Expand your World

Today, I am interviewing the brilliant David Arditti from my Astronomy Club that I had written about earlier. His is an internal migration story. It’s a long interview, but worth the read.

Exploring the café at Waterstones, Hampstead

You were born in Bournemouth and you live in North West London now. You mentioned you moved to London at the age of 18. What motivated the journey?

I don’t know how far you want me to go into family history.

Whatever you are comfortable with.

A long way back. My family isn’t from this country at all. But the two sides are different. My father’s family is a Jewish family and they have been in England since the late 19th century. They always seemed to be in the same business which is selling carpets. And they came from Turkey, and set up the carpet business in London, but during the Second World War, they decided to move it to Bournemouth on the south coast. My father was sent to school near there in Dorset. My mother came from Italy and worked as an au pair, looking after children and doing housework for English families and she worked for my father’s mother, and that’s how they met. She was from a tiny farming village in northern Italy, in the high Alps, right on the border between Italy and Austria, and her mother tongue is German. She has died now, but she could speak Italian and English as well. And her family were part of the German population of that region, and they were transferred into Italy as war reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. So there’s a big community there which is German-speaking, and they are culturally German or Austrian, but they are from Italy. My father is from this Jewish family that was very anglicised. They were very determined to be very English. He was sent to a very English public school and so I was born in Bournemouth but shortly afterwards, my father decided to stop working for his mother in her carpet business and set up another carpet business in the next town along the coast, which is called Christchurch. I went to school in Christchurch, which is small town, 50,000 people, and it’s a very nice town. But it felt like quite the backwater. There was nothing much going on. It’s mostly a place for retired people. There’s some industry there. There’s an airport there now called Bournemouth airport, so it has some air-related and defence-related industries, but not much goes on in Christchurch really, apart from a bit of fishing and looking after old people. Most young people don’t tend to stay there. They go elsewhere. I applied to various universities that I did not get into, which were actually closer. I applied to South Hampton university that is the closest, but I did not get in there. I did get into London University, in a college called Westfield College. At the time, Margaret Thatcher, who was Prime Minister, had decided to reduce the number of different universities and colleges and amalgamate smaller ones into bigger ones. The writing on the wall was that they had to merge with another college, and that college actually ceased to exist. I was one of the last people taken on to do Physics there. I think they wanted to take on as many people as possible that year, even if they did not get top marks in the A levels. I got to study with many other people. They took so many people that they didn’t have accommodation for them all. Normally, the first years when they go to university, which is far from their home town, and this is quite a long way, longer than 100 miles from Christchurch, you’d expect them to be given accommodation. But they didn’t do that. I had to find my own through the student union. But some students didn’t realise that. They hadn’t worked out that they needed accommodation. They had to get them beds on the library floor, I remember. Anyway, I moved to London to study Physics, BSc at Westfield College, University of London. Westfield College has since merged with Queen Mary College and is now known as Queen Mary University of London. And I stayed on really because I made friends and connections in London.

You graduated in Physics, you’re a Composer, Writer and Cyclist. When you introduce yourself, where does Astronomy feature on the list?

It depends on who I’m talking to. I do normally say I’m an amateur astronomer, because I’ve never worked in astronomy research. I’ve never been paid to do astronomy research, although I wrote a lot about astronomy research. I’ve never done that as a profession, so my line has been more writing about Astronomy and giving talks about it for adult education and sometimes children's education as well, and writing articles and also administering societies because, unfortunately, I’ve got quite a lot of common sense. You often see that scientists or astronomers don’t have much common sense. They are clever but impractical, and it’s quite difficult to find people with common sense to run organisations. So I’ve been very involved with Western London Astronomical Society and British Astronomical Association (BAA), and I became President of BAA, which is the largest astronomy group for amateur astronomy in the UK. I became president because I’ve got enough common sense to be able to run an organisation that has employees and has large assets, has a lot of money in the bank and needs to invest the money. And also, has a lot of volunteers who have to be kept on site and negotiated with and made to agree with the policies. If you want to change the policies, it is difficult to do, because you have to get everybody to agree to it. Since most of them are unpaid, they can just walk away if they are not happy with something. I spent a lot of time running voluntary organisations, doing unpaid stuff.

