Sir Timothy Berners-Lee Interview (page: 4 / 8) Father of the World Wide Web	Print Interview

What did you read growing up? What interested you?

Timothy Berners-Lee: As a teen I read science fiction. I read whodunits, Agatha Christie. I read John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clarke. I has a problem with sci-fi books. I'd get stuck in them and not stop until morning, having finished a book, which would be kind of disastrous for the next day. Apart from that, I always liked the outdoors, walked with friends over the mountains, first around the hills in England and then those in Wales and Scotland, later in the Alps.

We saw a reference to a particular Arthur C. Clarke story that excited or inspired you in some way as a kid.

Timothy Berners-Lee: I'm not sure. I think there's probably one you're talking about which has been seized on by lots of interviewers, because I used it as an example to somebody interviewing me. Somebody was afraid of the web itself becoming a conscious being which would take us all over, and I said, "What do you mean? Like in Dial F for Frankenstein?" So Dial F for Frankenstein is the Arthur C. Clarke story which embodied that. For me, it's a label for that fear of the web waking up, like a baby taking its first cry. But I wouldn't say that it was an inspiration for doing the web.

What interested you most in school?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Math was my favorite subject, I suppose, at school, but on the other hand, I was interested in this electronics. So I thought I'd do physics as being a compromise between the two. It wasn't. It was something completely different, I realized. The philosophy of physics is different, and I think physics is pretty special. I'm glad that I did do it, but it did not prepare me. It did not turn me into a mathematician, and it did not really allow me to do electronics. It allowed me to do a lot of thinking, all sorts of interesting ways, and I realized the relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic. The microscopic rules of behavior of atoms, and the macroscopic behavior of them and so on, is really very interesting. That difference is now crucial between the microscopic way in which two computers interact over the network and the way the whole web behaves, which we're now calling "web science." The difference between the microscopic and the macroscopic is still a challenging step.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

You went to Queen's College at Oxford. What was that like?

Timothy Berners-Lee: College was a really exciting time, really one of the best times. Suddenly being an independent person, meeting all these exciting, interesting people. At Oxford, I felt a sort of mixed blessing, this huge weight of all those who have gone before through those hallowed arches and echoing cloisters. I found it was great just to be in that environment, to walk into the library which was hundreds of years old. I felt a lot of respect had been conferred upon all of us who'd been allowed to go there and that it should be mutual. It was really a very powerful feeling to be somewhere which has been created for study and learning. This is the place. This is the way of life that has been created for study and learning. So that was, as we would now say, "awesome" to be involved in. And then, on the other side, of course it's such a lot of fun to be with so many people, and this constant tension between whether you should be punting on the river up to the Victoria Arms for a pint or finishing some more physics problems. I realized that, actually, the physics problems probably wouldn't have gone so well if it hadn't been for the punting in between, and the punting would not have had that incredible feeling if we hadn't known in the back of our minds that we ought to be doing physics problems.

Did you play tiddlywinks against Cambridge. Is that true?

Timothy Berners-Lee: I did play tiddlywinks. You've dug up all kinds of interesting little things. That's actually true. It's not as though that would characterize my life as a great tiddlywinker. I only played tiddlywinks once. I found out that some of my friends in another college were going to Cambridge in a bus. My good friend, Nick, that I had all these childhood adventures with, with electronics, was at Cambridge. He switched to biology and genetics. Now he's a Fellow of the Society and a very respected professor of genetics up in Edinburgh, but at that point, he was in Cambridge. I wanted to go and see him, and I heard that there was a bus going, taking the entire Oxford University Tiddlywinks Team for a varsity match, no less, between the two universities. I knew all the people on this tiddlywinks team were not very serious people; this was not like a rowing team. So they said, "Oh, come along. All you have to do is you have to learn a few terms," which now have completely escaped me. "We'll probably get knocked out pretty quickly, because the Cambridge people are really serious about tiddlywinks. We're just up there for the ride." So I caught a ride and got to see Nick, played a little bit of tiddlywinks, and got back.

We thought maybe you'd discovered some unknown way to win at tiddlywinks.

Timothy Berners-Lee: Absolutely not.

We all take the web for granted now. We use it every day without thinking about it, but somebody had to think of it and realize its potential and usefulness and how to achieve it. How did you do that?

Timothy Berners-Lee: I think the creative process is fascinating. One, because it's essential to progress. Two, because it's really exciting. I get a kick out of designing something, making something that works. I think we all do. We have different forms of creativity, but just as we get a kick out of skiing down a mountain or eating sugar, we get this visceral -- I don't know whether it's a dump of dopamine or what. People will tell us soon what it is, but we get it from solving a problem, from things falling into shape.

It's interesting, the creative moment. The creative process, I should say, which is not a moment. I think it 's a long-term process. I think what's interesting about it is the way it's inaccessible to us. We can think of a lot of thoughts, but if we think too closely about the creative process, if we put our thoughts in too much order on the page, nothing comes. That's when you get your writer's block. That's fine for writing a recipe. It's fine for writing a manual for how to put a car together. But if you're trying to think of something new, or you're trying to write a poem, you have to let everything flow. The ideas have to be half-formed, and half-formed ideas, we don't have language to express well.

They float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it's better. Then the more mechanical part takes over and turns it into program. I think that's exciting too, if you get a kick out of that too. I think it's fun to take the half-formed idea. I think it would be really nice if we could do this, if this program were to be able to do that. I think it's great. It's a challenge, really, to think, "Okay. I can now tell you how to write the code to do that. We're going to have these types of objects, and we're going to take this interface apart this way, so now you're going to be able to look at it this way, and we're going to make it a whole lot simpler, because otherwise we'll add too much complexity..." All that sort of process is really interesting too. But...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. What people describe as the "Aha!" moment, the "eureka" moment, I think this idea of it being a moment, I'm very suspicious of. I don't actually believe that Archimedes sat in the bath, saw the water up, and said "Eureka!" I think he probably tried all kinds of things. He tried ways of filling the crown full of little marbles maybe and counting the marbles. Goodness knows what. No, he tried all kinds of ways of estimating its volume. And then he figured, "Ah goodness! Yeah. Water will do it!" But he'd done a lot of preparation, and he probably had a lot of ideas pretty close to it. And in fact, it didn't happen -- (snaps). If you'd started him off on the problem totally fresh and sat him in the bath, nothing would have happened. It wouldn't have happened without him discussing the problem with people, without him starting to form all of these hypotheses, half-formed things.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

I think one of the challenges now is how can we do that better in groups. That's where I was coming from with the web originally. I wanted it to be something which would allow us to work together, design things together. Now, the really interesting part of the design is when we have lots of people all over the planet, for example, who have part of it in their heads. They have parts of the cure for AIDS, part of an understanding of cancer.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mankind does not have -- humankind, excuse me -- does not have an understanding of cancer, but we have all of these half-formed ideas. Can we somehow use the web to transmit those half-formed ideas? Can we make it a space where I can leave a trail? Express to you my half-formed ideas in such a way that you, who have the other part of it -- or can see how to take it next -- can see that, pick it up, without still having a solution to the problem, and then take it on to somebody else, or add a little piece to it, contribute your piece? So that after a while, eventually, somebody manages to put all the pieces together and solve one of these really big problems which we've got before us now.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

I finished a sentence! Rare thing, huh?

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