever I want, amuse myself, or whatever I want. So with that double combination I could relax, somehow I was getting out from some psychological problem and I relaxed and started to play as I said with the rotation. This rotation lead me to a similar problem, the rotation of the spin of an electron according to Diracs equation and that led me back into quantum electro dynamics which was the problem Id been working on and I kept continuing now to play with it in the relaxed fashion I had originally done and its just like getting a cork out of a bottle, everything just poured out. I, by the way, in very short order worked the things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize. Speaker: Was it worth a Nobel Prize? Richard Feynman: I dont know anything about the Nobel prize, I dont understand what its all about, or whats worth what and if the people in the Swedish Academy decided X, Y or Z wins a Nobel Prize then so be it. I wont have anything to do with the Nobel Prize its a pain in the neck. I dont like honours. I am appreciated for the work that I did and if people appreciate it and I notice other physicists use my work, I dont need anything else, I dont think theres any sense to anything else. I dont see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decided this work is noble enough to receive a prize. Ive already got the prize, the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it, those are the real things, the honours are unreal to me. I dont believe in honours, it bothers me, honours bother me, honours is epaulettes, honours is uniforms, my pop brought me up this way, I cant stand it, it hurts me. When I was in high school one of the first honours I got was to be a member of the Arista which was a group of kids who got good grades and everybody wanted to be a member of the Arista. And when I got into the Arista I discovered that what they did in their meetings was to sit around and discuss who else was worthy to join this wonderful group that we are. So we sat around trying to decide who it was who would get to be allowed into this Arista - this kind of thing bothers my psychologically for one or another reason, I dont understand myself - honours. And from that day to this it has always bothered me. I had trouble when I became a member of the National Academy of Science and I had ultimately to resign because there was another organisation most of whose time was spent in choosing who was illustrious enough to be allowed to join us in our organisation. Including such questions as we physicists have to stick together because theres a very good chemist that they are trying to get in and we havent got enough room. Whats the matter with chemists? The whole thing was rotten because the purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honour OK - I dont like honours. Robyn Williams: And youre listening to In Conversation with me, Robyn Williams and some thoughts from the great Dr Richard Feynman on life, living and being smart. Richard Feynman: Imagine that the gods are playing some great game like chess, lets say a chess game and you dont know the rules of the game but youre allowed to look at the board at least from time to time in a little corner perhaps. And from these observations you try to figure out what the rules are of the game, what the rules of the pieces moving and you might discover after a bit for example that when theres only one bishop around on the board that the bishop maintains its colour. And later on you might discover the law for the bishop is that it moves on the diagonal which would explain the law that you understood before that it maintains its colour. And that would be analogous that we discover one law and then later find a deeper understanding of it then things can happen, everything is going good, youve got all the laws, it looks very good and then all of a sudden some strange phenomenon occurs in some corner and you begin to investigate and have to look for it, its castling, something you didnt expect. By the way in fundamental physics always try to investigate those things which we dont understand the conclusions, we are not trying to check all the time our conclusions, we have checked them enough OK, the thing that doesnt fit is the thing thats most interesting. The part that doesnt go according to what you expected. Also you can have revolutions in physics after youve noticed that the bishops maintain their colour and they go along the diagonals and so on for such a long time and everybody knows that thats true and you suddenly discover one day in some chess game that the bishop doesnt maintain its colour, it changes its colour. Only later do you discover a new possibility that the bishop is captured and the pawn went all the way down to the queens end to produce a new bishop - that can happen but you didnt know it. And so its very analogous to the way I was, either sometimes look positively, keep on working and all of a sudden some little gimmick shows that theyre wrong and then we have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop change of colour happened and gradually learn the new rule that explains it more deeply. Unlike the chess game though in the case of the chess game the rules become more complicated as you go along but in the physics, when you discover new things, it looks more simple. It appears on the whole to be complicated because we learn about a greater experience. That is we learn about more particles and new things and so the laws look complicated again. But if you realise all the time whats kind of wonderful that is if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience every once and a while we have these integrations in which everything is pulled together in a unification which turns out to be simpler than it looked before. And what Im working on in physics right now is a special problem which weve come up against. You know that everything is made out of atoms, weve got that far already and most people know that already. And that the atom has a nucleus with electrons going around, the behaviour of the electrons on the outside, the laws for it are well understood as far as we can tell in this quantum electro dynamics that I told you about. And after that was evolved then the problem was how does the nucleus work, how are the particles indirect, how do they hold together? One of the by products was to discover fission and make a bomb but investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task. At first it was thought that it was an exchange of some sort of particles inside which were invented by Yukawa called pions and it would be predicted if you hit protons against the protons in one of the particles in the nucleus, against a nucleus, it would knock out such pions. And sure enough such particles came out, not only pions came out but other particles and we began to run out of names kaons, and sigmas, and lambda and so on. These are all called hadrons now and as we increased the energy and the reaction got more and more different kinds until there were hundreds of different kinds of particles then the problem was of course doing all this - this period is from 1950 up until the present, was to find the pattern behind it and there seemed to be very many interesting patterns amongst the particles. Until a theory was evolved to explain these patterns that all of these particles were really made of something else, that they were made of a thing called quarks, three quarks for example would form a proton, a proton is one of the products of a nucleus, another one is a neutron. The quarks came in a number of varieties, in fact at first only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks, they were called U type, D type, S type. Two Us and a D made a proton, two Ds and a U made a neutron. If they were moving a different way inside they were some other particle and so on. Then the problem came what is exactly the behaviour of the quarks and what holds them together? And a theory was thought of which is a very close analogy to quantum electro dynamics not exactly the same but very close in which the quarks are like the electron and the photons which go between the electrons which makes them attract each other electrically were called gluons. The mathematics was very similar but theres a few terms slightly different. The difference in the form of the equation that were guessed at were guessed by principles by such beauty and such simplicity that isnt arbitrary, its very, very determined. Now unlike electro dynamics two electrons can be pulled apart as far as you want, in fact when they are very far away their force is weakened. If this were true and if these were made out of quarks you would have expected that when you hit things together hard enough the quarks would come out. But instead of that when youre doing an experiment with enough energy that quarks could come out, instead of that you found a big jet, that is all particles going about the same direction and they are all hadrons, no quarks. And it was clear what was required was that when the quark comes out it kind of makes these new pairs of quarks and they come in little groups and make hadron. The question is why is it so different in electro dynamics? How do these small term differences, these little terms that are different in the equation produce such different effects, entirely different effects? In fact it was very surprising to most people that this would really come out, at first you would think the theory was wrong. But the more it was study the more clear it became that its very possible that these extra