JOHN PENDRY’S AFTER DINNER SPEECH

29th September 2008, London.

“A flash of his life”

INTRODUCTION

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a pleasure and I am honoured to be here tonight to say a few things about John Pendry, Sir John Pendry. This is what we are here for to honour a scientist, a man whom we respect because he is a great scientist and whom we love because he is a great person.

But I am worried as well, because even if I could articulate something to say I am not so sure that, my beautiful English accent would be fully understood inEngland. I can not help remembering my first seminar at Cambridge at the end of my Ph.D. When I finished my presentation, Phil Anderson asked me: “Pedro where did you learn English?” with my natural arrogance, I answered: “In Oxford Sir”, only to hear Anderson again. “Did you ask for your money back?” By the time I answered. “No Sir success was not guaranteed” nobody in the audience was able to hear me.

In any case the fact that I am speaking here might be appropiate to show that Adrian Sutton shares with John Pendry one of his key characteristics, his appetite for risk.

SCIENTIST

John combines in a brilliant and unusual way physical insight, as well as mathematical virtuosity. His work on near field effectson electromagnetism and on metamaterials shows him at the prime of his creativity. Not many scientists can establish a completely new and unexpected area of research, but this has been John’s achievement in the last few years in the field of metamaterials.

-[John to his wife Pat before publishing his paper on perfect lenses.If I publish this I will be either famous of infamous]

This work has elevated John to the Nobel platform. What I like about this work is that it was there in the Maxwell equations, in front of us incidentally the same as Einstein’s work or special relativity but it took the character and insightof John to see it. I like this and hope and wish that we will soon have the firstdinner after the telephone call in S. Sebastian.

MAESTRO- MAGISTER

Far from being neutral with respect to human values, science like art requires freedom, honesty and tolerance in order to foster originality and creativity.

John Pendry has worked with many research students, post-docs, and leading theoreticians and experimentalists, and has always been thoughtful and generous in his interactions with others. This is the real Pendry, a brilliant, an honest versatile mind, full of talent, kind and generous and capable of inspiring confidence in his people to work independently.Passion to inspire.

Pendry is a Professor, a master, in the noblest sense of the word. For me he is a clear positive example of how to behave as a Professor. A negative Professor has servants, instead of students or co-workers;but even when I was a Ph.D. student his generous way of collaboration made me feel more like a colleague than a student. A negative Professor goes for the weak (usually the Ph.D. students) instead of fighting the big shots. Pendry does exactly the opposite he goes, if necessary, against the big shots, “only a king can fight a king!”.

I enjoy John's way of criticizing others, with indirect but hard-hitting words spoken with a twinkle in the eye and a special smile on his face. This under a very gentlemanly and English veneer of politeness. I think the English have developed that to a form of art.

MORTAR- “A concrete achievement”.

A strong sense of fairness characterises J. Pendry.

He will speak his mind at whatever moment he finds he ought to do so irrespective of the convenience of the moment. He often expresses minority opinions, no doubt believing with Hardy that “It is never worth a first class man’s time to express a majority opinion by definition there are plenty of others to do that”.

LEADER

And then there is the issue of leadership. Pendry is a natural leader and indeed a scientific leader. Through these years I have become convinced that there is a Pendry style of doing things, the Pendry way.

He is broad minded. Always open to new things. He is always prepared for the next topic of research. He is very good in new ideas. How does he do it?

Part of the answer is that he has always made a conscious effort to work on completely new topics, every 10 years or so. He keeps aware of results outside his own field. Carrying skills from one field to another

COMMUNICATOR

He is always very careful in what he publishes. Never publishes faster than he thinks. Science is above all creativity but second is about communication. He writes papers in an unusual, attractive style. He avoids the dry style of many others

JBP – PME thought he had written a brilliantly elegant paper: “Thank you for your notes!”

His talks are impressive. I love his deep and clearly presented analogies, Levinson Theorem and the boat, left handed materials and antimatter, Higgs boson and plasmons.

John has always made a full contribution to wider scientific life.

One way John does this well is his choice of catchy words in naming his methods (e.g. cloak- linking to Happy Potter- Cloak is a misnomer, shield might be more appropriate, perfect lens, RFS, tensor LEED) and in particular his paper titles (e.g. “SEXAFS without x-rays”, “Shearing the vacuum – quantum friction”).

