I think a lot about that. I got into it by a pretty circuitous
route. I did a BA in physics, and I migrated to geography
because I had an opportunity to do a PhD study in caves and I
was interested in caves at the time. And then when I landed in
geography, I discovered there were things going on in
geography that I liked. And so I stayed.
I remember David Semanat, the first time I walked into his
office and he said, "Hello, I understand you're lazy." And of
course what he was doing was establishing a sort of
management style that he knew would get the best out of me.
But it was, I think, it's not exactly advice, but it was a
very, it stayed with me very much.
I'd have to say making maps, and trying to make the maps correct.
So scaled representations of the Earth's surface, and
experimenting with how to do that. And I remember spending a
lot of time doing that. And questions like, what do you
choose to put on the map, and why is that important, and why
did you want to record that?
The freedom to explore in virtually any direction I like.
And the freedom to always find the most fundamental and
intellectually compelling aspects of a problem. Rather
than having to solve it, being able to learn from the, from the
process of solving. And the freedom to solve problems
mathematically and get the satisfaction from, from being
able to do so. These are the things I really enjoy, I think.
I think an openness to communication. It's very easy in
my field, it's very easy because everyone understands what a map
is. And so talking about maps will always resonate with a lot
of people. I think it would be much more difficult to reach a
broader audience if you were engaged in some very abstract
concept that was hard to explain to the general public. And I
think that ability is fundamentally what makes and
breaks a scientist. If you are sequestered in your own narrow
field and never reach out, then ultimately you,
I think you've failed.
That's easy, because this field is something society uses all
the time. So society now has the ability to navigate, to not get
lost, to find their way across the landscape reliably and
safely. These are very major benefits. And then a whole list
of other benefits that come from mapping and remote sensing, and
the kind of information we now have about the world.
I think I've, at various points in my career, I've been very
attached to very, to specific scientists. One of them is the
physicist, Eddington, who flourished in the periods from
1910 to 1930, was very much involved in the empirical
verification of general relativity. And I, I spent a lot
of time with his work because as- this is when I was an
undergraduate- because I admired his search for the simple. One
of the things he believed, that later turned out to be wrong,
was that some of the fundamental constants of physics were whole
numbers. For example, the ratio of the mass of the proton to the
mass of the electron, I think, if I remember right. He
hypothesized that this was a whole number, which would
reflect, of course, some symmetry in the universe.
And he ultimately was proved wrong when it became possible to
measure those numbers more accurately. But at his time it
was still possible to believe they were whole numbers.
I think most people take the kind of information that we deal
with, for granted. So they, they accept that you can zoom down in
Google Earth and see individual houses and individual cars and
individual people. And they think this is fine. And they
will use Google arth- or Google Earth to determine the positions
of those features in latitude and longitude. And what will
surprise them is that we are in fact extremely uncertain
about where exactly things are on the earth's surface. And in
part this is because our measurement systems are
limited. In part it's because the earth keeps moving and
changing its shape and wobbling about its axis. And in part
because some parts of the world continue moving. So Australia is
moving steadily north at quite a, quite a substantial clip. And
these things, I think, surprise people. They're used to a world
which is perfectly rigid and perfectly ordered and perfectly
measurable. And so it's a surprise when, to learn
that it's not.
My laptop. It's got to be. These days it's got to
be something digital.
I don't. So I usually don't listen to music in the car, in
part because I'm a geographer and I'm far more interested in
what the, what I'm driving through. I enjoy driving and I
like to concentrate on it. In the lab, music will be
distracting, and it's multitasking,
and I can't do that.