Oral-History:Archie Campbell
About Archie Campbell
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Archie MacRobert Campbell (1940-2019) was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Trinity College, Glenalmond. In 1959, he was awarded a scholarship at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge to study natural sciences. He received a B.A. in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1965 in material science and continued his career at the University of Cambridge Engineering Department. In 1966, he became a Fellow of Christ’s College and at the University of Cambridge he was appointed a University Lecturer in 1974 and retired as Emeritus Professor of Electromagnetism in 2007. He also served the university as Pro-Proctor from 1985 to 1986, and then Proctor from 1986 to 1986.
During his forty-year career, Campbell pioneered the so-called "Campbell technique" for investigating the penetration of flux in bulk superconductors and, together with late Professor Jan Evetts, authored in 1972 the subject-defining monograph “Flux pinning in Type II superconductors” (Adv. Phys. 21, 199, 1972).
In 2010, Campbell received the IEEE Council on Superconductivity’s Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions in the Field of Applied Superconductivity (Materials). (Since 2013, the IEEE Dr. James Wong Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions to Applied Superconductor Materials Technology.) He was granted this award “for significant and sustained contributions in the development of superconducting materials by advancing the science of both low temperature and high temperature superconducting materials, in particular: for making contributions to the subject of flux pinning in Type II superconductors; for authoring, with the late Jan Evetts, the subject-defining monograph on critical currents in superconductors; and for his leadership of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Superconductivity at the University of Cambridge which promote research across a wide range of superconducting science and technology.”
To the dismay of family and friends, Campbell passed away unexpectedly, shortly after recording this oral history, on 21 November 2019.
About the Interview
ARCHIE CAMPBELL: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, September 5, 2019
Interview #838 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
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Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Archie Campbell, an oral history conducted in 2019 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
Early life and education
Hellrigel:
Today is September 5, 2019. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel, Institutional Historian and Archivist at the IEEE History Center. I’m in Glasgow, Scotland, at EUCAS 2019, the 14th European Conference on Applied Superconductivity. I’m here with Dr. Archie MacRobert Campbell. Thank you, sir.
Campbell:
Yes. Professor, actually.
Hellrigel:
Professor, I’m very pleased that you were able to find the time because it was such a last-minute invitation. This is part of the larger IEEE Council on Superconductivity (IEEE CSC) Oral History Project. We have twenty-five oral histories in the collection, and at this conference I am recording nine more oral histories
Campbell:
You haven’t gotten Martin Wilson, have you?
Hellrigel:
I got him yesterday.
Campbell:
Oh good, because he made a very major contribution at the beginning.
Hellrigel:
Good, right. Bruce Strauss was eating at the restaurant, and I was there. He stopped to say hello to Martin, and then I pigeonholed him to do this.
Campbell:
Yes, good. He originated the sort of conductor which was then used all over the world and is still being used all over the world.
Hellrigel:
Yes. We spoke a bit about the patent, and he said the company overstretched it, so the patent wound up being indefensible.
Campbell:
Is that right: It was indefensible? They should have made a lot of money on that.
Hellrigel:
Right, it in the end.
Campbell:
Right. Well, that’s the way it goes.
Hellrigel:
You’ve been selected by Peter Lee to be one of our interviewees as we try to document not only your career, but the history of superconductivity, the ASC, and perhaps the IEEE Council on Superconductivity. But this project started about five years ago, so we’re under way.
We start with a little bit about your biographical information. When and where were you born?
Campbell:
I was born in Edinburgh in 1940.
Hellrigel:
Edinburgh, in 1940.
Campbell:
Yes, I went to school at Edinburgh Academy which is, in fact, the same school that James Clerk Maxwell went to, rather before my time.
Hellrigel:
Oh, a few years earlier.
Campbell:
A few years earlier. Remarkably, I didn’t know that. Nobody knew that because the school wasn’t interested in science. All the clever boys were meant to do classics, and science was well down the pecking order. And so, we were told our famous alumnus was Robert Louis Stevenson, who was fine. Very, very famous, but nobody mentioned Clerk Maxwell. They only became conscious of it about twenty, thirty years ago.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Campbell:
Now they’ve got a Maxwell Laboratory.
Hellrigel:
IEEE has a Maxwell Milestone. [IEEE Milestone # 86, Maxwell’s Equations, 1860-1871. Dedicated 13 August 2009.]
Campbell:
Has it? What does that mean?
Hellrigel:
Well, his research has been documented as being a fundamental accomplishment in a technology within IEEE’s fields of interest. His home is a historic site.
Campbell:
Yes, in Edinburgh.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
Yes, I think it’s quite true. Einstein would certainly… And you’ve got Newton, Maxwell, Einstein who were the major steps before quantum mechanics.
Hellrigel:
Right. But I’m surprised, though, that the school didn’t make more of a to-do about it.
Campbell:
You wouldn’t have been if you knew the school.
Hellrigel:
Oh, okay. If you were to study the classics, did they expect you to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a minister, or a professor?
Campbell:
Yes. Well, all my family were lawyers. But there was no opposition. I wanted to do science, and I had to push a little, but they let me do it because, well, I was obviously quite good at it. Then I went from Edinburgh Academy, at the age of thirteen, to a boarding school, Glenalmond, which is in the Highlands, near Perth, and I stayed there until I was eighteen.
Hellrigel:
What’s the name of the boarding school?
Campbell:
Glenalmond. It was called Trinity College, Glenalmond [and renamed Glenalmond College in 1983].
Hellrigel:
Trinity College. There were you allowed to specialize in science?
Campbell:
That was where I was allowed to specialize, yes. After O-level, you could specialize.
Hellrigel:
At this point, when you went to that school, you knew you were going to go to university?
Campbell:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
Just a little bit more biographical information. If you could tell us your mother’s name.
Campbell:
Cecile MacRobert.
Hellrigel:
Cecile MacRobert. Did she have schooling, education?
Campbell:
Oh, yes. Yes. Actually, she was fairly advanced for her time, because she was born in 1904. She went to Queen Ethelburga’s, a school in England, and then Edinburgh University, where she read history and philosophy. She was quite unusual in having a degree. Her father was an advocate, and, in fact, became Lord Advocate of Scotland. He was quite an eminent lawyer. So, I come from a fairly privileged, solidly middle-class family. There’s no struggles against polity on either side, any side of our family.
Hellrigel:
That’s fortunate that they were open-minded enough to allow your mom to get an education, especially at that time. But she was of age with the big push for the women’s right to vote?
Campbell:
Well, that’s right, yes. Yes. She was an only child. Her father was very keen that she should succeed and be somebody. Well, she ended up being a secretary in the end.
Hellrigel:
She became a secretary after college?
Campbell:
After university.
Hellrigel:
After university.
Campbell:
Yes, she became a secretary to one of the professors there. Then of course, she got married, and then the war came. She had children, so that was the end of any career.
Hellrigel:
Right, that was the traditional pattern. Your father’s name?
Campbell:
Also, Archie Campbell [Archibald Campbell].
Hellrigel:
Archie Campbell, and he was a lawyer?
Campbell:
He was a lawyer in Edinburgh, yes.
Hellrigel:
He went to university at Edinburgh?
Campbell:
Yes, yes. He went to Edinburgh academy and Edinburgh University. It’s the capital city. It’s a closed society or a very small society. Everybody knows each other. Well, not everybody, but the middle classes and the lawyers, especially. There are lots of lawyers, and they all move together, and their children go to parties together and so on.
Hellrigel:
Was his father a lawyer?
Campbell:
Yes. He set up the family firm.
Hellrigel:
Oh, and do you have siblings?
Campbell:
I’ve got a sister in Edinburgh, whom I’m going to see this afternoon. I’m going to stay there on my way back.
Hellrigel:
Did she go to university?
Campbell:
No. She became a physiotherapist. She wasn’t interested in academic things.
Hellrigel:
When you were young, what piqued your interest in science or math?
Campbell:
Well, it was just always in there.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
Yes. I saw all the books about electricity, space, stars… Just everything absolutely fascinated me from the very beginning.
Hellrigel:
The natural science fascinated you?
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Like birds and all?
Campbell:
Yes, yes, nature.
Hellrigel:
Nature.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What kinds of hobbies did you have? Many of the gentlemen said they made radios.
Campbell:
I didn’t make radios. I made model airplanes with a body out of balsa wood. You get these little motors, and you spend ages in the cold trying to start the bloody things. Then they would fly around. And, I had a Meccano [set] or something called Tricks, where you built things and put electric motors in them and made cranes and things like that. Yes, I did that sort of thing all the time.
Hellrigel:
Yes, they were very popular.
Campbell:
Oh, yes and very good.
Hellrigel:
And did you play any sports?
Campbell:
I used to play golf a bit, but I was very bad at sports.
Hellrigel:
In school, before university, what was your least favorite subject?
Campbell:
English.
Hellrigel:
English. And why would that be?
Campbell:
Well, partly because I was the youngest in the class, or one of the youngest. We were pushed ahead. The brighter students were pushed ahead, so I was having to do Shakespeare at the age of thirteen and fourteen. It didn’t mean anything to me because instead of watching it, say, in a film or a play, you would go through it page by page. Then you have to write an essay on Shakespeare’s humor, for example. And to be honest, I didn’t find Shakespeare funny at that age. In fact, it’s not funny if you read it in a book.