terms would produce these effects. Now we were in a position thats different in history than at any other time in physics - its always different. We have a theory, a complete and definite theory of all of these hadrons and we have an enormous number of experiments and lots and lots of details but why cant we test the theory right away to find out if its right or wrong? Because what we have to do is calculate consequences of the theory, if this theory is right what should happen? And this time the difficulty is in the first step, if the theory is right what should happen is very hard to figure out. The mathematics needed to figure out what the consequences of this theory are turned out to be at the present time insuperably difficult right and therefore obvious what my problem is. My problem is to try and develop a way of getting numbers out of this theory, to test it. I spent a few years trying to invent mathematical things that would permit me to solve the equations and I didnt get anywhere. Then I decided that in order to do that I must first understand more or less how the answer probably looks, in other words people didnt even understand roughly how it worked. And so Ive been working most recently, in the last year or two, on understanding roughly how it works, not quantitatively yet with the hope that in the future that rough understanding can be refined into a precise mathematic algorithm to get from the theory to the particles. You see were in a funny position, its not that were looking for the theory, weve got the theory but were at the step in science where we need to compare the theory to experiment by seeing what the consequences are and checking it. Were stuck in seeing what the consequences are and that is my aim, its my desire to work out what the consequences of this theory are. Its a kind of a crazy position to be in to have a theory that you cant work out the consequences of, I cant stand it, I have to figure it out. Robyn Williams: The remarkable Dr Richard Feynman. His books are still available and the play QED at the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney is nearing the end of its run - do try to catch it with Henri Szepps. Next week, another amazing American, Dr Peter Bernhardt of St Louis in Missouri on how plants got their god-like names. Production by Kyla Slaven, Im Robyn Williams.

These days the carrot and stick approach can be applied to parenting or prison inmates or even employees, but its origins are, of course, in trying to get a horse or donkey to comply with human commands. TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Good evening; and let me ask you straight away, do you respond more willingly to a smack on the bottom or to tender loving enticements? Hello, Im Robyn Williams and this evening Im in conversation with Professor Paul McGreevy, who has just written and published a book about that, appropriately called Carrots and Sticks. But Dr McGreevy is concerned here about animals, not us, though the implications may be right for humans as well. So, Paul, your subject really is animal training, and I must say Ive heard lots of stories about cows being far more productive and willing if talked to sweetly and even stroked instead of being hit with sticks. Is this right? Paul McGreevy: If you put the emphasis on carrots and think about what can motivate the animal to be there, including food but also attention, you can scratch cows and lower their heart rates, it can be quite a useful interaction for a human and a cow to have. And of course youre releasing pressure from the udder. So there are a number of things that motivate an animal such as a high yielding dairy cow to go into that space. Her stress levels, the physiological response to any distress of forcing her into that space, will be reflected in her ability to let down milk and produce good milk throughout the day between the one milking and the next. So bringing stress levels down in production animals is incredibly important, and we are beginning to recognise so many ways in which weve been doing animals a disservice by forcing them, getting the job done, forcing them into a certain space or context and losing the opportunity to gentle them into that space. Robyn Williams: This isnt just the kind of semi sentimental modern view that occasionally critics apply to bringing up kids, where you just go too gentle and you know they eventually get out of control. What youre saying is that animals do respond to that kind of quiet attention. Paul McGreevy: The production animals that were thinking of, if we can bring their stress levels down, we can look for a better product. Another example is in pork production, if you stress pigs out on the way to the slaughter house they will produce pale, soft, exudative pork, PSE pork. And so the emphasis now is on keeping the pigs calm as they travel up the ramp into the truck, calm as they are unloaded and calm as they make their way to the slaughter unit, and all of that produces a better product. So theres a benefit for the producers and for the animals. Robyn Williams: I want to find out the difference between the kind of legendary horse whisperer type trainer, which is almost beyond our normal capabilities, and people like the rest of us and how much we can go in for everyday training using common sense. Do you think that we have been misled by the whisperer kind of syndrome, so that we dont think that we can apply what normal people would want to get on with anyway? Paul McGreevy: Well part of what Carrots and Sticks does, it breaks down the principles of animal training and allows us to see a process called negative reinforcement, where you strengthen a behaviour, strengthen the response, you reinforce it by removing something, and thats where the negative term comes into the title. So what can we remove from a horses world if we want to see more of what its just done? And what we do generally to remove pressure, when we ride a horse and it responds appropriately to tension in the rein we reward it by removing that discomfort in the mouth, we relax the rein. In the same way if we want the horse to move to the left, we apply the right leg until its moved and then release that pressure immediately. The horse whisperers have taken it a step further, the pressure they apply is psychological, they can stare at a horse in a certain way, and we think its a predatorial analogue, and apply pressure that way and when the horse makes the appropriate response they take that pressure away. So its still negative reinforcement, we can still use the principles of learning theory to explain whats going on. Its the subtlety with which these guys work which is amazing. Robyn Williams: And its legit that whispering works? Paul McGreevy: Well, it was called whispering because years ago the shaman would come into town and sort out this tricky stallion that had been killing people by going into the stable, shutting the doors and keeping the secrets to himself, and he would emerge with this calm, tractable animal. And people were forgiven for thinking that he was whispering to them. But what he was doing was applying the principles of negative reinforcement; if he wanted the horse to come to him calmly he would take the pressure away when it came to him calmly. If the horse was aggressive then he would chase it and he was applying the principle of negative reinforcement. So we can see the basis of what he was doing was entirely legitimate, the practice is exquisite in its subtlety and the latest wave of horse whisperers, the new age horse trainers, have taught ethologists like me to look closely at what they are doing in their practice and begin to dissect the subtleties of it. We know that horses communicate with one another through minute signals for instance of the ear, the pinna of the ear. We cant do that, our ears are immobile, we cant speak horse and its beguiling to think that we can but I think we would be misled if we believed we were really speaking horse. We can make our signals, our body language, the use of our arms for instance or our eyes, very subtle, as subtle as horses are with one another, and we can create a very low-pressure environment for the horses to learn in. Robyn Williams: I can understand that if the horses ears are flat its probably frightened, but what other kind of signals can you read from what the horses ears are doing? Paul McGreevy: The horses ears have got 16 muscles to move them, so there are so many permutations of what the horse can do with its ears. It can show where its looking, it can show its point of attention, it can keep one ear forward and one ear to the side to show it has split its attention. It can put its ears back to show that its about to be aggressive, it can shoot its ears back in a slightly more flattened fashion when its really trying to get out of trouble. So we think that ear position may have evolved from a bid to keep the ears safe, because they are very delicate structures. Keeping them out of the way could be part of a process for keeping them safe during antagonistic or aggressive encounters. And then it became stylised or ritualised and can be used as a threat, and we think that some horses are very good at making hollow threats, they are very good at bluffing, and theres almost the suggestion that some families of mares and fillies can pass on this culture of a very effective threatening process, a threatening mechanism that isnt necessarily a true reflection of their strength or their fundamental aggression tendencies. Robyn Williams: Well, Paul McGreevy, one of the delights of