 What did Woody Allen say? He said, I wish to obtain immortality by not dying. I suppose, in my case, I just want things to go on forever. I'm marking my 70th birthday quietly. It's not an occasion to particularly celebrate, I think. But on the other hand, as a theorist, I was supposed to have stopped working when I was 35, but here I am at twice that age. And actually, the last 10 years have been perhaps the most productive of my entire career. And I hope they'll continue for a little while yet. I was recently awarded the Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics. I'm very pleased to get this medal. The significance of awards to me is recognition by my fellow scientists. So it's always nice to have your friends tell you that you're doing well and that they appreciate your work. I was always interested in science. I can't remember a time when I wasn't thinking about problems. My family is from the north of England, and I was brought up in Ashton Underline in Lancashire. It was a very resilient and tough family on my maternal grandmother's side. And since we live with my grandmother, the small boy, that side of the family was very much the dominant influence in my life. We lived in her sweet shop. Previous to the sweet shop, when my uncle was living still with the family, they ran an electrical shop and all the little bits of kit from an electrical shop were down there in the cellar. There was a treasure trove of electrical equipment, light fittings and the old-fashioned carbon-filament electrical bulbs. Lots of wire. Eventually when I got a bit older, we had a chemistry set, and of course every young boy with a chemistry set isn't content with that. He goes on to make explosives and fireworks and so on, which I did. Quite a few electrical shocks along the way, I must say. But whenever I got really stuck, I'd go to my uncle. He would come and play the piano and play with me. And we talked science because he was an engineer, an electrical engineer. And so any real difficulties I bumped into, I'd ask him about it and he'd either answer my question or even more usefully, he'd introduce me to books and magazines. That experience of playing with technical and scientific toys taught me a great deal, not so much about the academic side with the mathematics and so on, which I learned at school, but very much about how to ask questions. So now when I approach a problem, I can see that child asking what is fire made of. It's the obvious question to ask and my mind works in the same way when I approach perhaps a more sophisticated problem in my 70th year. I spent 13 years in Cambridge and that was really rather a monastic existence. The colleges were single sex in those days. Women were in very short supply and very fortunate that the Cavendish of 1973 recruited a young lady from Oxford who was a group theorist. She was in the room down the hall from mine and we began to date one another and eventually we got married after quite a long time actually. It took us two years to tie the knot. When you speak of my wife and my work, a story of a PG Wodehouse comes to mind. One of his books was dedicated to his wife and in the dedication he said to my wife, with that whose help this book would have finished in half the time and I think that's the influence my wife has on my work. In other words, a company is so delightful that I'm easily distracted from what I'm doing at the time. My first area of research had to do with surface science and at that time people were very interested in the structure of the immediate surface region. That's to say one or two atoms down from the surface. I was one of the leading players in developing that technology to do surface crystallography. My collaborator in Sweden, Stig Andersen, did the first surface crystal structure using electron diffractions. So that's an achievement I'm quite pleased with in that part of my research. The other thing I'm very pleased to have done but is not something which people would recognize very much is this disordered problem and this beautiful theorem that you can have a structure which is a complete mess like a glass of milk for example and if you try to get some light through it just by shining any old torch on it the light won't go through. The result which says that if you're really clever and try very hard the light will always go through. Disorder materials can be transparent providing you look at them in the right direction. That's an amazing result and I'm still in shock and awe at it. They were so interested in our recent paper that they asked me all the details about the model. So they told me that they were going to implement it straight away. I put a lot of store by this collaboration because I think that is one of the major groups on the experimental side of things and if we're going to achieve something it will probably be through their experimental efforts hopefully using some of our theory as well. If you're doing theory that doesn't have many experiments to talk to is kind of a dead subject and it's when the experiments come in that you have the fun and that's been very much the case with the third major research topic which I'm working on now which has to do not with how light interacts with a disordered structure but how you can design the structure in a very specific and ordered way that will create unique properties for light. So not so much to the chemistry of the material that they're made of it's actually to do with the micro structure that you engineer into that material these new materials which we've invented are called metamaterials and it turns out within optics there are many things you might want to do which you can't do because when you want to do something you've got to make it out of a material and if that material with the properties you need is not available you can't do it. And metamaterials extend the properties to which you have access in a very dramatic way. I tend to like to work in areas where there is a residual problem but perhaps it's an area which has been well studied but maybe there are things which others haven't seen a statement that applies very much to perhaps my most notorious work which is when I discovered that you could focus light perfectly that is to say to an infinitely sharp point providing you could find the materials to build a lens which would do that and all lenses cannot focus anything better than wavelength of light which is about a micron a millionth of a meter and that's not good enough for seeing many biological specimens but in 2000 I discovered that it was possible to give specifications for a lens which was not limited by the wavelength and that was a shaft of light actually it temporarily blinded me because I didn't believe the result and I had to stare at it for a very long time because I knew that if I published it many of my colleagues would have thought I had gone crazy and I did publish it and sure enough some colleagues reacted in a very negative way to it everybody in optics remembers that moment this silly paper came out in physical review letters in my work I do try to be very diverse and to look to a far horizon and different things and so on and so it is that when I'm not working playing as someone would say I like to do things which are really very different photography is one thing that's the easy things the first interest I had in optics was the diffraction of light from structures so you can make colour in two different ways one is to have a chemical which absorbs part of the white light leaving only say the red but there's another way and that is you can bounce light off very very tiny structures which respond only to light of a certain colour and that's called diffractive colour and butterflies are very good at using structure for colour so if you see a butterfly that's blue or green then it will almost always have metallic sheen to it and that's a signature that the colour is not coming from chemistry that it's coming from structure to sort of draw people into my lectures on this I thought it would be a good idea if I had some photographs of butterflies and so I started taking these photographs myself I now take lots and lots of photographs of butterflies that never see a scientific meeting of course I like hard challenges I would like to solve a really really difficult problem and I'm being tempted at the moment to return to my work on disorder I haven't decided to do it yet of course just as when I came to Imperial College and was settled as a professor I thought I could have the freedom to tackle a difficult problem now I've got the Newton Medal I feel that freezing me up to say well ok I can do something which might fail very badly now and so I might turn back to the parts of that disorder problem that I failed to solve all these years ago and try again