In fact, I was surprised when I was doing some research to see the word amateur, given your body of work, because, as you said, you’ve been president of BAA, you’ve written books with Patrick Moore, who’s himself supposed to be a major figure here.

Patrick Moore is very influential on me and a lot of other people of my kind in my generation, of several generations really, because he was on the television for, believe it or not, about 60 years every month and is a very popular figure, and such a friendly man and when you met him, he always invited you down to his house. That would not happen today. You can’t invite… I couldn’t invite these children down to my house, but that’s what you did. And that happened and there was nothing sinister, nothing bad about it. He was just really enthusiastic. He wanted to tell everybody about astronomy and he enthused hundreds, maybe even thousands of young people to either become professional astronomers or amateur astronomers or other types of scientists, mostly boys I would say. I think he didn’t get along with girls so much. He had a very boyish personality. Even as an old man, he was like an over-enthusiastic school boy, and that’s why school boys really liked him. And he wrote hundreds of books. And I’ve read most of his books, bought a lot of his books, and I met him at meetings, and he always loved to talk to young people and help them. I didn’t have a grandfather. Both of my grandfathers died long before I was born. He was like a grandfather figure to me.

Do you think his enthusiasm for the subject is still alive in amateur astronomy today? I read somewhere he called it the best of all hobbies.

Farmer George would agree

Yeah, I think it is. I think the nature of it is changing. He belonged to a world where he made drawings and everything. I’m very keen to get these children in school in our astronomy club to draw things and make notes in the traditional way, make notes in notebooks and draw what they see in the sky. That’s what amateur astronomers did. They kept records of what was happening in the sky and often recorded things that professional astronomers didn’t record and often made discoveries. I think there’s a bit less of that now. I think it’s all becoming a bit electronic these days and a lot of the amateur astronomers spend a lot of their time taking pictures of the same things and not really discovering anything new and getting very involved with electronics and computers and technicalities, but it doesn’t quite have the same homespun DIY quality that it used to, where people used to make everything. We used to make our own telescopes, what we are doing in this club of course, but that’s quite unusual now. We are doing it as an educational exercise but people seriously made their own stuff to do research.

I think it aids your memory, if you are doing something DIY.

It certainly does. Making drawings aids the memory. I follow Patrick Moore’s advice and he said things like you should learn a different constellation every night and make drawings of constellations, And the things that I learned using his method when I was about 13, I still remember. But things that I didn’t learn at the time, I can’t remember even though I’ve read them in books many times since.

Did your work while you were growing up here help you connect with other Londoners or even migrant communities? I’ve realised that a lot of hobbies that I used to think were solitary such as astronomy aren’t really so. Did you connect with a lot of other enthusiasts?

Well, you can certainly do it as a solitary hobby and I’m sure there are a lot of people like that but I don’t meet them very much because they are solitary, obviously. Going back to when I was learning about astronomy, you had to join a society to get all the details because we didn’t have the internet. Some of the daily newspapers had columns telling you what’s in the sky, but it was actually quite difficult to find out this basic information. If you wanted to know where the planet Venus would be tonight or something like that, there was no sort of information. Things that are fixed, you can read in books, but for things that change from night to night, you had to join a society where they had the information, where they would write a newsletter saying what was in the sky that night for that week and the BAA, they publish a magazine every other month and a book every year where they give all the details of where to find objects in the sky and what they are doing and what are the timing of the eclipses and conjunctions and those kinds of things. You really had to join an organisation to get that information. Today you don’t, today you can just google it. So, it’s a very different world.

Which year are you talking about?