your book is, apart from the ideas in chapters, youve got lots of case histories. I want to go first of all to Bob the sheep, I had no idea that sheep could be so aware. Could you tell the story of Bob and what he might be aware of as hes wandering around the field? Paul McGreevy: Well Bob is a Devon Long Wool at a show farm in Devon in the UK. Hes a ram with very twisted curly hair and has attracted the name Bob because of Bob Marley, his dreadlocks apparently are evoking Marleyesque images. And he has been trained as part of a display to go to a certain spot that has on this podium the name of his breed, and hes accompanied on to the stage by various other, perhaps 20 other breeds of sheep, and all these rams go straight to their appointed spots, standing beside the plaque bearing their breed name. And thats all very charming to look at because these rams come from all angles and suddenly they appear on stage in the right order. But they have been trained to expect to feed there and to feed only there, theres a small receptacle of sheep pellets at each station and they are trained that they will not be able stay still and feed if theyre not in their correct spot. And this really highlights the importance of feeding stations and animal training. Ive learned a lot talking to trainers over the years about the importance of training animals to expect food in certain spots. Bobs a great example because its a very simple behaviour he had to learn -- A to B, essentially -- but were charmed by the fact that these animals have different Bs. The same principle of using a feeding station is what we see in marine mammal training a lot of the time. If you think about the seal, if you watch its often given its fish reward, some of them love squid, its given its reward at one particular spot and so the behaviours between one feed and the next might vary depending on the cue the trainer is giving, but the animal is always fed in a certain spot and thats a safety consideration, because an angry seal can give a very nasty and highly infected bite. So its important for health that the trainers ensure the animal is always going to one spot to get its reward -- and you dont want to get in the way of an angry seal. Robyn Williams: I can imagine. Back to the sheep in the field. Youd imagine that all they are doing is standing around and chewing all day, but in fact they can be discriminatory and tell which car motor or tractor motor is coming towards them, because one of them -- and Im sure they cant necessarily tell the brand -- but they can discern the sound because that particular sound often is associated with feed. Paul McGreevy: Thats right and thats a bit of a surprise, isnt it, because grass doesnt make a noise, so innately we wouldnt assume that the ethology of the sheep links sounds with food outcomes. But this is a great example of classical or Pavlovian conditioning where simply the links made between the predictors, the stimuli that predicts the arrival of food in this case and the subsequent arrival of the food. So its a very simple link between what happened before the food and the food arriving, and we can work out from looking at different species how good their discrimination actually is. So learning theory is used in laboratories that study the perception abilities of animals. For instance, you could work out what the frequencies of sounds that sheep were able to discriminate between, and the frequencies that they werent able to discriminate between, and that tells a lot about the way the animals see the sound in general. Robyn Williams: Well what about sight? Because it turns out that sheep can tell one face from another. Paul McGreevy: Thats right, thats the work from Cambridge, and very interesting that they can recognise familiar sheep faces and familiar human faces as well. So there are faces in the mob and its important for them to work out whether they want to spend time with that face and that group of faces. So there are cohorts of animals in social groups that gravitate to one another. And they will defend those companions as a resource, so its important that they know who they are dealing with. The counter to that is social flocks of birds in massive groups, when you think about broiler birds and the meat birds that provide poultry for our tables, provide chicken meat, theyre housed in groups of 10,000, so they really struggle to keep on top of whos around them. And we think thats part of why they begin to peck each other's feathers, thats the nature of overcrowding, It starts to compromise the animals fitness and they are unable to manage their social groups. Robyn Williams: Yes, the flock should be something like 20 at the most instead of 10,000. Paul McGreevy: Well thats an ongoing study, yes, and its been suggested that we can select animals that are more tolerant of these conditions and theres a lot of energy going into selecting animals that tolerate commercial production conditions -- with another counter argument that says we should change the conditions, not the animals. Robyn Williams: Another case history, tell us about the octopus and its clever antic. Paul McGreevy: Well Philippa is the octopus in this book, shes a common octopus but we wont hold that against her. And shes got an ability to take the lid off a jar to get a crab snack from within it. This is a very easy behaviour to train because, as we know, the cephalopods, the octopus and squid, are very good at solving problems. We think thats because they are good at preying on crabs and crabs are quite tricky, they are certainly tricky to break into. So once youve solved the problem of grabbing your crab youve got the problem of getting the meat from within it and that involves various twisting motions with the legs. And they are the attributes that you see in Philippa when shes taking the lid off a jar, so you simply present the jar with crab in it, crab meat, not the whole crab, oh you cant put a whole crab in anymore, and she habituates to find her food there very quickly. She learns the association as well thats it not going to hurt her, shes obturating to it and its a good reliable source of food and then you just place a lid on it very loosely and she just has to knock it off, then gradually you tighten the lid and she has to put some effort into it. This is an interesting form of environment enrichment, making food more difficult to acquire is one of the clever ways in which zoo keepers can enrich their animals environment. Robyn Williams: Yes, its been used quite a lot in zoos around Australia, from Perth to Taronga, to Melbourne, and the animals seem to enjoy the game. But tell me the story, talking about finding food, of one of the pictures in your book of Betty the crow. And this is something weve mentioned before on air in these programs, of something that was actually discovered by accident in Oxford where they were filming the crows and they had an implement which was supposed to enable the male crow to go and find the food. It had a hook in it and the male crow went off leaving Betty without an object, a tool, and she actually then bent the wire that had been left there by accident to exactly the right shape to be able to dig out the food from the little tube. Now this is extraordinary stuff which they discovered because they happened to leave the film running in the Oxford lab, so it was a fluke, discovering this. Now the corvids, or the crows, that sort of group are bloody intelligent, arent they? Paul McGreevy: Yes, Bettys a Caledonian crow and the use of tools by that particular species of crow has been widely celebrated and its probably as you say just the tip of the iceburg. And we know there are many other species and many other birds that are beginning to show us that when we look closely and ask the right questions that they will use tools. And what I suppose is really exciting about some of this research is that some of the behaviours that birds will show are counter intuitive. Bettys use of crafted tool is wonderful that she was using her own work and fashioning her own tool to acquire food. The kias from New Zealand will use an apparatus that requires them to push food away from them to grab it. And thats a really interesting test of accomplishment. Robyn Williams: Now weve met kias often in the mountains and they are big parrots and they wander along the ground with those thin, long beaks and were supposed not to feed them but lots of tourists do and you say the experiment is they have to push the food away. Paul McGreevy: Yes, if you imagine a perspex tube with a piston of sorts inside it and theres a lump of cheese at one end of the piston, the only way to get the piston to travel within the tube is counter-intuitively, is to push the cheese away. The bird wants the cheese but the only way it can access it is to use this piston to push it along the tube of an aperture so it has to do a lot of problem solving and its got to risk the possibility that another kia could say thanks very much, Ill take that while youre pushing it. So its food being pushed away before its acquired is a strong indicator of a number of steps, cognitive steps that the animal has taken. So its very impressive. Kias are amazing birds, theyve been likened to Gonzo with the enormous beak, Gonzo from the Muppet Show, these birds are very, very good at investigating their environment. But the way that the kia explores its environment has, we think, accounted for their latest nasty habit which is to hang around abattoirs. The were hanging around abattoirs to feed on offal and, unfortunately, some kias have