Original subtitles

- When I grow up,

I'd like to find out all about the moon and all that.

- Nick, a farmer's son,

grew up in the Yorkshire Dales.

- I said I was interested in physics and chemistry.

Well, I'm not gonna do that here.

- At 14, he was at away at boarding school,

and at 21, reading physics at Oxford.

So, what career are you gonna pursue?

- It depends whether I'll be good enough

to do what I want to really do.

I would like if I can to do research.

The gas in these experiments is at a temperature

comparable with that of the sun, whereas in a power reactor,

it would be maybe 10 times the temperature of the sun,

and we're trying to induce that gas to fuse.

- By 28, he had moved to America

and was doing research into nuclear fusion

at the University of Wisconsin.

By 35, he was an associate professor there.

- The first one is basically saying

that the rate of change of crystal momentum,

it's DDT at this quality H bar K.

That is equal to the Laurent's Force.

So, if you work out the density in any cell.

In addition to now being a full professor,

I've been doing some administrative jobs.

I've been associate chair of my department,

which means I've run the graduate programme in my department,

which is the Electrical Engineering department.

I've been running admissions

and dealing with student problems

and some for the graduate programme.

And I've spent the last year and a half

writing a couple of books.

One about this business of using plasmas

to process semi-conductors,

and there is another one that was about semi-conductors.

It's called "Semi-conductor Devises,"

and it's got a subtitle, "A Simulation Approach."

- Do you have a girlfriend?

- I don't want to answer that.

I don't answer those kind of questions.

I thought that one would come up

because when I was, when I was going on the other one,

somebody said, "What do you think about girls,"

and I said, "I don't answer questions like that."

Is that the reason you're asking it?

Yeah, I thought so.

The best answer would be to say

that I don't answer questions like that,

but you know, it's what I said when I was seven,

and it's still the most sensible,

but I mean, what about them?

- Nick was only 17 when I first met him,

and I knew he was a nice person.

I find him very attractive and he uses his intelligence

in his relationship with me which is very important.

- His English-born wife Jackie

is a professor of journalism at the university.

They have an eight-year-old son.

- Why only one child?

- Well, there's a couple of reasons,

one is that these silly jobs we have

demand such an amount of time

and such a commitment that it's hard to fit in one.

Also, he's such a lively person

and he demands such a lot of attention

that he makes it hard to find time for another.

So, I think that's the main reason.

- So, you don't want another one?

- Oh yes, no, I would love to.

I would dearly love to have another one actually.

No that's, don't go away with that impression.

No, I absolutely adore children.

If I can change the world, I'd change it into a diamond.

I don't really think that I've done anything

you could call a great success.

I mean, it would seem really ridiculous

to any of my friends who watch this if I said,

"Christ, aren't I a great success, look at me."

- When I first met you,

I remember I thought this was very idealistic,

but it was rather interesting,

when I asked you why are you working on fusion,

you said you wanted to save the world.

I think that's a bit embarrassing now,

but I don't think you'd feel the same way

about something that you didn't feel mattered.

- I always wanted to have an impact,

to do something useful

that was actually going to benefit people.

I had this vision of people in ivory towers being cut off,

doing stuff all their lives

and having no effect on anybody whatsoever,

and that was absolutely not what I wanted to do,

and so I chose to go into this fusion business

'cause I thought this would have a huge impact.

- Plasma's supposed to fill that volume.

- I'm not expecting to be reported

in newspaper headlines any time soon.

That's not the limit of my ambition,

but it's just trying to be realistic.

I'm just gonna have to try

and settle for reasonably small victories.

They'd like to come out for a holiday

in the country when we'd like,

when I'd like to have a holiday in the town.

- Do you get lonely here?

- You just tend to get stuck into your everyday routine,

and you don't think about it, but when you call home,

then you realise how far away you are,

and now it seems acute

because both our families are getting older,

even if you think in terms of seeing them

once every two years.

- That's not so many times. - You're thinking only

about 10 times and that's awful.

- This year, Nick went back to the Dales

to see his family.

