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How did you get in?
I was in the RAF in the War and learned
a bit about communications, electronics, and radar.
I then got a scholarship to Cambridge. Actually, I stayed
in Cambridge for 20 years, with a University Lectureship
and a Fellowship (I am now a Fellow of Downing College
and Corpus Christi College).
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What's been the highlight of
your working career so far?
There are several: working
on the moon-landing, actually with two projects,
estimating perceptual problems for astronauts
with a space simulator we built in Cambridge,
and a system for getting improved pictures from
telescopes (avoiding disturbance of the atmosphere)
for selecting a moon-landing site.
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Another is investigating
a man (SB) who was blind, almost certainly from birth,
and got his sight at the age of 52. Studying the development
of his perception was the turning point in how I came
to think of visual perception and how closely it is
related to touch. Another highlight was doing the Royal
Institution Christmas Lectures, and starting the Exploratory
hands-on-science-centre (this was actually the first
in Britain).
What keeps you going through the hard
times?
Any research is a mixture of long periods
of tedium with occasional excitements. Either alone
would be impossible. The mixture is what it is all about.
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Why do you work in the area that
you do?
Because I like phenomena, optical
apparatus, philosophical questions, and devising
experiments that might yield answers, sometimes
to ancient questions.
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Are you a scientist
24/7?
I like music, puns, and having fun in
all sorts of ways. But at the back of it all, there
are questions which are essentially scientific as they
are about why things are the way they are, and how we
can make improvements. But simply listening to Beethoven
and having jokes with one's friends are very important.
What's your favourite trivial pursuit
category?
Do you mean the game? I don't know what
these categories are. Generally: thinking up puns (my
recreation in "Who's Who" is punning and pondering).
What was the title of your last published
paper?
"The blind leading the sighted"
(shortly to be appear in Nature as a Turning Points
essay.)
What scientist do you admire from the
past?
Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Richard Feynman,
Hermann von Helmholtz, Thomas Young, J.Z. Young, Sir
Frederic Bartlett.
What would you like to be remembered
for?
Having been useful to one's students;
having produced insights on the nature of perception
and illusion; having made some good puns.
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