cut out the middle man and are now pecking at live sheep that are corralled before slaughter. So their ability to work out where the offal was coming from has created that problem for abattoir managers and its meant that the kia is now seen as a pest in these localities. Robyn Williams: Oh, raiding the sheep -- how amazing. Now that brings up a question I suppose, for we who have to train animals domestically, because they are just pets, not just pets, pets are more than just pets. But Ive been accused by people who know me of being too much laissez faire, in other words giving the animals free rein, especially the border collies, you know they are incredibly bright, but like training and are tremendously responsive to guidance and instead of...if you leave them go they can become wonderfully indulgent and hard to be with. But then you take the other extreme, you train them too much, you feel that youre somehow being unkind to them. What really would you say from your book is guidance for the everyday person who is living with animals in a normal domestic house? I suppose it depends very much on the animal but nonetheless this difference between carrot and stick. What really is the lesson? Paul McGreevy: Well there are a number of lessons, a very strong lesson for me when talking with these trainers was that two characteristics kept popping out, and they are timing and consistency. If you get your timing right you know when to give the rewards, and thats critical because you can end up rewarding the wrong behaviour. If youre consistent, youre consistent in the way you deliver commands and youre consistent in your body language. Weve talked about the nuances that horses can pick up, most of the animals were training have got reasonably good eyesight and if we change our body language when were issuing one command and repeating the same command but with a shift in body language, then the animal has to discriminate. Do you really mean sit or do you mean lie down? Is there a significance to the shift that youve made without ever realising it? So the best trainers have this incredible consistency about their body language and the way they move around animals. In terms of how much carrot and how much stick, I really like to see animals trained with lots of carrots and the elegant training comes when you know how to manipulate and motivate animals so they really want that carrot. An example would be toys, the use of toys in dog training is booming, which is great news for dogs. Getting a dog to want that toy is an art that some people have and some people seem to struggle to find. Some people are frankly dull when it comes to working with dogs, they dont really know how to get the dog fired up. Other people know how to engage with a toy so that the dog will really want that toy. So the use of carrots has to be couched in those elegant terms of knowing how to get the animal motivated for the carrot and we can call the carrot any primary reinforcer. Anything the animals evolved to want or evolved to seek and evolved to value, so it can go from toys to food, to play, to shelter. So there are a number of things that animals will work for and we need to know how to use those properly. The problem with sticks is that punishment per se just means a reduction in the probability of a behaviour emerging or popping up again. So simply by saying no, if 'no' means something you can punish an animal, that doesnt mean youre beating it around the head with a three-by-two, its simply meaning that you have punished it, youve suppressed the behaviour. Clearly if animals habituate to that you have to use a bigger stick, and so people who march down the road of using punishment as a way of modifying animal behaviour find they are really having to lay into their animals after a while, and most animals will learn to avoid people who do that. So we cant advocate the use of physical punishers because animals habituate to them and the animals learn to avoid any cues that tell them that punishment is about to occur. So the environment in which punishment has occurred changes the animals willingness to explore it, and we recognise the importance of exploring the environment to nurture new behaviours. A good trainer has to have a comfortable animal thats prepared to take some risks through trial and error, some different approaches to solve problems. And you can think of every good trainer as being someone who gives the animal a problem, its a slightly different problem to the last time it was trained for a specific behaviour but the problem is for the animals, how do I get this environment to give me what I want. And the good trainer, the elegant trainer, has made a slight shift in the ante and is directing the animal, guiding the animal, as you say, to offer a bit more. Robyn Williams: And its that little bit more that counts a lot. I was In Conversation with Associate Professor Paul McGreevy, whos based at the University of Sydney Vet School and whose new book is called Carrots and Sticks, which is published by Cambridge. Next week I shall be In Conversation with a legend of physics. In fact hell be in conversation with himself, the late Richard Feynman on bongos, on the Manhattan Project and going to the woods with dad. Im Robyn Williams.

The late Grote Reber is recognised as both the father of radio astronomy and the first person to build a big dish telescope to explore the cosmos. The American moved from his home in the USA to Tasmania in the 1950s and assisted this country to establish a lead in the field. Now a museum has been opened by the University of Tasmania to commemorate his work and David Fisher takes us on a tour with astronomer Professor John Dickey TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Good evening, Robyn Williams with another conversation, this time coming from Hobart and featuring John Dickey with my colleague David Fisher. But before we join them a question. You know the film The Dish starring the grand old lady the Parkes Telescope which helped bring the world the first steps on the moon back in 1989? Well, who invented those dishes for capturing radio waves from outer space? His name is not well known, partly because he was a bit of a recluse and partly because he chose to keep away from the better-endowed centres in America and Europe. Im talking about Grote Reber who came in Australia in the 1950s and died in 2002. And now theres a brand new museum to display his genius. John Dickey and David Fisher take us on a tour. John Dickey: Well the first thing I want to point out is the construction of the museum itself. Grote Rebers original telescope which he built when he was living in America is now under National Register of Historic Structures in the US and its on display in Greenbank, West Virginia at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. His second great telescope was the one he built at Bothwell in Tasmania which was a huge array of poles and wires, a square kilometre altogether in area. Unfortunately that should really be a historic structure as well but its fallen down and its no longer in existence. But the one bit of it that we do still have is the control building, that is to say his radio shack or his shed from which he controlled and in which he sat when he was observing. So we have that, we got the structure moved here to Mount Pleasant to the observatory and then our objective in building this museum was to work out a way that the general public could visit, learn about Grote Reber, see the inside and outside of his radio shack because its a historic structure and also nave a nice time. That is, not just peek at from outside but really walk around and learn about him. Because its such a certain structure we couldnt change it in any way, we couldnt even drill holes in the wall or anything. So weve built the museum to adjoin the radio shed and if you look around here youll see that the roof overlaps but doesnt actually touch and the walls abutt but they dont actually touch in any way. David Fisher: Yes, its completely separate. John Dickey: Its completely separate but its easy to walk into it from the museum and to see all the stuff that he had in it. The reason that he moved here to Tasmania in 1954 is that our magnetic latitude is almost unique in that there is only two places in the world with the same magnetic latitude as here Tasmania and Northern Canada. Northern Canada is not a very benign place to live so he chose Tasmania. And the reason that magnetic latitude is important is that he was observing at frequencies where the radio waves dont penetrate through the ionosphere except at those particular places where the magnetic field is going straight up from the surface. So there are places like that on the earth and Tasmania happens to be one of them. David Fisher: So the incoming signals get a clear run? John Dickey: So the incoming signals get a more clear run, its not perfect but it makes some difference, yes. David Fisher: So here he is, a mannequin of Grote Reber and with his original equipment, a light going on there and I see hes got headphones on. John Dickey: Yes. In the radio shed he never had any electric power so we got for example his old gas powered lamp, we got some of his radio equipment. Here you can see exactly how he would have looked when he was observing, we have photographs of him when he was observing so we were able to reconstruct that pretty well. David Fisher: Do radio astronomers use headphones today? John Dickey: We dont usually use headphones. Ive known some radio astronomers who love to put on headphones and