Hellrigel:
No, and some of the humor is rather bawdy.
Campbell:
Yes. I mean, I loved reading.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
I liked science fiction and novels and, of course, science books. Then religious studies. Well, I didn’t mind them, but those are the only exams I failed. I failed religious studies twice, and they really had no idea why.
Hellrigel:
You had to take that in school as part of…
Campbell:
I had to. Yes, yes. We took all the grade range, about eight subjects. This was at O-level, when I was just fourteen. I got an A in English, in literature, in English language, history, even French. But I failed the religious studies.
Hellrigel:
Religious studies.
Campbell:
I think that one of the problems—[it’s] sort of a jumble, looking back on it—was that we were doing, actually, the apostles.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
There was a bit there where St. Paul said the Athenians spend all their time at the marketplace talking and learning new things. I thought that sounded absolutely great, but he obviously mentioned it as a very strong criticism. So, I had the wrong attitude to religion.
Hellrigel:
Yes. They were not productive people.
Campbell:
Yes. That’s right. No, they’re people like our - -Archimedes [laughs].
Cambridge
Hellrigel:
[laughing] Right, right. And you went to university?
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Where?
Campbell:
Cambridge.
Hellrigel:
Cambridge.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You left Edinburgh.
Campbell:
Yes. My school was the sort where the brighter boys were all directed towards Cambridge. My father was prepared to pay for it, so I’m very grateful to him. Cambridge, of course, was the place to do physics and math.
Hellrigel:
Cambridge, but not Oxford as the place for physics and math?
Campbell:
No.
Hellrigel:
You go to Cambridge because you’re one of the intellectual elites, I guess?
Campbell:
Well, not so.
Hellrigel:
As a candidate to get into Cambridge, you have to take exams?
Campbell:
Yes, yes. You take a scholarship exam. I didn’t get a scholarship, so I was sort of middle-of-the-road in Cambridge.
Hellrigel:
When you were going to go to Cambridge, did you have to declare a major?
Campbell:
Yes. Well, when I went, the major, if you like, would be natural sciences.
Hellrigel:
Natural sciences.
Campbell:
But I then found I had to do biology, which I wasn’t keen on. So instead, I did a year in mathematics. I did the Mathematical Tripos, which I found very, very difficult because others there had been doing nothing but math. I had done math, physics, and chemistry, so I was behind the others. It was also very difficult. It made me realize that I’m a physicist and not a mathematician, but I enjoyed it. I’m glad I did it. I learned lots of interesting things, but I then was pleased to change to physics at the end of the first year.
Hellrigel:
The first year.
Campbell:
I met my wife [Anne] in the first-year mathematics department. She was a mathematician.
Hellrigel:
Oh, she was studying?
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Cambridge was coed?
Campbell:
Oh yes. There were twenty colleges; only three of them took women. It was much more difficult for the women to get into Cambridge than the men.
Hellrigel:
Which college were you in?
Campbell:
I was in Corpus Christi College at that time.
Hellrigel:
They took women?
Campbell:
Sorry?
Hellrigel:
They took women.
Campbell:
No.
Hellrigel:
No?
Campbell:
No, no. I met her in the class.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
She was at Newnham [College].
Hellrigel:
When you were studying, did you have any influential professors?
Campbell:
Well, Brian Pippard was one of the most influential. I’ve never met anyone who could make things so clear, so easily. Well, the problem was he made everything so clear you didn’t realize that there were actually some gaps. So, when you tried to do things yourself, you sort of fell over. Another man, even more eminent, was [Richard] Feynman. I went to one of his lectures on quantum mechanics and antiparticles, and I came out feeling, ah, I understand that. But about half an hour later, I realized I didn’t. But it’s wonderful to hear people talk in this extremely clear and convincing and logical way about what are really very difficult things.
Brian Pippard died a few years ago, but I, like everyone else, have a huge admiration for him. He was a real physicist in every way.
Hellrigel:
Pippard seemed to enjoy teaching, by what others have told me.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you work in any labs as an undergraduate?
Campbell:
Not really. Only doing practicals. Well, I had one very interesting experience: Before I went, there was a well-known physicist called R. V. Jones, Reg Jones. R. V. Jones played a major part in the war. He worked with Churchill’s cabinet at the time and Lord Lindemann, so he was sort of Lindemann’s second-in-command. He was responsible for infrared detectors, but also it was he who worked out that the Germans were guiding the bombers with radio waves. This was the very beginning of the war, and you could pick up the waves. He was very influential all the way through the war in the technology and then he became professor at Aberdeen. He was a most amazing experimental physicist. He could make tiny little devices which could measure infrared radiation purely from the thermal expansion, which is a very small effect, and he had one of these in the lobby of his laboratory. It went like that [gestures] twice a day as the tides came into Aberdeen and the whole city tilted slightly. These were unbelievably sensitive experiments. This was 1959, before electronics had really taken off.
Hellrigel:
That’s amazing.
Campbell:
He was a fascinating man, yes.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
He was somebody who was an order of magnitude better than anyone else around him at what he did.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Pippard’s name has come up with other people that we’ve spoken with, and so has Feynman’s.
Campbell:
Yes. Well, of course. Yes. He didn’t work on superconductors.
Hellrigel:
No.
Campbell:
No.
Hellrigel:
But you’re going through, and at what point did you decide that you’re going to stay on for your master’s degree?
Campbell:
At that time, you didn’t do a master’s [degree]. The system in Cambridge, which still exists, was that from medieval times, you did your bachelor’s degree, and then you learned a bit about life, and you moved around. And then you got a master’s, which showed that you were a rounded person. You were experienced and you had your degree, and then you could do things like taking on undergraduates when you’re ready. So, the master’s wasn’t an academic qualification. You paid three pounds and got your master’s, so an M.A.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
Other universities rather resent this. You get an M.A. at Cambridge for playing, but we still do that. So, I spent three years and got my degree, and then I looked around for a Ph.D. topic. One of the ones was in the material science department on superconductors. I’d never heard of them, but they seemed like a bit of magic or telepathy. The currents could flow in these materials without any resistance, so if you start a current in a superconducting ring, it goes on forever, literally, forever. We knew that because if you cool the ring in a magnetic field, the currents go from zero and they start up. If they start up, they’re not going to die away again. But this seemed extraordinary. Well, it still seems remarkable. So, I thought, well, I’ve got three years to do something that looks interesting before I get a proper job. But here I am, fifty years later, still doing it.
Hellrigel:
You got your undergraduate degree in three years?
Campbell:
Yes, and then my Ph.D. in about three and a half.
Hellrigel:
You find a topic, and now did you have to find a professor?
Campbell:
No, it was the other way around. Essentially, you go around and—well, it’s not a cattle market, but the professors have projects because they’ve got money for them. In an experimental one, you need money.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
You can’t just decide to do an experiment on atomic bombs.
Hellrigel:
You’re looking for a professor with a project and funding?
Campbell:
You go to a department, and you talk to the professors who have projects on and are looking for Ph.D. students. Then you pick one, or he picks you, or vice versa, and that’s how it’s decided.
Hellrigel:
Who did you pair off with?
Campbell:
Oh, David Dew-Hughes was my supervisor. I should say that this was an exciting time with superconductors because up to this point, up until about 1960, superconductors were pure physics, and pure materials were the only ones of interest. [Henry] Cavendish’s idea of an alloy was .1 percent silver and gold or something like that, not practical. Then, suddenly, these materials emerged, the alloys—niobium-titanium, in particular, niobium-zirconium—which will carry very large currents in high magnetic fields. Suddenly, you could make really powerful superconducting magnets.
Alan Cottrell was head of material science, and he was a wonderful man. He was like Brian Pippard. He had a wonderfully acute sense of how to explain things, but also where things were going [and] what was interesting. And this department started a whole series of projects in different areas which are still going on today.
Hellrigel:
Material science was a different department?
Campbell:
It was a different department, yes. It came out of chemistry. A few years back, it was mainly concerned with how you get iron out of iron ore and things like that, but then the advent of the physicist into solid-state physics and mechanical properties meant that it went a lot more that way. So, Alan Cottrell very wisely decided that superconducting alloys were going to be a good project, but there was nobody there who knew anything about them. He found David Dew-Hughes, who was a graduate, but was working at Yale, [and] working on semiconductors. A lot of people confuse the two and think they’re something similar, but there isn’t. He suggested a day that he would come back and start a group on superconductors. So, David started reading about superconductors about six months before I joined. He was only six months ahead of me. And we went along like that for about most of the rest of the time. He was a very good supervisor. He made things work, he got things, got the money, generally helped.
Hellrigel:
It sounds like you had a good time.
Campbell:
We had a good time, yes. It seemed stressful at the time, but looking back on it, you feel virtually no competition. The physicists weren’t interested in this. They called them dirty superconductors.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
There’s actually a physics—that’s not meant to be pejorative, because it actually meant that the alloys scattered electrons and so on. But they were also not reversible. You heard Terry [Holesinger] talk about reversibility, and physicists don’t like reversible and hysteretic systems. The theories tend not to work in labs. And because it was a material science, it’s very dependent on what you do to the material. If you roll it or things like that, it alters the properties.
Hellrigel:
The quality of the material.