I’m talking about the 1980s and I think it started to change in the 1990s. So yeah, I joined an astronomical society when I was about 13 or 14 I think because my father had a business friend who was in the Wessex Astronomical Society which met in Dorset. He introduced me to them and they were all very friendly and they allowed me to look through their telescopes. What got me hooked was looking through a 12-inch telescope that belonged to an amateur astronomer in the Wessex Astronomical Society in Bournemouth, and looking at Planet Saturn and the moon I think, and some other objects. It was a really big telescope particularly for that time. I can still remember exactly what Saturn looked like through that telescope. And you could see all the moons and that was so amazing that I wanted my own telescope, and I wanted to read all about it and join their society. But I also had a long period when I wasn’t involved in amateur astronomy at all. After I did my physics degree, I decided to study music and I only studied that part-time, and in evening classes, at adult education places. So I never studied that full time either. But I devoted a lot of time to it, and I wasn’t involved in astronomy at all for about 20 years. It was only when I moved in with my current partner Helen, who bought a house in North West London, which has a big garden, that I thought that it would be quite a good place to observe the sky from. I could get out my old telescope, which I bought when I was still in school but hadn’t used for about 20 years, get that out, set that up. Then I joined this society in London, West of London Astronomical Society and became involved with that, and I rejoined the British Astronomical Association and started going to their meetings again. So I had a long period when I wasn’t actually involved with astronomy at all.

Since you spoke of music, is your interest in music and astronomy in any way connected? I think your compositions draw on poetry and folk traditions, and these are rooted in feelings and memory and astronomy is the opposite, like you said. It is enormous and unchanging and very different from the human world.

That’s a question that I actually get asked a lot. And strangely enough the answer seems to be completely no. There is absolutely no connection. And I do know people in music who are really interested in astronomy and want to write pieces of music that are inspired by things in astronomy and I have never done that and I have never connected them at all, and to me it seems kind of passe to connect them, a bit too obvious, like it’s been done already. I just don’t see the connection, I don’t think there is any. I think it is sort of connected to the philosophy of art really, the philosophy of music. I think that music is completely abstract. I think it doesn’t represent anything.

That’s very interesting you said that. It reminds me of the Preface to The Portrait of Dorian Grey, where Oscar Wilde famously says in the end, ‘All art is quite useless’, but he was talking about, I’m saying it wrong … but it was similar to the philosophy you just mentioned, that art is by itself, it’s just supposed to be.

Yes, there are famous pieces of music that are supposed to be connected to astronomy. The only really famous one is The Planets by Holst, but he was inspired actually by the mythology connected to the planets. He wrote a violent piece to start his planet suite, which is called Mars Bringer of War, because in Greek Mythology, Mars is the harbinger of war, because of its red colour. His work is really based on mythology. It’s nothing to do with the physics of how planets really are and what the systems are really like. In my view, these things are completely separate things (fair point). I don’t connect them at all, and people often ask me why don’t you write a piece of music inspired by the constellations, but I don’t do the planets because the planets have already been done. There’s no point doing it again. You are not going to write a better one than Holst. You could do the satellites of the planets I suppose. Then again, there are too many of them, it gets silly. I thought about it. You could do constellations of the Zodiac, but there are too many of those. You don’t want such a big number as 12, and there’s 88 constellations in the sky, that’s far too many. So maybe I will do it one day, but so far I’ve not read any music that is in any way connected to astronomy, and I just feel that art and science are the opposite sides of a piece of paper, they don’t touch. They exist in parallel. They exist in the same world and in some sense, they have the same basis, they exist in the same minds, but I don’t think they really connect. I don’t think one creates the other in either direction. And I think when people think they do, they are just using their imagination in a creative way.

I thought to ask this because they are such distinct hobbies, and you are a pro in both.

If you take an example of another famous piece of music that everybody knows, it would be Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. It has got floor pieces representing winter, spring, summer and autumn. But I believe that if nobody told you which was which season, and you just listened, if you played these pieces to an African Tribesman who never had any contact with European Civilisation and didn’t know anything about it, he wouldn’t know which one was autumn. You wouldn’t be able to tell which was autumn, which was spring, which was winter. These are imaginary associations. I think music is abstract, it’s absolute, It really doesn’t represent the things it’s supposed to represent, even in a famous case like that.

You are talking about the instrumental part of music, right? Because as soon as you introduce lyrics, it becomes different.

You are absolutely right. Then you’ve got a song, you’ve got poetry, then obviously it connects to the other things.

Do you think different sciences correlate with different arts?