It's been five years since I've been back here.

It's changed quite a lot.

It's got more touristy and less like a region that's farmed.

Every second house seems to be a hotel at the moment.

- This is the old pippin.

- Well, it's been rotten for my dad

because he's been unable to walk a lot of the time.

He'd had terrible troubles with his legs,

and of course, farming's in a miserable shape,

so he's retiring, and the stock have been sold.

Yes, I think he'd had a very hard life.

He's had to work enormous hours every day of his life

doing something that ultimately isn't going to work.

- Do you want to take up farming?

- No.

I'm not interested in it.

My youngest brother, the deaf one,

if he can't do anything else,

he can probably run the farm if he can't, as a last resort.

- So, your brothers won't take over on the farm?

- Absolutely not, no.

Neither of them really wanted to, I don't think.

Andrew's a newspaper reporter.

He's I think about to take a job near York.

He's gonna need a base over there.

He can't commute from here.

Well, Christopher's married, which is great.

He has a very nice wife who is getting better and better

at communicating with the deaf and he works in Skipton.

He's taking some courses in computers.

I'm not actually sure what, but he always says to me

that I do computers and I think that it's a good idea

that he does computers and I do.

So, I try to encourage him.

- So, you're all away,

so the Hitchons are finished here?

- Yes, the Hitchons are certainly

largely uprooted from here, aren't they?

I'm the only child in the village

except for my baby brother.

Well, this is Arncliffe School,

which is where my brother and I went to school

from age five to 10.

And there's the church

where we were all christened and everything.

We used to go to harvest festivals and things there.

- What did you learn here do you think

that you carried with you?

- Well, you just look at this place.

I mean, it's utterly beautiful

but not beautiful in the pretty cutesy way.

I think of it as being magnificent but rather grim really.

I sort of feel as if you could look deep inside me,

I feel like there's some of this in there somewhere,

and it's rather dower but just wonderful.

It's very uncompromising, and sometimes it's rather tragic,

but it makes other places you go

seem rather trivial as well.

I'm just enormously proud of having come from here.

The people are, the idea of being a Dales person

is really terribly important to me.

What you see that's so magnificent

are the clouds sweeping by all the time,

air and cloud and water continually sweeping over you.

I mean, there's a poetic side to that,

and I would be looking at these and thinking,

"Now, how does a cloud work?"

And when you come down to it,

what I do when I try to solve equations,

it's the same equations that describe clouds

and water and air flowing around.

From a scientific point of view,

I relate back to this sort of thing.

- So, this is a sign, there's ESAs, there's LFAs.

- It's hard being away from your roots, isn't it?

- Terribly hard.

It's hard in lots and lots of ways.

I mean, if you go to an alien culture,

you don't know what's going on around you half the time.

It's really strange to go to a different country,

people don't send out the same signals.

I could try that. - Even if it's frightening.

- It's very hard to imagine being able to come back here,

and I think about it a lot,

but I haven't seen the way to do it yet.

In some sense, it never really belonged to me.

I mean, part of me would love to own a stake in it,

but I really don't own any of it.

But the other thing is that I've had to move out of here,

and I think that the way the world is,

it's very hard to stay in one place.

People are forced to move constantly.

The history of this century has a lot of examples

where people moved or should have moved

and professionally and in lots of other ways,

it's really important that people are always thinking

about what's happening around them

and how they have to react to it.

Beauty's transient, so maybe we can come by here

and visit it, but unfortunately,

I'm not gonna be permitted to be here very much.

- And what about all the other children?

What's happened to them?

- Well, I'll go in to Africa and try and teach people

who are not civilised to be more or less good.

- I'm going to work in Woolworths.

- What would you do if you'd lots of money,

about maybe two pounds?

- I would buy meself a new nice house, wouldn't I?

- What does university mean?

- When I grow up, I want to be an astronaut,

but if I can't be an astronaut,

I think I'll be a coach driver.

Well, I'm going to take people to the country

and sometimes take them to the seaside.

- Is Neil still homeless?

We'll find out tomorrow.