Voices of Science

I spent quite a lot of time with Hermann Bondi who was chief scien – he’d done a lot of jobs, he’d been a professor of cosmology, he was also – he’d been head of the European Space Agency, been chief scientist at the Department of Environment, he’d been chief scientist at Ministry of Defence, he’d been all over the place really. And he was a really interesting person, he was one of the people we had to lunch of course. And I got on very well with Hermann Bondi and we talked a lot about scientists’ careers because at that time he was – I think he was – I think he was chief scientist at the Ministry of Defence. And he was concerned about scientists not being in a job for life in – in the civil service. There were a lot of scientists in the civil service, tens of thousands of them and they – they might come in at twenty-one and they would expect to have a steady job until they retired at sixty-five. And he thought this was – for many people was quite unhealthy, he – he said, you know, as far as his career was concerned, he said, ‘My principle has been get yourself a good job, do it, go and find another good job,’ and he’d done that in – by example really. And I was very much influenced by that myself in sort of saying, ‘Don’t,’ I mean I became very much a sort of acolyte of him in that I suppose, that he – the idea that you should not hang around in a job too long.