In my experience, a lot of mathematical sciences, like astronomers and physicists, they are very keen on music, particularly classical music. And you find a lot of classical musicians interested in the physical sciences, whereas I think the biomedical sciences, like doctors, they tend to be more into literature and drama and the theatre. There are exceptions, but I think there is a parallel between music and mathematics. Music is about proportion really. The notes are a certain frequency and proportion to other notes, and harmony is built up in particular ratios and frequencies as was discovered by Pythagoras in ancient Greece. This is phrased as The Harmony of the Spheres and certain scientists of the past, like Kepler who discovered the laws of the planetary motion and built the Kepler telescope. He was very keen on this idea of the harmony of the spheres and he believed that he could prove that the distances of the planets were in similar ratios to the pitches of music, which isn’t quite the case, but he believed that there was a connection. And people always believed in these connections between mathematics and astronomy and music. And it doesn’t really apply to books so much.

So there you have the connection, why you get asked the question so many times.

Yeah, I think people with a mathematical bent of mind tend to be keen at music and they tend to be often good at music as well. I’ve even met classical musicians who have abandoned that career and gone full-time into science because it’s very hard to make a living in music. It’s precarious. You just tend to get paid for specific jobs. It’s very difficult to get a stable income from music, unless you teach, which a lot of musicians do as well.

Is yours a pure passion for music that makes you continue with it?

Yes. Gustav already mentioned a correct connection to the Planet suite, he said something when people asked him why do you compose. He said something like I don’t compose until the idea that I’ve got becomes more annoying not to write it down than to write it down. I‘ll get rid of something. I’ll relieve myself of some annoying thing that is bothering me. That happens to me as well. If I have an idea bothering me, writing it down becomes less effort than not writing it down. It’s a funny way of putting this, but its easier to do than not to do, that’s how I feel about it. It like a thing that has to be done. I expect artists in other fields feel the same way, they have to paint that painting, they have to write that poem.

Yes, it’s also to not forget later, to do when inspiration strikes or to get inspired while doing.

I’m chair of a group of composers called London Composers Forum and I’ve been in that for about twenty years, and I’ve been the chair of it for about the last ten years. We organise concerts of music, and we also teach each other about different aspects of music and composing, so I meet a lot of composers, and they are all different. They do things in different ways and some of them find it difficult to come up with ideas and they need help, like stimulus to come up with ideas. If we were to say that yeah we have to write a piece about planets, and you must write a piece about Venus, and you about Jupiter, that would stimulate them to come up with an idea, and then they would do it. But I’m not like that. I find that I get a lot of ideas, and then I don’t finish them. I have difficulty getting around. I kind of lose interest in a project halfway through, and I have difficulty finishing things. So I have hundreds of ideas, and they are all written down, but they are just scraps, they are brief notes, they are not finished pieces that anybody could play. And I only get round to turning those scrappy notes into finished pieces that people can read and play in a very small proportion of the cases, like 1% of the time. Whereas other people want to write a piece of music, they don’t have many ideas, and you have to give them ideas or suggest ideas. These composers are all different and they work in different ways, and some people like to have a system to compose.

You can collaborate with those people. I think ideation is a difficult step, which is why I’m very fearful of AI, because now everyone is outsourcing thinking, so that will get even scarcer. People will stop thinking for themselves.

I don’t really like systems per se. In any art, I probably wouldn’t like systems either. I believe in doing it intuitively, and I think it's useful to have a very wide knowledge of what music has been produced in the past and take from it what you want to, what you can and follow your own instincts. So I don’t believe in composing to a pattern or system. You can use a system which is almost like painting by numbers, filling your own colours here and there, but the structure has been pre-determined by some mathematical formula or some pattern. Some composers really like to do that. They actually want things to be determined scientifically by some formula, but I don’t.

I think that’s so interesting and also contradictory to something that we were discussing earlier about how Mathematics and Music are connected through patterns of ratios and proportions, whereas you are saying that it needs to be more abstract, more intuitive. It need not be part of a system.

I think the reason for that is that there are many levels of what you might call text, there are many levels of detail in any work of art and you can have patterns on some level but randomness on another level, or artistic decision-making on another level. So I’m not one of the composers who wants to find pitches between the twelve notes of the conventional Western scale. You can construct music with all sorts of inventive pitches that you create between the notes of the scale, but I’m quite happy to stick with the twelve notes that we have already got, and so that already imposes Pythagorean pattern on music, that already has those natural ratios built into it. So it has mathematics on that level, but I don’t believe that I should write the piece of music that has 12 bars in this theme, and 16 bars in the next theme, and 64 bars in the next theme or whatever, in some mathematical ratio of structure that you follow to complete your piece, but some people do that. Some people do try to create a mathematical structure on that level, so you can have different levels of the structure. Some of them could be more randomised. You can do what you like. In the end, we are not driving a train. It’s just music, it’s not going to kill anybody (quite the contrary), its not going to injure anybody, you can have whatever you like. The worst that could happen is that people are just going to get bored and walk out.