Campbell:
Yes. Well, things like the strength of material require all sorts of heat treatments and things like that. That all had a huge effect on the superconducting properties, so that’s why it was done in a material science department. But there was a lot of good physics to do as well.
Hellrigel:
Material science sometimes came out of mechanical engineering and work on the properties and strength of the metals.
Campbell:
Well, that’s right. It didn’t in Cambridge, but they, of course, then do a lot of the mechanical engineering, the fatigue, the factors, things like that. There were many groups on that.
Hellrigel:
Now you’re entering something that looks like it’s going to be a new adventure.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You’re attracted to this work. How many people were in the lab that Dew-Hughes ran? You’re in the lab and his group?
Campbell:
The group.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
There were four of us. There was David; there was Anant Narlikar, who was an electron microscopist; and then, at the same time as I joined, Jan Evetts joined. You may have heard the name.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I have.
Campbell:
Jan Evetts, yes. The two of us started together, and we were close friends and colleagues. Our families used to go on holidays together for the next fifty years, until he died, very sadly, about twelve years ago. We were lucky to be able to have this close collaboration for so long.
Hellrigel:
Were there any women in the lab?
Campbell:
There was one crazy one who committed suicide.
Hellrigel:
Oh, that is an unfortunate turn of events. She was a physicist?
Campbell:
No, she was a material scientist; very, very glamorous, as far as I remember. Although there was one other member of the group, he left. He was called Campbell Laird, and at one point, Barbara Evans rang through and said she had a cup of cyanide in the fatigue lab, and she was going to drink it if he didn’t come down and talk to her.
Hellrigel:
Oh, my gosh. A love thing?
Campbell:
Something like that, yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Oh, my gosh.
Campbell:
She didn’t. At least, not at that time.
Hellrigel:
Oh, good. But, yes, what an event. At this time, you’re married?
Campbell:
No, I didn’t get married until I finished my Ph.D. Wait a minute. No, that’s not quite right. No, I married the second year of my Ph.D.
Hellrigel:
That would have been…
Campbell:
Oh, dear, 1963, is it? No, 1964. I think it was 1963. I’m getting confused now.
Hellrigel:
You’ll figure that out before your anniversary.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You haven’t started a family yet?
Campbell:
No.
Hellrigel:
You found a sense of community, which is important because, in the lab, it’s not a nine-to-five job.
Campbell:
No, it’s a real community. Whenever someone passed a Ph.D., that lab is small enough that we would all go down to the pub and have a beer and celebrate. So, there was the community of the lab, but then there’s also a community of the college. Well, before I got married, I was in, essentially, a college hostel, and you can meet and talk to people from all subjects. That’s the big attraction of Cambridge. Although it’s divided into departments in one way, it’s divided into colleges in another, and you’ve got the same people overlap.
Hellrigel:
You had a good time at Cambridge.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You enjoyed that experience.
Campbell:
Yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
You’re working along, and what did you think you were going to do for a career?
Campbell:
Oh, I was going to do research of some kind.
Hellrigel:
Research. Did you ever think of going to industry?
Campbell:
Oh, it was possible. but I think I would always prefer university.
Hellrigel:
Did teaching appeal to you?
Campbell:
Yes, yes. I liked teaching. I’m a compulsive teacher. You know what? If you work hard at something and you don’t understand it, and then you understand it, it’s a great pleasure to explain it to people. There were things that I was taught, and I didn’t understand. Eventually, I worked it out, and I thought to myself, why wasn’t it explained in this way? I know how I should explain this. And I thought that if I explained it in this way, it would be immediately understandable, but it wasn’t.
Hellrigel:
No.
Campbell:
Different people need different types of explanation.
Hellrigel:
Yes. That was my experience with calculus.
Campbell:
Calculus? Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I can’t conceptualize it.
Campbell:
Sorry. One difference is you see the math—mathematicians do it mathematically and logically. But for the physicists, we really like to start from a simple practical application and then perhaps go to [a] more complicated [one] and then set down the theory precisely. It’s the opposite direction from a mathematician. What did you read for your degree?
Hellrigel:
History and biology.
Campbell:
But you did calculus at school?
Hellrigel:
Yes. In high school and then at university. At university I had a class of 300-plus people and we spent much of the fall semester calculating Professor Zimmerman’s New York City Marathan race.
Campbell:
Oh.
Hellrigel:
On the first day, he said if you get a D, you’re a success because 60 percent of the class would fail, and then in the second semester, 60 percent would fail, so in the end, if you got Ds, you are a success.
Campbell:
If you failed; you were out?
Hellrigel:
Well, you’d have to either take another math or repeat the course, hopefully, with a different professor.
Campbell:
Oh, right. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I was a success, but barely. It was just a harsh way of not teaching.
Campbell:
It’s a waste of time teaching mathematics to people who aren’t interested in it and have no talent for it.
Hellrigel:
Algebra, piece of cake.
Campbell:
Is that right? But not the calculus.
Hellrigel:
Not the calculus. Yes. I was actually on the math team in high school.
Campbell:
Oh, really? Okay.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and a few sports teams, too.
Campbell:
You should have been able to cope with it.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I did cope with it, and I succeeded according to Professor Zimmerman. It just never made sense, and the professor never attempted to teach. It didn’t help that the teaching assistants lacked the proficiency to teach in English.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
As an undergraduate I focused on biology and history, and then I entered graduate school to study history. I focused on the history of technology.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
My research is on [Thomas] Edison and the invention of a practical incandescent lamp and then the commercialization of the incandescent lamp, the electrical manufacturing industry, the installation and operation of power plants, and domestic appliances, both gas and electric.
Campbell:
Yes. Oh, that would be fun. And Tesla?
Hellrigel:
Tesla is not central to much of my research because I do not focus on the alleged “battle of the systems.” It is a distraction to what really happened.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Right. And so much of my research is pre-1940.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Superconductivity is a brave new world for me.
Campbell:
Yes. The battle between AC [alternating current] and DC [direct current] and which could kill most people.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that was more of a publicity campaign.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I gave a paper called “Not Just Systems” at the University of Pennsylvania where Tom Hughes, the late Thomas Parke Hughes, taught. He wrote Networks of Power, and his students believed systems was the only story. However, the real history is more complex than the light bulb was invented and then there was a linear technological evolution to regional networks and a national grid. Folks need to understand that a method or system evolved out of what they were doing, not from saying at the beginning we needed systems.
Campbell:
That’s right. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Leslie Hannah has done quite a bit on electrification of the U.K.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Calculus, no, but I’ve done the rest. So, teaching is okay for you.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You’re doing your dissertation and you get this done in three years, so is this considered pretty quick? Maybe you finished in two and a half years.
Campbell:
No, people do it in three years, three and a half. It’s usually three and a half years to finish, but perhaps longer. It depends how it went. It depends on if the money was running out.
Research fellowship
Hellrigel:
True. True. And then what happened?
Campbell:
Well, then I applied for a research fellowship, and that’s what you do in Cambridge. The colleges offer research fellowships; each college offers perhaps two, and there was a lot of competition for those. I applied for one, and I got one in Christ’s. So, what that did was pay me a salary. Also, as a fellow, I got a free room, but I was married, so I didn’t use that. The fellow got a free room and free meals, or one free meal a day. I loved the college there. Lots of fellows to talk to, and I did teaching for the college.
Of course, David Dew-Hughes was very pleased because it meant that my salary was paid so I could stay on and do research and continue in the group. Jan Evetts also got a research fellowship, in Pembroke. So, that went on for the next three years.
Hellrigel:
You have a fellowship for three years.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You’re allowed to stay at Cambridge, but it’s very competitive and you were successful in that competition.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You got to continue your research, so there’s no break in continuity which is quite fortunate.
Campbell:
Yes. That’s right.
Hellrigel:
How did you like being a research fellow as opposed to a graduate student?
Campbell:
Oh, very much. This meant I could do what I liked.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Campbell:
Mind you, I did what I liked as a Ph.D. student. I mean, David Dew-Hughes just kept a monitor. In fact, I’ve always done what I’ve liked, you know. The arrangement in Cambridge is much more flexible. We don’t have managers. At least, I don’t think we do. We have administrators who are absolutely wonderful, and the place couldn’t work without them. But we don’t have managers telling us what to do. The teaching is organized by your colleagues. The lecturers [and] professors get together the materials and decide who’s going to teach what and so on. I’m horrified when I see people being managed by non-academics in other universities. Didn’t happen to me. I was really lucky.
Hellrigel:
You’re lucky you’re not in the United States where the university system seems a bit different.
Campbell:
I think so, yes. Yes. See, from that point on, once I had a research fellowship and I got a further one, an industrial one, I could apply for grants in my own name. I could get a grant, and I would run the grant myself. And I carried on from there.
Hellrigel:
The grants would come from the government?
Campbell:
Yes, from the Research Council.
Hellrigel:
You’re doing this, you have that three-year fellowship. Then you said you had another three-years.
Campbell:
Well, yes. When that came to an end, I got another one. And when that came to an end, I got yet another one.
Hellrigel:
Another three years.
Campbell:
Another three, yes. This last one was by the Armourers & Brasiers’ [Company]. The Armourers & Brasiers are a livery company in London, and they were started in medieval times. The goldsmiths are the armorers, and a brasier is a candlestick maker. [The Company was founded in 1322 as the guild overseeing the production of armor.]