At the same time, John is good at motivating people, by simplifying the subject to some extent. Oversimplification tends to irritate the colleagues who know the details, but that is the cost of popularization!. John is more careful than others in this regard, and I would not use the term "oversimplification" in his case.

It is true that he in his talks simplifies but never losing the essence . In the words of Eisntein he makes things "as simple as possible but no more".

OVERAL VIEW

One of the many things I like about Pendry, is his admiration that I completely share, for the beauty of nature. Beyond science there is that necessary hinterland, particularly his love and knowledge of the Natural world, butterfliescome to my mind, his love of music, for John is a fine pianist. When he is at home he tries to practice every day.

He loves his garden. He has also maintained his interest in photography and it seems to me that this interest in the properties of lenses for photography probably influenced his work on the perfect lens.

He is a very loyal person, loyal to friends, never said no to a request for help, colleagues, his country (he is just emerging blinking into the sunlight after the National Research Assessment), his University, to science, how appropriate Sir John for services to science, his old college – it gave him great pleasure to be awarded an Honorary Fellowship at Downing College, Cambridge, in 2005.

John enjoyed his life in Cambridge. He still has his dampers tie. The qualification for this is to fall fully clothed into the Cam while punting. The tie has a simple pictorial representation of this - basically water, punt pole and legs in the air. I do not know if there is a tie for falling completely naked and have the impression that this is not the most appropriate moment to enquire about it.

I remember when John returned to the Cavendish from the US. I also remember the blue sports car that he drove round the Cambridge countryside. He was very proud of it! Not to speak of your watch, what happened to it! He was also very keen to keep fit. I went swimming with him. His main exercise now is walking and gardening although he did buy a mountain bike last autumn.John relishes gadgets – the latest GPS or camera lens. He is a good cook and when I first knew him he thought nothing of cooking a dinner party for 10

Did you know that John was already mentioned in a Sunday Times article "80 for the Eighties"? This was a list of 80 people in the UK who they expected to be successful in the eighties.

END

This is a dangerous moment for a speaker. He gets warmed up by talking and could go on and on. It is precisely when one should approach the finish. It is very dangerous for a speaker the moment in which his eagerness to continue is inversely proportional to the desire of the audience for him to go on.

Let summarise my views on Pendry. There is more to Pendry than his leadership, his knowledge, his genius: there is warmth, integrity and friendship. We appreciate in Pendry the specialist who has a wide outlook, broad knowledge and warm enthusiasm outside his own subject as well as in it … whose heart and eyes take also delight in the triumph of art, in the history of man, in the progress of society, in social justice, in nature.

The Pendry´s equation- Give more than he receives. Selfishness

Progress always proceeds in intricate ways. Allow me to mention two more things:

First, since I speak the oldest language of Europe I had prepared some verses in Basque to be read here. Then I realised that they would be even less understood than my English and commissioned a translation from a British Physics colleague steeped in the Basque culture though it may have lost something in translation to English, thanks Archie.

Brought to the Light

We celebrate tonight a man who found

In Maxwell´s work fresh truths (as Einstein did).

Effective media John’s rules expound

Left-handed roles of composites were hid!

First Leewenhoek his microscope devised

Its single lens a tiny drop of glass.

Then Zeiss his apochromats realized;

But Pendry’s perfect lens can these surpass!

The deepest workings of John Pendry’s mind

A cloak of darkness shields them from our view.

To sparkling products nobody is blind -

They’ll win for their creator honour due!

Let’s pardon Rector Sykes whose brutal stroke

Unwittingly turned on this fertile stream.

He cut John from his bureaucratic yoke

Thus freed up time and energy to dream!

Now I really finish with a personal confession. While I was in Cambridge, John developed an urgent passion for group theory. I could not understand why until I met Pat. Then, all was clear. All fit. His love for Science. His love for beauty, inner and external beauty. To talk about Pat is to talk about the person without whom the impressive work, both in quantity and quality, leading to this fest will not have taken place in such an harmonious and pleasant way.

To sum up; in a sentence.

Many people strive to have a career in science: John Pendry has shown us the more noble way of attaining a life in science. We are proud to be his friends.

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