Speaking of systems, do you have concerns about Artificial Intelligence?

It’s not intelligence, it’s computer algorithms. It’s very un-environmental, it consumes vast amounts of energy, and to do what? To do things that humans have always been able to do and always taken pleasure in doing. People take pleasure in writing books and writing music and painting pictures. Why do we want to remove that pleasure or lessen it by getting machines to do it for us? When all what machines are doing is recycling earlier work anyway. They can’t think for themselves, they are just stealing what’s been done in the past. They are stealing text that has been written in the past or music that has been written in the past, and applying algorithms and trying to put it together. Most people who talk about AI don’t understand what it is. And I didn’t understand very much about it, and I still don’t understand, but I understand more than what I did before. I listened to a very good explanation by an expert on this field, in a YouTube video. It was a respectable lecture. He gave a talk at the Royal Institution, and he talked about how LLMs worked, and they are essentially probability machines. They are an extension of the word prediction you have on your phone, which fills in the next word for you without typing. They are doing that, but on a much larger scale. So they are filling in text that is the most probable text to follow the input. They are not thinking, they have no morality, they have no concept of truth or falsehood, they are simply statistical prediction machines. As a moral position, I have nothing to do with it. I know a very good composer, who I’m very friendly with, who writes very good music, but when he wants to write text about what the music is, what it’s about or publicise it and this is the first time I saw it actually, he showed me how ChatGPT worked. You get ChatGPT to write this article for you, this review as it were of your piece of music and it’s just obvious to me. It’s obvious to anybody who is any good at, who is a good critic or a good reader, it’s obviously text that has been written by a machine. You can tell. It’s very formulaic.

It has no opinion, no personality and the sentence structures are the same. You can identify it from a distance.

Yes, and it reduces my opinion of anybody who uses that because I think it’s just lazy. Why don’t you feel confident to write your text yourself? I’m sure he’d never get the AI to write the music for him because music is his specialism, but he considers that writing text is not his speciality, so he’d rather get the AI to write the blurb for him. But then where do you stop it? It’s a slippery slope. I can’t see anything useful that AI has achieved so far. Of course, I don’t know everything about it, but I’ve heard of important cases where it has been very misleading, for example, where they tried to use AI to make a medical diagnosis. They were trying to diagnose skin cancer so they showed the AI pictures of different skin effects, skin colourations and defects and trained it to recognise skin cancer. The objective was to speed up cancer diagnosis and get it treated early, and what they found was that it was quite successful, but that it was diagnosing all the photographs it was shown that had a ruler in them as having cancer and those that didn’t as not having cancer, because it was being misled by the ruler. Obviously, most people do not include a ruler in the picture of their skin. It was the doctors who were including the ruler in it when they strongly suspected it was a cancer already. So there was a bias. It’s so easy to have the bias in the training data and it goes wrong because AI picks up on something that’s actually irrelevant. The ruler has nothing to do with it, but it’s an incidental, confounding factor in the statistics and then you get problems like different skin colours, because there was a bias. There weren’t enough black people being diagnosed, because the doctors were not doing it and maybe because the black people were more reluctant to go to the doctors in the first place. So there’s a bias against being able to identify the cancer in black people. So you get all these confounding effects, you have to be really careful. I’m not certain that there will never be good applications of AI, or useful applications, but most of what we have seen so far is just pollution.

You mentioned that one of the reasons you got reintroduced to Astronomy was because you moved to NW London, decided that the skies were clear and brought your telescope. Were there unique challenges that London’s light-polluted atmosphere presented to stargazing? Do you think where you currently stay is the best place for it?