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
But of course, now they’re in businessmen’s dining clubs and quite rich. They all try to keep some contact with their subject, so they funded a fellowship in Cambridge, which I got.
Hellrigel:
It allowed you to do whatever you wanted?
Campbell:
Yes. Yes. But by this time, I was getting a bit jumpy. I was about thirty-two. When I graduated, when I got my Ph.D., I was offered a couple of lectureships because there were universities that were being established, new universities, so there were lots of lectureships. The situation changed, and it changed fairly rapidly. So, the numbers were going down as I was getting older, and the number of jobs.
Hellrigel:
In the United States, too.
Campbell:
And the States, too; that’s right. When I was coming to the end, I was offered a lectureship in St. Andrews and at Aberdeen, where R. V. Jones offered me one. He is a friend. Professor Mike Ashby was appointed professor of materials in the engineering department, so I applied there for a lectureship, which I got. That was great because that’s a tenured position.
Hellrigel:
Great.
Campbell:
So, I had my college fellowship, and I had my lectureship, and I was set up for the rest of my life.
Hellrigel:
The tenure process is different from that in the United States?
Campbell:
Yes. It was generally assumed that once you got a lectureship, it was tenured. But you were on probation for the first three years. But you had to not perform for three years to get sacked, rather than having to perform for three years to get to stay on.
Hellrigel:
How was it different to be with engineering rather than materials people?
Campbell:
Oh, I loved it because being a physicist, you know, the materials were more specialized. Running into engineering, well, I thought I could do all the engineering because, as a physicist, I knew about electricity and magnetism and yield stresses and things like that, and the thermodynamics. So, I could do all those as a physicist. But then I found, of course, I couldn’t do any of the exam questions because they required more details and techniques. As a supervisor, we’re one-to-one in the college. You do the supervisions in your own college with the undergraduates in your own college, so you get to know the engineering undergraduates. That was in Christ’s, by this time. You get to know the undergraduates very well. You’ll have them to your house for a party and things. Perhaps even a meal, yes. If they’re not working, you find out why. Then they’ve also got a tutor. They’re well looked after within a college. I lost the thread.
Oh, that’s right. I really found the subject fascinating, so I took up teaching all the first- and second-year courses of the engineering department. You know, they had fluids, thermodynamics, electricity.
Hellrigel:
You expanded your horizons?
Campbell:
Very much so. And I learned a hell of a lot. The first year doing it, I would struggle a bit to do the questions. But then you got to know it, and it was very satisfying to know all these things because I could talk to all the engineers on their subject.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Often when I talk to superconductivity people, they’ll say that there’s a break between the theory people and the people who build things.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I don’t know.
Campbell:
There’s a major break between the microscopic theory, which deals with why a material becomes superconducting, and this is the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory [BCS theory], which was the first. It was the only way to show that superconductivity could exist, and it was about 1950, something like that. That was forty years after superconductivity is discovered and after liquid helium and all sorts of physics would be done. It was a great achievement, but it’s actually not really useful because what you really want is something which will predict where do you go with materials, how to find new materials. The BCS theory explained a very large number of measurements, but it wasn’t very useful for the progress or the practical progress of the subject.
Now there’s another theory, if you like, a level up. You may have heard of [Alexi Alexeyevich] Abrikosov. He introduced the idea of flux lines. These will affect any currents—small eddies within the material, lines like vortices—they are vortices. This really was useful because this described the magnetic properties of the superconducting alloys.
To go back to when I first started, this theory had first come out. Essentially, Abrikosov was working with [Lev] Landau in Moscow, and he was using Landau’s theory, the Ginzburg-Landau theory. And he used a parameter in an area which Landau said it’s got no physical significance, this calculation, so it’s not worth publishing. So Abrikosov put it in a drawer. And then when Landau, a bit later, learned about vortices in liquid helium, he suddenly thought that perhaps this thing by Abrikosov might be of some use. So, he told him to get it out and publish it. It was published in an obscure journal, the Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids. And it took a long time to surface. But about the time that I started my Ph.D., Phil Anderson, who’s one of the great solid-state physicists, published this paper saying that the currents in superconductors were determined by the pinning of flux vortices, and people must have talked about this. In other words, defects. And that’s why the processing of materials made so much difference. You put in precipitates and so on. You completely change the strengths of the pinning, and therefore there’s a critical current.
This was a huge increase in understanding, and it replaced something called the Mendelssohn sponge model, which was Kurt Mendelssohn, a refugee from Germany, and he was a very distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society. And he came up with this perfectly sensible theory of a sponge: very fine filaments of superconductor. But it was clearly unacceptable when this flux-line theory came out, but he wouldn’t give up. Jan Evetts and I would give talks at conferences as young students on the flux lines, interpreting things in flux lines, and Mendelssohn would thump the table and say, “It’s a sponge model.” He was very, very difficult.
Hellrigel:
Did it reach the AC-DC war level?
Campbell:
Well, no.
Hellrigel:
It didn’t.
Campbell:
No. The physics was so obvious. I don’t know if he ever wrote a reference for me. He might have, but it didn’t matter.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
So, no. No, there were no personal battles, especially, as you know, we were so junior, and he was so senior and nearly in retirement. He was in Oxford.
Hellrigel:
So, he was mature about it.
Campbell:
I’m not too sure. He retired and went into Egyptology.
Hellrigel:
Oh, that’s a shift.
Campbell:
Oh, quite a lot of scientists do that.
Hellrigel:
You were sticking your neck out and taking a risk.
Campbell:
No, not taking a risk. No; eventually, everybody was in agreement with what we were doing. Yes. So where were we?
Hellrigel:
Oh, that Abrikosov, you’ve got the flux lines…
Campbell:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
I originally asked the difference between theory people and people who build things or can make things by hand such as build lab equipment.
Campbell:
Yes. I didn’t do quite a lot of theory in that sense, but it’s kind of modeling of things. It’s not the difficult microscopic theory, which I don’t understand and don’t use and don’t have to use, fortunately. You can do fairly simple calculations. And of course, when computers came along, the whole thing was, you could do all sorts of calculations on how these flux lines behaved. And my thesis was on the pinning of flux lines and explaining it—still unsolved. We know the principles, but the problem is that the microstructure is very random, and so you’ve got to try and add up the effects of lots of different things, and this couldn’t really have been done very satisfactorily.
Hellrigel:
It’s not as controllable as…
Campbell:
Not controllable, no. That’s right. By that time, I was now in engineering, so I was more involved in the magnets and particularly AC losses. One of the things people don’t realize is that the zero resistance is only true if the magnetic field or current doesn’t change. So as soon as you try to work things at mains frequencies, there are quite big losses, as a resistance. It’s not big compared to copper; it’s very small. But, of course, you’re doing it—at that time—in liquid helium, so very small losses are very damaging.
Hellrigel:
So, you’re doing it with liquid helium.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You’re not using copper wire.
Campbell:
No, we’re using superconducting wire, niobium-titanium.
Hellrigel:
Niobium-titanium.
Campbell:
Yes. And so, this losses problem was a major one. I don’t say it’s solved, but practical materials were made by Martin Wilson, who saw that the thinner you make the superconducting bit, the lower the loss. So, they drew the gauge into—put packed filaments together into copper tubes and pulled it out. Then another brilliant thing was that if you do this, you get very long-term eddy currents between the filaments in the copper. And what he did was, it was actually an electrical engineer’s idea. If you twist it, there’s no longer the same coupling, so this twisted, multifilamentary superconductor and niobium-titanium and copper—I assume he patented it. If he made it too narrow, it was a big mistake because that has been the fundamental material in the industry ever since.
Hellrigel:
I think that was, but I’ve done so many interviews, I have to check my notes.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
But there was one with a company that was sort of involved with it; [they] just stretched their claims so far that they couldn’t defend it in court.
Campbell:
I didn’t know that. Yes.
Hellrigel:
And the court just…
Campbell:
They threw it out. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes. They said it was more the company’s lawyers trying to be greedy and making claims that weren’t true that got it nixed.
Campbell:
I didn’t know that.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I have to look up what he said.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I’ll send you an email.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
But that is probably a common thing: fighting between those that are building or doing things and then the lawyers that want to claim so much of the intellectual property.
Campbell:
Right, yes. It’s really difficult to make them watertight, which is probably a good thing because that means that the technology can spread and improve.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
It’s not good for the company that invented it, but it’s good for everybody else.
Hellrigel:
Right. Yes. You don’t want them putting a lock on.
Campbell:
Yes, that’s right. Yes.
Hellrigel:
He talked about his twisted fiber superconductor.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You’re doing this work, and now you’re lecturing. You’ve got tenure, so that means you can stay.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Is it uncommon for people to start their education and end up spending their whole career at…
Campbell:
At Cambridge?
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
Quite common, you know, if you can. There’s no motivation to move. I have no ambition to be professor somewhere else. I’d much rather be a lecturer in Cambridge than a professor somewhere else because you’ve got so much more freedom, and I like the college and, certainly, now there’s a smaller teaching load. And Cambridge is a nice place to live. By that time, my wife had a job there.
Hellrigel:
What was she doing?