listen to the signals. Most of the time the signals that we detect sound like a hiss and so theres not much to get. I think the reason that Grote did use headphones is that growing up with radio astronomy, he was the first radio astronomer, he was working at low frequencies where you really can identify sources of interference by what they sound like. The real signals are still just a hiss but the interference which might be lightening strikes, or might be an aircraft, or a car engine, those things make very distinctive sounds and if those are dominating whats coming into the receiver then you want to reject that data. And I think thats why he probably always wore headphones. David Fisher: Now Grote Reber has been considered a genius, why is that? John Dickey: Well he was clearly a genius, if only because of his very broad basic contributions. But his most important contribution was the invention of the radio telescope which is a large parabolic mirror, focusing the radio waves up to a receiver. David Fisher: Why are you giving this so much prominence, I mean Newton had parabolic discs, what did Grote Reber do to forward the use of a parabolic dish? John Dickey: Thats a very insightful comment. Isaac Newton did invent telescopes which had a parabolic mirror rather than just lenses that you look through and so to that extent what Grote was doing was applying that design, the reflecting telescope design of Newtons to the radio waves. But I think what was the most extraordinary contribution there was that Grote simply realised you could collect radio waves from space in the same way that an optical telescope collects light from space. And that was something that no one had hardly conceived of before, no one had thought of how best to do that. People have thought a lot about how best to do that in the 75 years since but no one has really come up with anything better than the steerable paraboloid design which Grote Reber himself built. David Fisher: Now I suppose this is the centrepiece of the museum and that is a model of his telescope? John Dickey: We are very proud of that yes, I think it is a 1 to 5 scale model of Grotes original telescope which is, as we said before, is a large parabola dish parabolic reflector mounted at the focal point is a feed; that is to say it is a antenna which collects the radio waves. Grote invented something called the cavity backed dipole which is now the standard design for all radio telescopes. That was I think never thought of before he first built the first one in 1937. David Fisher: Tell me a little more about Grote Reber the personality, what do we know about him? John Dickey: Well I met him only once, he has some friends who are still here in Tasmania who knew him quite well. He was kind of a loner, he worked at times in big organisations like the National Bureau of Standards but I think he was more creative and more successful when he was working mostly on his own. He did have students at the University of Tasmania, he worked with professors at the University of Tasmania at various stages but his greatest contributions I would say he made working alone. So in a way I think its fair to say Grote Reber is the quintessential example of the truth that we often forget which is that one person can make a huge difference in history. One person working alone you dont necessarily have to work through a huge institution. Most people do of course work through various institutions of one kind or another but Grote Reber was an exception to that rule. David Fisher: Now here is an amazing car with wheels that look like bike tyres and its a little metallic cabin for one person and a roof that flips up. John Dickey: Yes. Grote Reber was interested in everything and certainly a great many things besides radio astronomy. One of the subjects that fascinated him was transport. Way back in the 60s he realised that a petroleum power transportation system like our modern automobiles would not be able to go on forever. Eventually we would have to run out of petrol, we are not quite at that point yet but we are beginning to feel the limits. He was 50 years ahead of his time in that sense. He realised that electrical power would be something that would be renewable and we could design a whole transport system based on that. So he built bicycles and finally this car, which is powered by electricity, it has batteries in it. The best battery technology of his day unfortunately meant that it was pretty heavy and today I think you could build a car like this which would be even much more effective. But he used to drive this around Sandy Bay, Tasmania, when he was living there. David Fisher: Really, whats it made from? John Dickey: Its made of aluminium; it was made by an aerospace corporation in American and was tested in a wind tunnel by them for free. Grote was good at getting people to do interesting things more or less at cost, without having to pay a lot, and the company, I think it was Grumman that build this and tested it in the early 60s, did it in part just out of interest for their own work. David Fisher: And theres a bicycle here as well but thats not electric is it? John Dickey: Thats powered by gasoline, petrol and he was very interested in making petrol engines more efficient, particularly for bicycles, so he had three bicycles which he fitted with petrol motors at different times and we have one in our museum here and we have his all-electric car which he called Pixie. David Fisher: Now over here weve got some, these just look like normal fluorescent tubes, why are these in the museum? John Dickey: They are fairly old-fashioned normal fluorescent tubes from a kitchen lamp which was on the ceiling of his kitchen. Grote Reber meticulously documented all the data from his life, not only his scientific data but every bit of his life. So for example he knew that the fluorescent lamps were guaranteed for a year and he carefully recorded the date that he put them in and the date he took them out over a span of some 20 years. So we have boxes and boxes, he didnt throw them away after that, he kept them for the sake of the data for the lifetimes that he was recording. David Fisher: And claiming on guarantees no doubt? John Dickey: Well he was a very careful purchaser lets put it that way. He would always strive to save money on everything, which I think might have gotten compulsive for him at the end but at the same time we can all look up to that. He got his moneys worth, lets put it that way. David Fisher: What else was he documenting, what other elements of his life was he documenting? John Dickey: Well he documented pretty much everything, I have not seen myself but I have been told that on the wall of his toilet he documented even the frequency and the duration of his own body movements. This is some of his equipment that we found. David Fisher: Reading glasses... John Dickey: Notice that he used his pencils right down to the stubs, then he didnt throw them away he saved them for I dont know what -- firewood or something. David Fisher: He did work in botany as well? John Dickey: Yes, he worked with bean plants, he was interested in almost everything you could imagine and he made significant contributions to many different fields. I think he had something like 70 publications at the end of his life in something like 50 different journals, so unlike most scientists today he was not a narrow specialist, he was interested in everything. He got interested in some of the Aboriginal archaeological sites here in Tasmania and he was the first person to radio carbon date the ashes left over in some of those sites. At the time most people thought that the Aboriginal sites were just a few thousand years old but the radio carbon dating of some of the sites down on the Tasmanian peninsular went back 40,000 years ago and that completely revolutionised archaeology of Aboriginal sites here in Tasmania and in many other parts or the world too. A lot of other people started doing it after they saw how he did it. These are the great radio telescopes of the world which -- you may have visited some and I hope youll visit more. Ceduna in South Australia belongs to the University of Tasmania and Mount Pleasant here in Tasmania. In order to do very long baseline interferometry we need many telescopes spread widely. In the northern hemisphere there are dozens of radio telescopes, hundreds. In particular for example the international VLBI service which is not just an astronomical service but a service to the entire civilisation by carefully measuring whats called the international celestial reference frame, the far away centres of galaxies which are bright radio sources and provide us with markers with which we define a coordinate system. That is to say X, Y and Z system far beyond the earth, these are things beyond even our galaxy. In order to define positions on the earth we need to define them relative to that reference system. The global positioning satellite system GPS and also the GNSS, which is a new European system, these all depend on a coordinate system with which they can fix the orbits of the spacecraft which are then transmitting signals down. So whether it be for commercial use or individual civilian use, or navigation at sea, or for hiking in the bush, all of these things ultimately come down to the work that we do here on the international VLBI service. David Fisher: VLBI refers to? John Dickey: VLBI means very long baseline interferometry, the I is the important letter there, the interferometry means bringing signals together from several different antennas. So the antenna