Obviously not. I would prefer to be in the countryside or by the sea, but my partner Helen wants to stay in London because she’s got a big family and quite a few of them live in London, and she likes visiting her mother at least once a week. So she wants to stay in London, and she’s quite determined about that. So I do my best from a very poor location.

Why do you call it poor? What are the challenges that you face?

Well yes, there is a lot of light pollution and it increases every year. So mostly, I concentrate on observing the brighter objects which are the bright planets like Venus and Jupiter and Mars and the Moon and of course you can observe the Sun with solar telescopes as well. But you can see a surprising amount of even fainter objects like comets with a large telescope. You can see them, and with sensitive cameras, you can take images of them. And with modern computer processing power, you can do a lot to remove the light pollution interference from the images of the sky. Obviously, it’ll never be as good as images taken from a dark place. But you can do a lot. And that’s really why I concentrate on Jupiter, on images in Jupiter because it’s not affected by the light pollution. It’s mostly what you want for Jupiter, a steady atmosphere. What we astronomers call good seeing. So seeing is how sharp the images that you get when you look through a telescope are, because the image is always being disturbed by rising and falling currents of hot and cold air, which are interfering with the light part and are defocusing and splitting up the lights and making a mess of the images. But sometimes we get good seeing and the image is stable, but really if you just go out every night, then a proportion of the nights will be very good and so it’s just a matter of persistence even in a bad location. If you persist enough, you can get the right occasions when you can make nice observations and for Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mars, light pollution doesn’t really make any difference. And I find you can get quick results from a large city.

My introduction to Astronomy

Speaking of a large city, do you think the physical landscape of London has changed since you first arrived?

Yes, it’s become a lot denser. Where I live now in Outer London, it’s becoming much denser, it’s becoming more like Inner London. Even since I’ve been living in Outer London, which has been 23 years, it’s changed a lot. It used to be just old, little detached and semi-detached houses with big gardens and a certain amount of industry in between, but now the industry is mostly gone, and big block flats are being built everywhere. So it’s becoming more densely populated. The gardens tend to get built on. It’s becoming more like Inner London, and the community shifts all the time. The area that I lived in, before I got there, in the 1960s-1970s, there was a large influx from Asia, a big influence of Indian people. The white English people tended to move out into Hertfordshire or Essex and when I moved there, only the very old generation white people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s were still living there and it was all Asian families. But then in the 1990s and early 2000s, Tony Blair’s government really welcomed the East Europeans and then we got a big wave of East European immigration and that tended to displace the Asians. And they are still there. So now there is a really big East European community as well. So yes, it’s very mixed in outer North West London – big Asian community, lots of East European communities, not many white people. They have tended to move out into the outer suburbs like Watford, places like that further out. And there has also been a repopulation of Central London and Inner London. I lived for about 20 years in West Hampstead, and that was quite, I wouldn’t say down the hill, but it was quite lower-to-middle class, not particularly smart. You could get a lot of cheap flats there, lots of students there, young people there. Whereas, since then, that area inside the circle that we call Hampstead, well, Hampstead always had wealthy people, but West Hampstead didn’t have wealthy people. That’s become much more upmarket now, and that’s full of book shops, as we are sitting in a book shop today, now that’s completely different to how it was. That’s full of bookshops and ethnic delicatessens, craft shops, and it’s become much more upper-middle-class, and there’s been a repopulation of professional white people, mostly white people, some of us, European, Jewish, back into Inner London.

Do you think all these different communities that moved at different times, because you’ve stayed there for a long time and you have seen the influx and outflow, do you think they are well integrated now?