Campbell:
She did various things. She lectured at the local technical school. Then she got a job at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, where she analyzed the statistics of plant growers. She had to do all the statistics, and she was running a large mainframe computer group when computers had only just arrived, a big mainframe one. Eventually, she became a county councilor and then a member of Parliament. She was a member of Parliament for Cambridge for twelve years.
Hellrigel:
I didn’t know that.
Campbell:
Those were quite exciting times, even more exciting now. This was the time of the Iraq war, and everyone said, “Oh, well, we think you’re a great MP, but we can’t vote Labour because Tony Blair went to war.” She was one of the few who voted against it. She was put under a lot of pressure from Tony Blair and Cherie [Blair], but she was one of the few Labour MPs who did actually vote against it. People on the doorstep didn’t seem to think that was a reason for voting for her.
Hellrigel:
Was it around 2006?
Campbell:
Something like that. It was probably a good thing because she was still under seventy and she got a job as chair of the local mental health trust.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
And that was a big budget, 200 million. And when she retired from that, she’s been chairing governing bodies and organizing the Cambridge schools. She’s a very busy woman.
Hellrigel:
And children?
Campbell:
Yes, we’ve got three children [Frances, Emily, and Diarmid] and eight grandchildren [Eliza, Ella, Hannah, Kaz, Saskia, Cassidy, Lulu, and Mais. A ninth grandchild died shortly after their birth.] All living in Cambridge, which is wonderful. Not many people have their family within a mile. It’s an extended family. We’re lucky that way.
Hellrigel:
Did she work outside the home while raising the children?
Campbell:
Yes. Yes.
Hellrigel:
So that was…
Campbell:
At that time, we were both in fairly academic jobs. By the time she became an MP, the children had left home. When we were both teaching, I could give my supervisions at home, and she would go and lecture and things like that, so academic jobs are sufficiently flexible to keep you going. Otherwise, two careers in a family is not easy.
Hellrigel:
Did any of your children end up in science?
Campbell:
My son did maths at Imperial, and he became a computer programmer. He was programming computer games for Sony.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
He was traveling to London every day, so he gave that up. He’s got a computing job on games in Cambridge. It’s not on games anymore; he’s doing software in Cambridge. Yes. The girls both did, in spite of having gear wheels pushed down their throats from an early age, eventually end up doing fine arts. They’re both artists.
Hellrigel:
Artists.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Well, that’s a flexible family.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
It’s very fortunate, like you said, that everyone’s in Cambridge.
Campbell:
Yes, yes. They all get on very well together.
Hellrigel:
That’s a double blessing.
Campbell:
A double.
Hellrigel:
Your career’s moving along.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Do you get your own lab?
Campbell:
Yes. I didn’t build up a big group. I only had one grant and one post-doc, so I had a room in the department. But what then happened was the high-Tc big bang. If you draw big lines— high-Tc, you must have heard of it.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
Then it appeared that the government was going to be giving quite a big chunk of money for a high–critical temperature superconductor lab, and the universities were competing for it. Jan Evetts had much the biggest group or probably the biggest group in the country, very successful in producing thin films in electronics, so apparently, he went round it. It was Jan Evetts in material science, Peter Edwards in chemistry, Ekhard Salje in earth sciences, and me in engineering. He rather forgot to mention the Cavendish [Laboratory], who thought that they actually had some contribution to superconductivity, so that ruffled a few feathers. Eventually, we all got together, and it was unique. In the U.K., there were these five departments, all with fairly advanced programs in superconductivity.
Hellrigel:
And all based at Cambridge.
Campbell:
Each in one of the departments in Cambridge. The IRC [Interdisciplinary Research Centre] Team on Superconductivity was established in Cambridge. That was wonderful for me because I’m not a great getter of grants, and suddenly, I didn’t have to get them. I could get money within the IRC. It wasn’t so good for poor Jan because he was horrified to find that when this money came to Cambridge, it was divided up between the departments, and he was actually getting less money than he had when he was independent. I think it was very stressful for him because it was very unfair. Of course, all our colleagues had no sympathy at all, and they thought we were getting all this money and we were cushy, but in fact, it wasn’t true. The other downside, which wasn’t too apparent, was that having gotten this big chunk of money, we then allocated it to various projects. That made us very inflexible because you can get a post-doc to do a project. Well, that’s what he has to do, and for a completely new subject.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
The subject was moving very, very rapidly at this stage. So, every time a new thing appeared, people like Colin Gough and Bremmer could apply for a new grant to do this thing, and so they could bring in all sorts of new money and be much more flexible than us. But nevertheless, I think it was a success. People have criticized it, particularly our colleagues in the country. But I think it worked very well. There were five members, each one department, and then we each got one position. There was a second-in-command, a fairly senior one, but all the people worked very well together and talked to each other. We were all in one building and used each other’s apparatus and so on. So, as an interdisciplinary center, I think it worked very well.
Hellrigel:
It seems almost like a research lab like at Bell, where the staff had diversity with people from different fields and with different skills.
Campbell:
You have diversity.
Hellrigel:
In one house.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
But that’s getting to department level.
Campbell:
To some extent, yes. We had money for twenty years, or it was for ten years, and then, I think, we got another ten, something like that, which sounds like a long time. It is a long time. Then what happened was, at the university, we organized its accounting system. What used to happen was that a department had an allocation, and they would get the same every year unless they ran out or something like that. They had this chunk of money and that was their lot from the general fund, really, without having to justify it. Then the accountant said, “well, really, you know, what we’ll do is we’ll give the department more money, but then you’ve got to justify this in terms of, particularly, the space you use.” So, suddenly groups all over the university, and particularly engineering, who had been telling the head of the department they were terribly full, they needed more space, they wanted more labs, they wanted more offices, and so on, found they had to pay for them. They found, suddenly, they were having lots of spare space. The one thing that the head of departments didn’t want to do was pay very large sums to the IRC in Superconductivity, which was expensive for their own staff to be working up there. So that, combined with the time and the way the subject had developed—because, of course, it had become divided up more into its sections, chemistry, engineering, material science, and so on—meant that, essentially, the department, the IRC closed, and the groups went back to their departments, which was absolutely the right thing to do. Nearly all the projects and the work carried on within the departments, and they have continued to do so.
Hellrigel:
There was probably a changeover in professorships over these twenty years?
Campbell:
Well, all the original five of us who set it up: Jan died, Yao Liang retired, and the rest of us, the ones that weren’t professors who eventually became professors, we’re all still working, so no new people came in.
Hellrigel:
So, that was good in that you could continue.
Campbell:
Yes. We all went back to our departments and carried on the work there.
Hellrigel:
But you didn’t have to physically move.
Campbell:
Oh yes.
Hellrigel:
Oh, you did?
Campbell:
Yes, yes.
Hellrigel:
Well, that is inconvenient.
Campbell:
Yes, our building was given to, oh, who is it? It’s a Cavendish professor. His name’s gone. It’ll come back in a minute. Anyway, they rescinded it back to the Cavendish. It was on the Cavendish site. Richard Friend, it became his laboratory.
Teaching
Hellrigel:
You’re teaching, still teaching?
Campbell:
The teaching was still going on, yes, in the college. That’s independent of this.
Hellrigel:
After the first few years as you’re teaching first-year engineering courses, did you change your courses?
Campbell:
I didn’t. The teaching in the department; I was lecturing on materials, because I was engaged for a materials group. Now, what I would have liked to have done was lecture on electromagnetism because that was being done in a way which I consider extremely old-fashioned and extremely confusing. It was based, really, on the big, heavy electrical engineering ideas and these are very confusing for undergraduates because it’s not really based on formal definitions. All the other subjects—so, thermodynamics, the structures, the mechanics—all of them, you could go back to about four laws. If worst came to worst, you could go back to the law and get anything in the subject from that. Electromagnetism wasn’t taught that way. The definitions were vague. They were done in terms of definite intervals, handwaving. And the fundamentals, in my opinion, were just soggy, and the undergraduates found it soggy, and they hated it. So, I gave various lectures on this to the electrical engineers. It went over like a lead balloon. For thirty years, I tried to get them to change and failed completely.
Hellrigel:
You had a thirty-year teaching career.
Campbell:
Yes. Well, starting in 1975, so yes, a thirty to forty-year teaching career.
Hellrigel:
Did you have to retire at a certain age?
Campbell:
Yes. They threw me out at sixty-seven years old, but I was quite happy. Until recently, all the universities had a fixed retirement age. It’s mostly sixty-five, or you could extend it for another two years, something like that. Then this was declared illegal on age-discrimination grounds.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
This creates a bit of a problem for the university. But there was something in the act which said the university could argue that they needed to actually declare you redundant or something like that. They could argue that, really, this needed retirement is not based on age, of course.
Cambridge and Oxford, in particular, continue to use this, but it’s now being challenged in the courts. We’ll see what happens. I was quite happy because I’d earned a full pension by that time and the pension is a pretty good one. When I retired, I got half salary, and it’s index-linked, so it goes up every year. My poor colleagues, this salary scheme was stopped a number of years later. Some of my colleagues were still working and paying my pension, and paying more for their own, so I try to keep quiet about my pension.
Hellrigel:
Maybe that’s why some of them want to work a little longer.
