The Last Samurai

He said: Well, you’ve got your programme to get on with but there’s just one point I’d like to make, which is that the more you study any martial art the less likely you are to actually get in a fight and the less likely you are to put yourself in the type of situation where you have to fight. A beginner might do that type of thing but the more you progress the more you realise the skill is something not to be used lightly.

He said: Also the more you progress the more you realise that there is more to it than trying to progress. As a beginner you just want to improve as fast as you can, you tend to obsess about getting to the next colour of belt, there comes a time, or there should come a time, when you rise above that. Obviously you improve your skill by fighting someone as good as you are or better, well, if you think about it, if the only point is to improve your skill there’s nothing in it for the better fighter. There was a time when for that very reason the last thing I wanted was to open a school. But there comes a time when you realise you have to help young people coming along, and in the final analysis that was why I agreed to come on this show. If you, as a Nobel Prize winner, can take time away from the lab to help train young minds who am I to say no.

Sorabji said: Thank you for joining us.

He said: Let’s see this one more time in slow motion, and they replayed the arm rising and falling and the brick splitting in two.

Sib said: Do they teach you all that in judo?

I said we didn’t learn to break bricks because judo was mainly about throws and falls.

Sib said: Oh well.

He said: If the space between a nucleus and the first electron shell is like the space between 110 Vauxhall Astras at Wembley and a 1.5-kilo weight at Luton, and if the space between the first shell and the second is like the distance between Luton and Birmingham, why does it take ten years of serious mental and physical training to get a hand through a brick? At the atomic level both hand and brick are almost entirely empty space. The fact is it is not the matter in the hand which repels the matter in the brick. The repulsion is the result of electrical charge. If it were not for electrical charge we could walk through walls.

The first time I saw the programme I was very impressed by this. Now I suddenly thought Wait a minute.

I said to Sib that I did not think you could have an atom without electrical charge and if you couldn’t have an atom how could you have walls and I said maybe I should write him a letter and sign it Ludo aged 11.

Sib said: If you think he is unaware of the fact you should certainly bring it to his attention. She said you should only sign a letter aged 11 if you were saying something cleverer than the average 11-year-old would say and it was not a good idea if you had completely missed the point.

She said he was obviously trying to communicate a fact to the public at large.

I said: Fine.

She said: I wonder if it’s too late to move to Dunstable.

I said: What?

Sorabji explained that the electrons orbited the nucleus billions of times in a millionth of a second, the effect was similar to that of the propellers of a helicopter and it was the speed of the electrons that made the atom solid.

Sibylla commented that Sorabji was largely self-taught.

Sorabji’s father was a Parsi from Bombay; his mother was English. She first met his father on a visit to Cambridge: her brother was reading mathematics at Trinity College and introduced her to another man on the same staircase. At first they did not hit it off, because she made a comment about India and he had the bad manners to say that as she had never set foot in the country he would be interested to know on what she based her opinion; she said later he was the rudest man she had ever met. He went back to India and she was presented and did the usual things and it was all rather a bore. She had always been unconventional and she got the idea of going out to India just to see the place. At first her father refused his permission, but she turned down three or four offers of marriage and began taking a horse out and setting it at six-foot fences, and when she had broken an arm and a collarbone her father said he supposed he’d better let her go then, before one of the horses got hurt.