at Hobart works together with an antenna in Concepcin in Chile, with an antenna in Hartebeest Hoek in South Africa and with antennas in Hawaii, Japan, China, North America, Europe, Russia and so on. However, unfortunately the international VLBI service, which is an international collaboration in order to establish a reference frame from the earth, this is completely dominated by the northern hemisphere. There are some 37 telescopes in the northern hemisphere which contribute. There are only four which contribute reliably in the southern hemisphere. We think that that has to change in particular for Australias national benefit, national interest. We need to have a better definition of the celestial reference frame in the south where the northern hemisphere telescopes cant see it. So we are actively working on building new telescopes primarily dedicated to this reference frame. Wed like to put one in Yarragadee in Western Australia and one near Catherine in the Northern Territory in addition to our one here in Hobart and one in Ceduna in South Australia. I think with those four stations we can establish the Australian continent as a plain, and then we can watch how that plain moves -- either due to continental drift or sea level rise due to global warming. Its important for us to get very precise locations established in this way. David Fisher: Theres the proposal, theres the dream youve outlined, what are the dollars? John Dickey: We can do it fairly inexpensively I think. To put up a telescope in a new site costs a bit under a million dollars Australian so it would be, lets say, $800,000 or $900,000 and that would cover both the antenna, the receivers, the clocks that we need -- we need very accurate clocks -- and also the site preparation and any kind of engineering work that we need. David Fisher: It doesnt sound a lot for a huge structure, I mean its something big that people can see way in the distance -- thats a big telescope -- roughly a million does not sound a lot. John Dickey: Well I hope when you see one in the long distance it makes you feel good because what were doing is astronomy in the same sense that optical astronomers have done for centuries. And the purpose of our astronomy is to understand our place in the universe, essentially to understand the human condition in the sense of who are we and where are we? David Fisher: Sure, and youve just mentioned a handful of applications there in the bigger, bigger questions but also climate questions and how the world is changing around us. A million or two for a few more dishes doesnt sound too much. John Dickey: Well that is something Id be interested in your opinion of, and the opinion of all your listeners. But I think curiosity driven research, which is always what has motivated scientists going back centuries, often leads to unexpected applications which can be of tremendous value to society, but which arent what the people set out to do in the beginning. David Fisher: Yes, they werent in the original proposal. John Dickey: Precisely. So although radio astronomy was begun by Grote Reber as purely a curiosity driven thing -- he wanted to see what was out there -- and most of us who do radio astronomy are driven by exactly the same kind of curiosity, we just want to know what makes things work out in space. But those discoveries that we make can have completely unexpected and even unrelated applications here on earth, either to medical research or to positioning and things like that, to agriculture, to navigation. You never can predict what science will lead to but its important to do it. I wanted to just point out this dish over here, this is a 14-metre dish which was originally built way back in the early 70s and it was our first parabolic radio telescope here at the University of Tasmania. Weve recently gotten a grant from the Australian Research Council to refurbish it, that is to resurface it, and you can see the sun glinting off the brand new surface. We spent the whole of last year, we took it all apart, we tore off the old surface, put on these panels which are made of aluminium which are much more accurate parabola, and we hope to have it back, up on its mount and we will be taking data with it by, I guess, April. David Fisher: Whats the body of water here? John Dickey: Oh this is the Cole River Valley, yes this is a very beautiful site that we have here, the Cole River flows down through Richmond and then out into the Bay of Storms near the airport, near the Hobart airport. David Fisher: Well the dish is way on its side now, very different to just 10 or 15 minutes ago. John Dickey: Pointing west now. When a telescope tracks it follows the radio source as it moves across the sky. If you heard that noise its now repositioning itself just a little ways off the source. We typically do differential measurements meaning we point out the source and then we move maybe a degree or half a degree off and take the difference of those in order to get the strength of the source. David Fisher: Now here is something called a whisper dish, so weve got two dishes measuring roughly, what, two metres in diameter? John Dickey: Yes, thats about right. These are actually old satellite communication dishes. We brought these to service antennas for the GPS receivers that we have here for locating our position and we set them up for kids to play with and we can play with it right now. David Fisher: Lets be kids. John Dickey: OK good, Ill go down to the other one if you want to stand here and eventually what youll do, first put your ear here and you can click your mouse here, or you can put the microphone there and well see how it works. David Fisher: Fine. So John Dickey is walking up the concrete path and the other dish is up there roughly 30 or 40 metres away and weve got the dish set on its side and there is a metal pole with a ring presumably at the focus of the dish. Now John is standing next to the far dish and hes going to speak to me now John Dickey: Now Im talking with the same volume that I was using before, but now Im going to talk very softly, almost as if I was whispering in your ear -- can you hear that? David Fisher: Well I can hear it yes, its quite amazing, its as if youre right here, youre actually still 30 metres away, I suppose youre hearing me as well up there? John Dickey: I can hear you very well. David Fisher: So thats John 30 metres away and now hes walking back and it really sounded as if he was right here -- what an excellent demonstration of how dishes work collecting, be they light, be they collecting radio waves, or in this case sound waves and focusing them to a point. John Dickey: Thats right. Both radio waves, light waves, sound waves -- they all propagate as waves, and so the same design technology that we use for one we can use for another, and thats one of the ways that astronomy tends to have spin-off applications in other fields, because we develop things which can be applied to so many different areas. In fact even I think broadcasters were using dishes like this in order to pick up sounds from far away. I remember hearing that in the States they were using them for football games but then they had to discontinue it because some of the language wasnt really the sort of thing youd want to broadcast. Robyn Williams: Heaven forfend. That was Professor John Dickey, who is head of maths and physics at the University of Tasmania, playing cosmic cooee with my colleague David Fisher. And by the way you can see part of the structure on the left side of the aircraft as you are about to land in Hobart. Both were at the Grote Reber Museum in Cambridge just outside the capital of Tasmania. David normally produces the Science Show with me every week. Next week at this time I shall be In Conversation with vet Paul McGreevy to discuss his book about Carrots and Sticks -- how best to train animals from border collies to the odd octopus, friendly pats or stern smacks, which works best. Production as ever by Kyla Slaven, Im Robyn Williams.

The research began at Macquarie University and now promises to make an impact world wide. LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) are a way of illuminating without the inefficiencies of traditional bulbs -- which are essentially intense heaters pretending to be lights. Giles Bourne of the company BluGlass tells how they took a bright idea in physics and turned it into a business venture. Can this be a model for university-based innovation? TRANSCRIPT: Robyn Williams: Good evening, Robyn Williams with In Conversation. Now did you ever read Tom Browns School Days or see the movie? There were a few, I recall. Heres a reminder. Extract from Tom Browns Schooldays (1940) Robyn Williams: The famous tale from Rugby School and yes they did invent the game of rugby there. And by they I mean William Web Ellis who got fed up with just booting the ball around and picked it up to run with it. But back to Rugby, thats where Giles Bourne was educated before he travelled the world and then eventually came to Australia. Once here he joined a firm called Bluglass, which has won an innovation award from Macquarie University for applying their contribution to LEDs, those light emitting diodes which are helping to revolutionise lighting around the world. Back to the beginning. Giles Bourne, what made you hit the road way back then? Giles Bourne: I was at university until I eventually decided that joining the rat race in England wasnt for me. So I left and I went on to South America, because my mother, her family are from South America, and so I did this little wander around