Campbell:
Well, that’s right. If you haven’t got your pension, you need to work. My wife’s got a bigger pension because the MPs make sure that they don’t do badly, so I’m not complaining.
Hellrigel:
Like the U.S. Congress. Especially in comparison to the average America, they have an incredible pension and benefits package.
Campbell:
Exactly like Congress, yes, yes.
Hellrigel:
I watched the MPs last night on the television.
Campbell:
Oh, it’s unbelievable. Unbelievable. Nobody knows what’s happening. I’ll tell you, the closest parallel to the machinations is when Hitler came to power in Germany. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the parallels. Of course, you know, Boris Johnson is not going to start gassing Jews or put people in concentration camps, but the parallels are extraordinary because it started off with a referendum. Hitler came to power with a referendum and voted to abolish the parties. BBC Two had a program, which I hadn’t seen before. They’re doing that period in Germany. Before that, Hitler, I think, had the biggest party. I hadn’t heard of Streicher, but he was the chancellor, and he decided the only way to stop Hitler was to get parliament dissolved and for power to go back to Hindenburg, the president. He went to parliament, and he had to catch the eye of the speaker to get parliament dissolved, but the speaker was Herman Göring. So of course, Göring completely ignores him and then brought in bills to make sure that the parliament carried on and Hitler became chancellor. So, you see the parallels, except that in our case the speaker is on the side of the angels.
Hellrigel:
When you look at the political history of Germany, it’s like they fixed the rules to let Hitler rise.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
And then they won the real booby prize.
Campbell:
Exactly. They didn’t regret it until the end of the war.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
They still thought they could win it. You look at the people. You’ve got Boris Johnson as Hitler. You’ve got Dominic Cummings as Martin Bormann, his fixer. You’ve got Nigel Farage, as Goebbels with the propaganda.
Hellrigel:
I was just amazed. It is a little bit different than the U.S. is, though, but the outcome’s still trying to manipulate the system to do what you want to do when it might not be the best.
Campbell:
Yes. Well, the whole thing is completely unique because of this timetable, you see. If nothing happens, we come out of the E.U. [European Union] without a deal, in six weeks’ time.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
Now, this is quite unique because it looks as if all Boris Johnson has to do is just sit tight and do nothing. First, Parliament’s taken control from the government. Of course, Boris Johnson doesn’t have a majority anymore, so that essentially paralyzes him. They’ve taken control, but they’re also passing a law to tell him to go to Brussels and ask for an extension. Well, if he says no, what can you do about it? The whole thing is completely strange, completely unique, and unprecedented.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I guess the economic instability created chaos.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I know, like funding and…
Campbell:
It’s all up in limbo, yes. And both sides are saying, “we must implement the will of the people.” As if the will of the people was clear! When in fact, the whole country is completely divided, and it’s not divided on party lines. It’s divided on different lines, geographically. I know Scotland’s very angry. They don’t want to leave the E.U.
Hellrigel:
Yes, Scotland wants to remain in the E.U.
Campbell:
Neither do the Welsh, the Irish—well, the Irish are crazy anyway.
Hellrigel:
It just seems very perplexing to me.
Campbell:
It’s perplexing for us.
Hellrigel:
But, yes. Well, the United Kingdom is a member state of CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research]?
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I don’t know if the United Kingdom’s departure from the E.U. would impact that arrangement.
Campbell:
I don’t think so, because most of these collaborations predated the E.U. Things like that shouldn’t make too much difference. But I think it’s a business. What the E.U. brought for us is flexibility, so that the airplanes are made—the wings are in England, the engines are somewhere else, and then, particularly, the bits and pieces cross the borders like that. The same with food, so perishable food can cross backwards and forwards. And people can go to jobs backwards and forwards. And, of course, it just makes a much pleasanter feeling of unity. You really feel part of our friends: the Germans, the French—not so sure about the Bulgarians.
Hellrigel:
Well, that’s the big change with the expansion of the E.U. and the free movement of people. Perhaps some of the developments, or impacts, weren’t anticipated fully when some of the policies were made because they keep expanding in the relationships or areas of cooperation. In its most basic terms, the roots of the E.U. go back to a coal buying cooperative agreement between a few countries after World War II. Originally, the U.K. was not part of it.
Campbell:
Well, that’s what’s aroused the hostility. Originally, it was a customs union, and that’s really in my opinion the most important thing.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
But then, of course, the European Parliament and then the [E.U.] commissioners tried to take more powers. They tended to put in, rather than have let’s say, a German in the most important positions, they put in someone, say, from Luxembourg because then they wouldn’t have this backing of big… But then, of course, what they tried to do is [unintelligible]. So, Luxembourgers have the highest per-capita income in Europe. I think it’s been like Switzerland because they fiddle [with] the taxes, and big companies go there. There’s no tax, so the money flows in there from taxes that should be paid in the U.K. or Germany or France. This arouses resentment, but they’re also trying to centralize it. And Macron talks about having a European army, which we would fight against. I mean, it was such a disaster. The last time there was anything like a European army was in the First World War, where the Austrians—their army was composed of people from all the Austrian provinces. The result, of course, was that they all spoke different languages, couldn’t understand each other, and it was a complete disaster. Anyway, we got away from superconductors.
Post-university
Hellrigel:
Yes. Getting back to superconductors and your career. You leave the university at age sixty-seven?
Campbell:
Sorry?
Hellrigel:
What have you been doing since you left the university?
Campbell:
Oh yes. Well, I carry on. I started this group that David Cardwell runs in engineering, so I work with them. I do various things. I do modeling on my computer at home, but I go in and work with the research students in his group, which works well because I’ve got lots of experience and I’ve got time to talk to them. I’m not going to match their ideas of their supervisors, who are all busy trying to write reports, get money, teach and so on, and who don’t have time. So, I go in and work with them to a large extent.
Hellrigel:
You’re a consultant?
Campbell:
For the first time in my life, I’ve got one consultancy, with a colorectal surgeon group in Hong Kong. I am advising them on putting magnets on things that they stick inside to move around.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
So that’s very interesting.
Hellrigel:
But to work at Cambridge, you’re emeritus.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You don’t get paid.
Campbell:
I don’t get paid.
Hellrigel:
You have your pension.
Campbell:
I get my pension. That’s right.
Hellrigel:
And you have the flexibility.
Campbell:
I have complete flexibility, yes.
Hellrigel:
You continue to publish, go to conferences, and you just do not have to teach.
Campbell:
Yes. Yes. I don’t have to teach. I’ve had enough teaching, I think. I wouldn’t mind teaching electromagnetism, but the college has enough people to do it, so that’s all right.
I’m writing a book, it’s called A Miscellany of Applied Physics, which is a result of being very dissatisfied with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is wonderful as a first place to go, but the explanations you get there are either too mathematical or too vague, so this is Wikipedia for physicists. I don’t expect you to know the answer: The number of physicists who don’t know why you get two tides a day at the seaside
Hellrigel:
I don’t know. They don’t know about the moon?
Campbell:
Yes. Well, yes, but you see the simple picture is you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the earth, and you get a bulge. But the earth goes around once a day, not twice a day, so you only get one tide a day. You want to know something else? The answer is that’s too simple a picture. The earth and the moon are rotating like that. You’ve got a centrifugal force which cancels out at the center of the earth. You go to the moon, and the moon’s force is bigger; you go away, the centrifugal force is bigger, so instead of one big bulge, you get two smaller ones. There’s lots of things like that which, if you put in the physics—which Wikipedia doesn’t—a physicist will understand. Then it’s much more satisfactory.
Hellrigel:
Yes. That’s similar to what the IEEE History Center is doing for the history of engineering and technology with our wiki site, ETHW.org [Engineering and Technology History]. You should write an entry for ETHW.
Campbell:
Oh, right. You’re putting in some numbers and some algebra.
Hellrigel:
Not algebra numbers, but more concrete and accurate information about the technology and topics that are overlooked or topics that are not explained correctly in Wikipedia.
Campbell:
Right. Like what?
Hellrigel:
Oh, well, the whole AC-DC Tesla tale.
Campbell:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
We’ve had to lock the Tesla entry because people kept adding inaccurate and sensational information and untrue and derogatory things about Thomas Edison and so forth.
Campbell:
Oh, really?
Hellrigel:
Yes. The reality is difficult for some people to accept. It is just silly.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
We host some material from six engineering societies (and counting) on ETHW.
Campbell:
Is this one site?
Hellrigel:
Yes. I’ll send you the link.
Campbell:
Send me the link. I’d like to read that.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
The AC—there’s a lot of nonsense talk about Tesla, about his producing energy that could go through the earth and all these waves, which is complete nonsense.
Hellrigel:
Then there are people claiming that Tesla invented cell phones. I was giving a tour of the IEEE archive, and an IEEE member on one of the IEEE boards said, “Oh, yeah, he invented cell phones.”
Campbell:
That’s utter nonsense.
Hellrigel:
Then I’m in Delaware in the United States, and the guy’s installing a wood stove for a friend tells me, “Yeah, if it were up to Tesla, we’d have free electricity.” I’m, like, “No! That is not true.”
Campbell:
No, no. Mind you, what he did do was he invented a lot of things that Marconi got patents for in the radio here. He was very important in the early radio.
Hellrigel:
Right. I said Tesla was basically his own worst enemy, that he didn’t have a keeper like Edison had [Samuel] Insull.