I think they are extremely well integrated. Whenever we have racial tensions in the UK, when people try to make trouble, it’s not in London broadly. There have been problems in London, like in the past year, I can’t remember where they were. There were Brixton riots many years ago, there have been riots in London.  But in the last twenty years, from what I see, the communities in London are mostly peaceful, but there’s also been this effect of separating out. Often the white people have left of their own accord, and it’s complicated. The reason for that to a certain extent is that they have been priced out. Working-class white people have been priced out of Inner London, or the accommodation wasn’t available. The big houses that they needed to bring up their families, they tended to be blocked. The houses get occupied by somebody living on their own. The rest of the family has moved away. My father is like that. He’s occupying a house that is much too big for him, and nobody’s living with him, and it’s a big family house, but he’s going to live there until he dies, he’s determined to do that, and I’ve seen that a lot. You often get this situation of big houses being occupied by one person. So I think in the 80s-90s, probably early 2000s, what was in effect was this shortage of accommodation for families growing up in London, and that forced a lot of people to go into the home counties. And then, immigrants from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, who had been living in smaller spaces and cramming their whole families into one room, occupied those properties. So the effect of it is shortage of accommodation rather than people deciding that oh I don’t want to. I think there is an effect of people deciding that say, oh this area is full of Pakistanis, we don’t want to live here anymore, we don’t want to send our children to a school where everybody is speaking Gujarati or whatever. I think there was some effect of that, but I think there are also other effects of where the jobs are, where you get the housing that you need. So when I say that I think everything is very harmonious in London, maybe that’s also because people just got out of the way of each other. But I think that the place where the far-right parties do well tend to be the places that don’t have much immigration. And people are just afraid of something that they haven’t seen. But in London and in Birmingham and Manchester, the really big cities, where people have been all mixed up racially for a really long time, they are much less worried about this stuff. It’s also a class thing. More upper-class and upper-middle-class people are less worried about it. They are more secure in their jobs. It was the white London working-class that was always afraid about immigrants from West Indies, Africa, Asia taking the lower-level jobs like driving buses and driving taxis and emptying rubbish, that kind of thing. These days, it’s working in healthcare, working in hospitals. They were always worried about being undercut in terms of wages, and because my partner Helen is disabled, she takes a lot of taxis, and the taxi drivers we meet, I think of them as typical working-class English people. I don’t meet many of them, but they are the closest I tend to meet, and they usually have very right-wing views. They are anti-immigration, and they have all moved to places like Essex or Hertfordshire because they like it there, because there aren’t many immigrants there, there aren’t many black and brown people there, and they are representing a certain kind of tendency.

I think those would probably be the ones who voted for Brexit, because London didn’t. That becomes a whole different conversation.

We saw this division in a big way when London and other inner-city areas voted for Brexit. People in small towns and rural areas voted for Brexit, people in the larger cities voted against Brexit.

Sorry, that went off tangent. Just one more question which is, that if there is someone who has never looked through a telescope and they ask you why they should, what would you tell them? To someone who does not have any idea about astronomy.

It gives you an idea of the scale of the universe and also the scale of time. And I find that people who have studied astronomy have a different attitude to time compared to other people. I realise not only how short a human life is, but how short the life of the whole species is, how short the life of the whole planet is, how short the life of a star is. The vast scale of time and it gives people a different perspective on existence really. And I think on the need to care for our own planet, our own communities, to protect the environment, that kind of thing. I can look through my telescope at Venus and see a planet that is very like the Earth but is completely uninhabitable. And it’s uninhabitable because it has a Carbon Dioxide atmosphere that creates a greenhouse effect, which raises the temperature to 400 degrees Celsius, and that is going to happen to the Earth if we carry on like we are. And there’s a scientific certainty, I can see that, and it’s not going to take very long either. And I haven’t got any children, but my brother’s got a child, and I’m worried for the next generation. They’ll see an environmental catastrophe, which is entirely foreseeable and could be averted. And Astronomy really shows you what the universe is. It shows you the timescale, the distance scale and how hostile the rest of the universe is, and how special the Earth is. I mean you don’t need to look through a telescope, you could study the subject and find out all these things anyway. But the experience of seeing things with your own eyes helps to put these understandings deeper in the brain, I think, and consciousness. So I think understanding of astronomy is really important for people to understand our place in the universe, our smallness in the universe, our smallness in the scale of time, and the fragility of all human existence and think about some of the things that are needed to preserve human existence in the future.

That’s such a wonderful answer because it puts a lot of other problems and their magnitude really into perspective, the things people squabble over.

Exactly, and all the people who have been to space, they say this thing, that it gives you a different perspective. You can see how small everything is and it’s all in one place, in one tiny place in the universe and that’s everything and everybody who has ever existed and has ever known and ever will know, and it’s fragile. It’s unbelievably fragile when seen from the outside.

Thank you David!

You are welcome and thank you very much for your intelligent and thoughtful and interesting questions.