the globe and ended up in Chile for three years. Robyn Williams: In Chile? Giles Bourne: Yes, in Chile. Robyn Williams: I see. Was Pinochet still in charge then? Giles Bourne: No, well he was then just in charge of the military but no longer the president. Robyn Williams: Beginning to fade. Giles Bourne: Beginning to fade but it took him a long time. Robyn Williams: An awful lot of the scientists were coming out and asking advice around the world, especially to Australia, funnily enough, about environmental things, because Chile was linked of course physically to Australia and so you had the most amazing parallel between the plants especially and, in fact, of the geology. Were you there aware of such a transition between the scientists, the environmentalists and the technologists coming out? Giles Bourne: You could see it changing, I mean in the country -- there had been a lot of exodus from the country, a lot of people had left and things were certainly changing when I was there and there was more vibrancy in the science communities certainly. Robyn Williams: What were you doing at university back in England? Giles Bourne: A very strange degree, I did geography, no relevance whatsoever to compound semi-conductors but at least I know my way around the world. Robyn Williams: And of course thats a sort of degree that rugby players often take. Giles Bourne: Oh yes. Robyn Williams: So were you playing rugby at university? Giles Bourne: Yes, no for all my sins I had to play rugby at university and then pretty much at the end of university that was my end of rugby days and a more sedate sport after that. Cricket is my passion now. Robyn Williams: One of the reasons I ask is that much to my surprise you told me you went to Rugby School, famous for of course Tom Browns School Days. What was it like there for you? Giles Bourne: Well I have to say Rugby School when I went there in the 80s I dont think it had changed much since Flashman days. Its a very archaic institution, now its a completely different kettle of fish, a very modern school, its mixed all the way through and its a great school now. Robyn Williams: As in girls you mean? Giles Bourne: Girls all the way through, when I was there they were just in the 6th form. No, I had an interesting time there, I wouldnt say it was a fantastic time. Robyn Williams: Were they aware of the legend? Because they must have been. Giles Bourne: Oh yes, of course, absolutely. Plaques to William Web Ellis everywhere. Robyn Williams: The invention of rugby itself. Giles Bourne: Absolutely. Robyn Williams: Is it true that he picked up the ball because he was fed up with all that sort of nonsense about kicking it around? Giles Bourne: Well as legend has it he did, he picked up the ball and ran with it and that was the game, how it started. And we had Winchester rules football and you had Eaton rules football and rugby is one that sort of took off globally. Robyn Williams: So much for your background, and you came to Australia eleven years ago, was it something of a shock? Giles Bourne: No, because Id been in South America, Chile and, to be honest, Chile and Australia are very similar, a very similar outdoor lifestyle. And I came here not knowing what to expect and I was really surprised, it was a great place. And one year rapidly turned into eleven years and now with an Australian wife and two Australian children I cant see myself rushing out of the country, Im loving it here. Robyn Williams: Well were here to talk about two specific things based on technology. One of them the famous plastic notes, what was your involvement with that? Giles Bourne: Well I started with the Securency which was the marketing arm of the polymer banknote technology back in the late 90s and I was very much looking at helping to develop the export market for that. Now its a great success and I believe they are now in twenty four different countries. Robyn Williams: Having started in Australia via CSIRO technology was it? Giles Bourne: Yes, a combination of that and the Reserve Bank who drove the technology forward and then it spannered out into a private marketing enterprise which was Securency which soon became a manufacturing enterprise and then took the technology off shore and rapidly developed it with the manufacturing still very much down in Melbourne -- a very successful enterprise. Robyn Williams: What really are the advantages -- one security I imagine -- endurance, do they last longer? Giles Bourne: Oh absolutely, when youre looking at polymer bank notes around the world they last five times longer and that in itself is...economic benefits for that are extraordinary. So thats why its been such a successful technology, years of development and no one else has been able to do it to date. Robyn Williams: Thats a bit of a surprise. Why not? Giles Bourne: Well I suppose firstly I mean to protect the technology and theres patents around it but the technology itself its very complex to print on plastic and yes, its taken off. Robyn Williams: As they last so much longer what about -- and this vaguely occurs to me because were so pernickety these days -- what about the ways in which they can become infected with materials, not simply drugs -- although some people told me that 90% of our notes are actually touched by things like cocaine extraordinarily enough -- but what about those germs that pass from one to another? Surely if youre not careful these enduring plastic notes can in fact be amazing breeding zones. Giles Bourne: Well less absorbency in a note than the cotton fibre so less likely to contain germs. Theres studies around it, I dont know the date but I would suspect theyd be less of a carrier of germs than the cotton fibre and the paper bank notes. Robyn Williams: Then you moved on to glass, Bluglass and light. In fact I saw you at an awards night at Macquarie University which gave you -- what was the award on that night, for innovation? Giles Bourne: Yes, for innovation and in fact this technology that we developed at Macquarie University is like the polymer bank notes in a sense that its a step out of revolutionary technology looking at industry that already exists but looking at doing it differently. And so Macquarie was instrumental in driving this forward and ended up with this brilliant bit of technology growing gallium nitride wafers, which are the components which go into LEDs, and we all know LEDs is the future for lighting from a power to energy consumption and also for the longevity of the LEDs. We are not quite there with the LED lighting but it is the future and certainly in two to five years. Robyn Williams: Tell me what is LED, what do the initials stand for? Giles Bourne: That is light emitting diode so its a structure that basically grows multi layers of PNN junction and allows electrons to recombine to generate light essentially and weve had red LEDs around for some time. The invention of the blue and white LEDs was really in the last decade and its taken off rapidly now to a $4 billion market. And in fact we see it around us all the time, in your mobile phone, the back lighting on a mobile phone, the key pad lighting and if you drive around Sydney, all the traffic lights these days are LED. Prior to that they were using incandescent bulbs but they were prone to catastrophic failure, when a traffic light goes out obviously thats a disaster but with LEDs its certainly the way forward. We see it more in the automotive industry from the dashboard lighting in cars to rear light clusters and in some of our high end cars like the Audi, now we see the day time running lamps. But ultimately the big end game for LED is the lighting industry which is a $100 billion industry and thats really where were focused with our technology. Robyn Williams: What part in that big field did Macquarie University play? Giles Bourne: The physics department at Macquarie University were instrumental in developing this technology. Robyn Williams: All of it or just part of it? Giles Bourne: The most part of it. Weve also had a development work going on at the Australian National University through Professor Bosswell whos helped us with the plasma side of it which is a key component to actually growing the gallium nitride wafers. Maybe Robyn if I can explain a bit of how this works. Im a business person with a great passion for technology and what we do essentially is weve got this chamber and in that using nitrogen we get the active species of nitrogen by passing it through a plasma and in a heated up chamber we grow a structure on a wafer - in this case glass, and grow this complex structure over five hours which ends up being a LED chip and the chip eventually gets packaged up and put into a system. Macquarie Universitys physics department were instrumental in developing that. When Bluglass formed as an entity we took the department who were involved in this out of Macquarie University and we came into this separate entity which was listed on the Stock Exchange in September 2006 and we still have very close ties with Macquarie University who remain a major shareholder of the business and also working very closely with the Australian National University on the plasma source for our LED. Robyn Williams: Before we talk about the consequences in terms of environment and also the growth overseas because thats really a fascinating story, what about the lessons learned from this experiment in taking technology from a university out into the market place because that often is something, a transition that doesnt go terribly well. What was the secret of this success? Giles Bourne: Well in this case for Bluglass it really needed quite a bit of funding because we had to build a fairly complex clean room to actually put a demonstration plant together. So to extract it from the university and spin it out to a completely owned enterprise and in recognition of the IP that had been developed, issuing shares to Macquarie University, then going to a public listing to get the money that we needed to actually develop it, its worked seamlessly and weve had a very good relationship with Macquarie University, theyve been on our board, they have been intimately involved and so far to date it works very, very well and we hope it will continue to do so. Robyn Williams: So what is the secret of that success because I hear so often from everything from inventors to people working on IP intellectual property at universities that the transition is so bloody difficult? Giles Bourne: Firstly to make sure that your inventors are recognised in the development work theyve done and secondly to make sure that the university is recognised and then make sure theres a clean transition from the university into the public arena and thats what weve done. And make sure we continue a very strong relationship with Macquarie University - but its a clean break essentially, even though they remain as a core shareholder of ours the technology came out 100% into this enterprise and its worked well, its worked really well. Robyn Williams: Transition from the old fashioned light bulbs which of course more and more are regarded as a thing of the past, you know ancient technologies to LEDs, what will be the environmental impact or the reverse thereof, the lightening of the load as a consequence of transferring to this technology? Giles Bourne: Well mainly the incandescent bulbs basically consume, or lighting consumes well over 20% of the worlds energy and so a short term measure was moving to fluorescent and thats great because they do last longer and consume less energy. But the problem with fluorescents in the long term is they contain mercury and eventually when fluorescents go into land fill you can be putting 4 milligrams of mercury per fluorescent into the land fill which is an issue, it really is. So LED in terms of the future a lot less energy is consumed in the lighting for the LED and obviously last a lifetime so you know it makes economic sense as well as environmental sense. Hence the reason from a business where we sit weve been very well supported by the Commonwealth Government in terms of grants to help us commercialise the technology recognising the long term benefits in terms of environment. Robyn Williams: What about energy use? Giles Bourne: The energy use is considerably less and obviously that is always coming down over time, its considerably less than the incandescent bulb. Bear in mind that an incandescent bulb is essentially a heater, 95% of what it produces is heat and 5% is light and obviously in LED its a lot less. Most of the energy goes to light. Robyn Williams: Sure, and carbon emissions? Giles Bourne: Well carbon emissions again with the energy consumption you reduce the energy consumption so you are reducing the carbon emissions. Robyn Williams: Now Ive been told by a number of people for example Professor Jagadish at the Australian National University concerned with nano technology describing the use of LEDs in Asia and I suspect in other continents which are slightly less developed than here. LED transition has been a fundamental revolution just in the villages for example - have you tracked that very much, you were talking about South America before but what about other parts or the world? Giles Bourne: No we havent actually tracked that level because in terms of the supply chain we are upstream in the sense that we were manufacturing the equipment allows a foundry to produce a wafer that then packages it and puts it into a LED so theres a bit of a distance between us and what we do and the actual end usage and weve personally not got down into that area. From a business point of view its a very litigious environment and a lot of access to licences which we want to steer clear of. So we are aware of the growth in LEDs worldwide in terms of general lighting use and every day when I sort of drive around Sydney or I go overseas to Asia you increasingly see LEDs being used more and more widely. And I certainly understand they are being used right down at village level because it makes a lot of sense in terms of being able to light with low energy and consumption. Robyn Williams: What takes you to Asia in this regard? Giles Bourne: At the moment Asia is probably the biggest long term market, an opportunity for our LEDs, thats where its all happening. Their two big equipment manufacturers at the moment generate 80% of their sales in Asia, all the big wafer foundries are up in Asia. So from a business point of view that would be a core area for us to be and obviously the growth in the population there and such like makes it a very attractive place for us to do business. Robyn Williams: If you imagine a house that you and I might live in in say 2020 what remarkable changes could you expect if you look at the ways these technologies are beginning to change? Giles Bourne: Well I expect certainly that LEDs for starters would be common place in most houses and youd almost expect houses to be generating their own power with the massive advances in photovoltaics and solar energy and you could expect that houses could generate their own power to fill their own lighting sources etc. So I think increasingly it would be carbon neutral. Robyn Williams: And also I would imagine a kind of intelligent response to your presence in the house cause LEDs can be faded up and down and you can have a subtlety of use. The room we are in at the moment has got rather too many bright lights shining on us, I dont know why but thats something that I suppose was designed in 1991 when this building went up but I could imagine there being a responsiveness such that the fading on and off would be almost automatic and that would be controlled without very much hassle in future. Giles Bourne: From the LEDs the flexibility of them going forward in terms of fading, the colour changes, I mean you already see it now. If you go on the new air busses like the new air bus A380, I was fortunate enough to fly on it at the end of last year using LEDs and changing the actual colour of the LEDs its seamless, its so easy these days. So rather than having one harsh light you can have a range of colours, theres so much more versatility with LED lighting. Robyn Williams: What was it like sitting there amongst what is it 600 passengers? Giles Bourne: Oh you would never know it was that huge aircraft, I mean its so quiet. When I was sitting there at the end of the runway, the power went up and the next thing we knew we were airborne but you would never have known it was so quiet, it was just an extraordinary experience. Robyn Williams: How amazing. Giles Bourne: The future of air travel. Robyn Williams: Yes indeed. What about the future of Giles in this regard, obviously you cant give your career structure on the radio but what were your ambitions both in this field and later its development? Giles Bourne: Well Ive always loved technology and being able to commercialise technology is a passion of mine and here we have a fantastic Australian developed technology with a great future, a really good future. Weve got the best physicists, the best scientists involved in this area and weve got a really solid future going ahead. I very much want to be a part of that, I think growing it out of Australia weve got access to some fantastic research out of universities in Australia, weve got some cutting edge technology theres no two ways about it and theres room to explore other areas with our technologies as well. So Id like to see myself growing with this technology and the business, I clearly see the benefit thats going for it. Its very similar to the polymer bank note technology, I think in a few years time well see a very big and successful company here - Bluglass out of Australia. Robyn Williams: And youve even got a book written about you Brilliant, was that promoted by the company or was that independent? Giles Bourne: No, no as independent journalist Bob Johnson whos obviously a friend of ours, of the company and he wrote about Shuji Nakamura who was the person who really invented the white LED and is a great believer in technology. Its a fascinating story about Shuji Nakamura and I wont go into it now but I thoroughly recommend that people read Brilliant because it is a terrific book. Robyn Williams: And what about you are you keen on music? Giles Bourne: I certainly like a wide range of music. Robyn Williams: Choose something. Giles Bourne: Anything in particular? Ive just bought a new album which I absolutely love and its by James out of the UK, I grew up with him in the 80s, late 80s and they are back again and I absolutely like this terrific piece of music a new album called Hey Ma. Robyn Williams: Hey Ma by James chosen by Giles Bourne, Chief Executive Officer of the company Bluglass, one of those making the most of the growing passion for new technologies in lighting. And last month they announced that they are going solar as well; all initiated by some clever research at Macquarie University which is still involved. Next week at this time we shall go to Hobart where the pioneer of radio astronomy Grote Reber is being remembered with a brand new museum. Production for In Conversation by Kyla Slaven, Im Robyn Williams.