Campbell:
Is he? I don’t know. Well, but then Edison was much more a man of the world, even with a lousy keeper.
Hellrigel:
Right. Yes. Edison had an office staff and a private secretary, including Samuel Insull and Alfred Tate. I believe that George Westinghouse would have provided a laboratory for Tesla in Pittsburgh.
Campbell:
Yes, yes.
Hellrigel:
But Tesla was more of a lone wolf type person, so he went off on his own.
Campbell:
He’s obviously impossible to work with.
Hellrigel:
Yes, he seemed to have a quirky nature., but…
Campbell:
Yes, but fascinating.
Hellrigel:
Yes. He did a lot of interesting work, but…
Campbell:
Well, people say, oh, he invented the three-phase system, an induction motor—which, of course, he didn’t. But what he did do was put it all together into the Niagara Falls generators. Now that’s a real achievement. There are actually very few single inventions at that time. There were massive inventions in induction motors and all sorts of different things. The people you should remember are the engineers who put it all together into a successful system.
Hellrigel:
Right. Many engineers worked on the project to get rid of the “kinks,” so you can patent something, but it takes a lot of effort to make it actually work.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Some of what I work on are the original thirteen central stations built by Edison under the auspices of his company, the Thomas A. Edison Central Station Construction Department, in 1883 and 1884.
Campbell:
Who? Tesla did?
Hellrigel:
No, Edison.
Campbell:
Oh, Edison. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Edison and his team also created the handbooks for how to build and manage central stations.
Campbell:
Oh, yes. Right.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Tesla worked very briefly for the Edison interests at the Edison Machine Works.
Campbell:
No, he [Tesla] wouldn’t do that sort of thing.
Hellrigel:
His relationship with Edison is often misstated. Folks should read the Tesla biography by Bernie Carlson.
Campbell:
Well, he says Edison promised him a chunk of dollars if he did something, and he did it, and Edison said that he was only joking. So not surprisingly, Tesla buggered off.
Hellrigel:
The tale claims $10,000, but I know it is untrue. Read W. Bernard Carlson’s book, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age.
Campbell:
You don’t think that’s true. All right.
Hellrigel:
No, it is not true. But we digress from your oral history.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What would you consider your major accomplishments in superconductivity?
Campbell:
I’m not sure. I’ve got a lot of little ones.
Hellrigel:
What are your little ones?
Campbell:
Well, I think, the one that Terry [Holesinger] was talking about was these reversible movements. For large changes in field, you use something called the Bean model, which assumes a constant critical current density, and it’s hysteretic. But in fact, when I was doing susceptibility measurements, I found a reversible oscillation. I realized later I certainly wasn’t the first to discover this, but it was found by [J.I.] Gittleman and [B.] Rosenblum, who were working in a completely different regime because they were working in microwaves and gigahertz. And so, I didn’t think there was anything relevant there. But in fact, they were measuring that thing.
I think what I’m proudest of is using this to get a penetration depth, which I’m pleased to see people call the Campbell penetration depth [the “Campbell technique”]. Even in a reversible regime, when you apply a magnetic field to a surface, it decays exponentially inward to a certain distance. This is what you can call a Campbell penetration depth, if you like. I shouldn’t use it myself, maybe. It should be easier to work out pinning parameters from this because it is linear and reversible and more accessible. So, that’s one interesting thing.
Another thing, also as Terry was talking about, was the longitudinal problem, which is still unsolved. It’s when you have a field parallel to the current. The principle of the Bean model says you should get an infinite current density because there’s no Lorentz force, but of course you don’t. And what actually happens is you’ve got an instability, and so a straight current in a parallel field is unstable with respect to forming a helix. But then if you get one helix, it forms another helix, and so on and so on. In fact, it gets terribly complicated. I’ve made some contributions to this, and it’s a bit like the same problem in fusion reactors where the plasma goes all over the place. Actually, when I say I made a contribution, my contribution to that was to show that experimentally, and it turns out to be far too complicated to solve. But it was a fascinating problem.
Hellrigel:
These all impacted the design of the magnet?
Campbell:
Not very much.
Hellrigel:
No?
Campbell:
No, I’m sorry. I haven’t had much impact on magnets. Perhaps AC losses. I’ve done quite a lot on AC losses. I’ve publicized Jan Evetts’s theoretical work on how to define fields in superconductors, which I think is very important. It’s not [of] much practical importance in the high-Tc ones. You’re talking about the steppingstones or milestones. It’s not quite the same, in fact. But if you’re going to look at the electromagnetism milestones, you’ve got Maxwell, of course, to start it. Then you’ve got Lorentz at the turn of the twentieth century, who defined [the magnetic flux density] B. All the students want to know, “Well, what do we mean by these fields B and [the magnetic field strength] H in material in a magnet?” They don’t get satisfactory answers, and it’s perfectly easy to get a satisfactory answer. The B is the average of the free-space magnetic field over many atoms. You look at the fluctuating field as an atom, as an average, and that gives you the B, which then goes into Maxwell’s equation. That was fine for paramagnetic and ferromagnetic materials, but the superconductors that doesn’t work at all because you don’t have the dipoles. So, you had to do something completely different.
Simultaneously, Brian Josephson worked out the answer from very absurdly simple-looking arguments based on the equilibrium thermodynamics. And Jan did it in some way, in a more satisfactory argument to us flux-line people, where he gave free energy to a length of flux line, as well as the free energy for the compression. By putting that into a simple argument, he could show that the force on the flux line wasn’t just the gradient to the density, which other people have put in, but in fact the curls. The curl is what appears in Maxwell’s equation, so a mathematical thing. He derives the full Maxwell’s equations in the material from this very nice picture of the energy of a flux line. And so, the next step after, if you like, Lorentz, was Josephson and Evetts producing how to define magnetic fields in superconductors.
Hellrigel:
Yes. A number of the gentlemen I spoke with talked about Brian Josephson.
Campbell:
Oh yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
Yes. He was unbelievable.
Hellrigel:
Did you know him?
Campbell:
Oh yes. Well, as far as anyone knows him.
Hellrigel:
Oh?
Campbell:
He’s not very sociable.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
When he did physics—I mentioned Brian Pippard.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
I think Brian Josephson, I’m going to say he must be one of the better physicists, but not so general. He was Brian Pippard’s research student. Brian Pippard put him onto microwaves and superconductors. In his spare time, he worked on this tunneling theory of his own, and that led him to the Josephson equations and the Josephson effects.
[John] Bardeen said, “This doesn’t work,” so they had an argument. Phil Anderson was doing his Ph.D. examiner, and he believed it. He went to John Rowell in America, who had very good cinefilm equipment, and they made a junction which we now call a Josephson junction, which is a very sensitive pickup of a magnetic field. What Josephson predicted was that the critical current was periodic; as the field changed, you got periodic changes. This is actually directly related to the flux lines because you can say that a flux line [is] going in and out, and the field goes up and down. But that wasn’t appreciated then, so John Rowell says, they set up this junction and put currents through it. They just took a magnet and walked across the room, and they saw the X-Y recorder going up and down and up and down, like that. Bingo. That was the proof.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I think John Rowell did that work at Bell Laboratories.
Campbell:
Yes. That’s right.
Hellrigel:
A few years ago, I spoke with Rowell and recorded his oral history at his home in New Jersey.
Campbell:
Yes. But Brian Josephson was another person like Pippard and Feynman, really. I’ve heard him lecture on the microscopic theory, and again I would come away saying, “Oh, that’s obvious, I understand that.” Then half an hour later, I didn’t.
Hellrigel:
I have been reading Bardeen’s biography and it seems that he eventually came to accept Josephson.
Campbell:
Oh, yes. Yes. Well, because the experiment showed he was right very quickly.
Hellrigel:
And no more bickering at conferences.
Campbell:
No. No. Well, Bardeen wouldn’t because he was a shy man.
Hellrigel:
Yes. But the two camps.
Campbell:
Yes. I see what you’re saying. I’ll give you that. But the experiments show you almost straight away. How are we doing for time?
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Campbell:
That’s all right.
Hellrigel:
You have to catch a train.
Campbell:
Yes, but I go to Edinburgh, so there’s one every half hour.
Hellrigel:
You have to go to the central train station?
Campbell:
Yes. I think.
Hellrigel:
I don’t know.
Campbell:
Well, I looked it up. There’s trains from both of them.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
Is the central station in the center? Are there restaurants and things around there?
Hellrigel:
I don’t know. This is my first trip to Glasgow.
Campbell:
You don’t. I’ll go to the central station and get the next train.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Yes. I have to take it to Manchester tomorrow, so the other way.
Campbell:
All right.
Hellrigel:
It’s interesting, nobody that I’ve spoken with has known all these different people.
Campbell:
Yes, I’ve been lucky because I’ve been around a long time. I’ve also kind of dabbled and gone from not the microscopic theory but all the other theoretical works on the flux lines and starting on flux lines. I’ve been involved in all of that and the magnets. If you’re in the development of materials, then you have your finger in a lot of pies.
Hellrigel:
I guess you would meet the Americans and the Japanese and others at conferences?
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you have many graduate students?
Campbell:
I had quite a lot. I don’t know how many.
Hellrigel:
And they’ve gone to industry or academia in the U.K. or elsewhere?
Campbell:
They’ve gone to jobs elsewhere, yes. I don’t think I’ve had more than two at a time. Some people have ten or fifteen graduate students. I don’t know how they cope because your heart sinks if a student comes in to say, “Well, I’ve done that, what should I do next?” Or, “Well, I’ve got those results, I don’t understand it.” If you’re going to keep up with them, you’ve got to spend a lot of time. If you’ve got a big group and you have good post-docs, they can do it. That’s a different way of working—you have a big group. And so, if you’re doing that, you spend most of your time getting money. But Jan Evetts, I can tell you, he ran a big group and he not only got all the money, he was really involved in the science with all the students.
Campbell:
If you’ve got a big group and you have good post-docs, they can do it. That’s a diff you’re doing that, you spend most of your time getting money. But Jan Evetts, I can tell you, he ran a big group, and he not only got all the money, he was really involved in the science with all the students.
Reflections, closing remarks
Hellrigel:
What would you have done if you were not a physicist?
Campbell:
I’d have been a lawyer.
Hellrigel:
Okay. With your family?
Campbell:
Well, no, no. I wouldn’t have been a solicitor. I’d have been a barrister, and I’d be a judge.
Hellrigel:
Oh, okay.
Campbell:
I can tell you that for sure. Most nearly all the judges went to Edinburgh academy with me, at least the previous generation, because all their fathers were at Edinburgh academy with my father. So, these people, I know, weren’t all that able. They all became high-court judges and law this and law that. I think that’s what I would do, and I would rather have enjoyed that. I’d like to have done physics and become a barrister who knew some science because, my word, they don’t know any science, and it’s a terrible miscarriage of justice. They don’t know statistics, for example, so they misinterpret the DNA evidence and mislead jurors and so on. So, I think, I would have quite enjoyed being sort of like a forensic barrister, and then perhaps, a judge.
Hellrigel:
A barrister, in the U.K., means you practice in court?
Campbell:
Yes, yes. You either do civil law or you do criminal law. You’re the person that gets up and gives the speeches, and then you’re instructed by the solicitor. The client goes to a solicitor first, and then the solicitor engages a barrister to argue it in court.
Hellrigel:
Was your dad a barrister?
Campbell:
No, he was a solicitor, which means a family solicitor. Now also you do the buying and selling of houses, so they acted as estate agents as well.
Hellrigel:
Oh, okay. I could see you as a barrister in court.
Campbell:
Yes. Yes, yes. I like talking.
Hellrigel:
Then barristers are appointed.
Campbell:
No, no. They’re independent.
Hellrigel:
Actually, judges are appointed.
Campbell:
Judges are appointed centrally, yes. The barristers are self-employed.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
They work in chambers, with a group of them.
Hellrigel:
Yes. In the U.S., depending on the state—well, federal judges are all appointed, but depending on the state, some of them are elected.
Campbell:
Yes, that’s a terrible idea.
Hellrigel:
I was amazed to see campaign advertisements for judges when I moved to Ohio because in New Jersey they were all appointed.
Campbell:
Is that right? I thought they were always elected.
Hellrigel:
No, it depends on the state.
Campbell:
Yes. And the prosecutors are elected.
Hellrigel:
Yes, the prosecutors, or really the district attorney, in some states are elected, but not in mine. Once again, it all depends on the state you live in and how the state’s government is set up and its constitution.
Campbell:
That has a terrible effect, particularly in the South, of course, where if you’re black, your chances of getting convicted are ten times what it…
Hellrigel:
Yes, yes. It’s a system with many loopholes as well as potential conscious and unconscious bias problems.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Earlier you mentioned the potential problems due to a lack of understanding of statistics, and perhaps engineering, technology, and science. This can factor into all cases, including patent litigation.
Campbell:
That’s right.
Hellrigel:
It’s rather complex.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I taught at Stevens Institute of Technology. Some of the undergraduate engineering students went on to law school and became patent attorneys, which is a fairly specialized group.
Campbell:
Very specialized, yes, and very well paid.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
But I’ve heard it’s a bit dull. I’m not sure. I don’t know why. I thought it would be quite interesting. Although, I think, I’ve seen the way patents are written. Oh, it’s so obscure and difficult to follow that you have to learn the jargon and the details and so on.
Hellrigel:
You have to know, probably, the minutiae.
Campbell:
And the minutiae, ah, yes. So perhaps I wouldn’t have enjoyed that.
Hellrigel:
Are you content with the direction your career has taken?
Campbell:
Yes. Yes. No, I think, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been in the right place at the right time.
Hellrigel:
Good.
Campbell:
Nobody who’s had a tenured job and a fellowship in Cambridge can complain that life has given them a raw deal.
Hellrigel:
So, no second thoughts?
Campbell:
No.
Hellrigel:
Good.
Campbell:
I wouldn’t mind a second life as a barrister or as a judge.
Hellrigel:
The barrister.
Campbell:
I think I prefer the barrister bit.
Hellrigel:
You could have it if you can get a television show like “Rumpole of the Bailey.”
Campbell:
Exactly. Yes. Or “Judge Judy.”
Hellrigel:
Oh, sure.
Campbell:
Oh, I like Judge Judy.
Hellrigel:
Oh, she’s quite popular.
Campbell:
Judge Judy is televised here. If I’m writing something, I just relax a bit, and it’s a short-term thing.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
You know, you can watch for ten, fifteen minutes, and she’s pretty good.
Hellrigel:
Well, yes. She doesn’t take any guff.
Campbell:
No, she doesn’t. And the losers that come up in front of her, she tears apart. Yes. It makes good television for a short time.
Hellrigel:
Would you recommend students going into the field of superconductivity?
Campbell:
Well, less so, but I’m not sure where I would recommend. I think there’s still lots to do there. The practical applications really haven’t—there’s still lots of big projects going on, and there are lots of good jobs within it. So, yes. As an undergraduate course, or indeed a Ph.D., it’s a very good idea because you learn very good physics, which is applied. It’s good for electrical engineers because they learn a way of approaching things which is different from other ways, and then they can go back and get a conventional job.
Hellrigel:
Right. As a bachelor’s degree.
Campbell:
A bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D., yes. A good Ph.D. because the Ph.Ds. don’t naturally go into superconductivity. They get jobs in all sorts of things. There are companies selling their oxygen instruments.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Campbell:
So, it’s always interesting.
Hellrigel:
The teaching opportunities are becoming less and less.
Campbell:
Yes. There’s not many of those. And they’re becoming less and less attractive because of the pressures. Now I’m horrified to see that at some places the managers are saying you’ve got to bring this amount of money in, and if you don’t, you’re sacked. They thought they had tenured jobs, and they’ve been made redundant because they didn’t bring in enough money. One in Wales committed suicide because he said he couldn’t bring enough money because he had this huge teaching load. When I saw this teaching ad, it was about five times what I had in Cambridge. Yet, bright, right, keen, young students still want to get lectureships, you know, because then you can do what you like. If they’ll let you, you can do the research you want, but it’s not like what it was when I joined.
Hellrigel:
What would you say has been the recipe for your success?
Campbell:
Oh, I don’t know, being flexible, go where the jobs are.
Hellrigel:
Go where the jobs are.
Campbell:
But I was lucky to be able to get them where I wanted.
Hellrigel:
Yes, because we ask interviewees what advice would they give people contemplating studying science and engineering, in particular. One person advised they should have “a willingness to take risks.”
Campbell:
Yes. Oh, well, I never took any risks.
Hellrigel:
The last topic is professional societies.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Which societies are you a member of?
Campbell:
I’m a Fellow at the Institute of Physics and the Electrical Engineers. That’s the U.K. one.
Hellrigel:
Right. Are you a member of the applied superconductivity council, the European Society for Applied Superconductivity (ESAS)?
Campbell:
No.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Campbell:
No.
Hellrigel:
Okay. You publish with IEEE?
Campbell:
No, I publish with SUST [Superconductor Science and Technology].
Hellrigel:
I ask folks their affiliation with IEEE and the IEEE Council on Superconductivity.
Campbell:
Yes. Well, I have an award from them.
Hellrigel:
How’d you hear about that?
Campbell:
Oh, somebody e-mailed me.
Hellrigel:
They e-mailed you.
Campbell:
Yes. I can’t remember who it was. It was Art somebody.
Hellrigel:
Arnold Silver?
Campbell:
Yes. What was that? That’s odd. I don’t know. That was very nice. I was very grateful for that. And so that gave me a link to the IEEE and the conference, yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you go to the conference to accept it?
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you have to give a speech or anything?
Campbell:
I can’t remember. I think I maybe said a few words.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What other awards have you earned in your career?
Campbell:
That’s about it.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Campbell:
No, I got one from the cryogenic engineers.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Campbell:
Lifetime Achievement Award, which implies that I’ve finished my lifetime achievements. Well, I don’t think I have.
Hellrigel:
No, you’re still carrying on.
Campbell:
Still carrying on. That’s right. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Do you have second thoughts about paths not taken?
Campbell:
No.
Hellrigel:
No?
Campbell:
Nope.
Hellrigel:
Well, that’s fine and fortunate.
Campbell:
No, I’ve been very lucky.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
Okay?
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Campbell:
No, that’s fine.
Hellrigel:
Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.
