Today I'm speaking with Professor Mike Merrifield.

He's an astronomer at the University of Nottingham.

I've been filming and interviewing Mike for something like 14 years, I think.

He's a mainstay of my channel's 60 Symbols and Deep Sky videos. And he's also cameoed here on Numberphile in the past.

Like so many scientists, his career path is really fascinating to me.

And in this discussion, I learned many things about Mike I didn't know before.

So prepare for a meandering discussion about submarines,

judo, and the benefits of having terrible handwriting.

I was born at a place called Bexler Heath in Kent, so just outside London.

Just outside London, like in a hospital or...

Bexley Maternity Hospital, if you want the more precise coordinates. And here's a question. What day of the week were you born, do you know? I'm sure I used to know. I think it was a Wednesday, but I'm not entirely sure. Okay. We'll research that later. That can be one to check later. What were you like as a little boy? What were you into? How little do you want to go? How small? Like, you know, toddler's primary school? Like what were you into? Did you, were you really into sport? Were you really into nerdy stuff then? Or? I don't think I was really into anything, which is a bit sad, but I was just, I don't have that many memories of being a kid, at least as a small kid. And, you know, I remember playing with stuff and I remember I had a little wooden engine. I used to like driving up and down the garden and those kind of stuff. But I don't really remember that much about being, you know, so we moved from Bexler Heath when I was four, maybe, and so actually it was kind of, that was very early stuff, and I don't have that many memories of that first house at all. What did your parents do? So my dad was a museum curator, worked in museum, and my mum was a housewife at the time. So if you've got a father who's a museum curator, you're obviously surrounded by some pretty interesting stuff and curios. Did that inform

you at all? Do you have memories of running around museums and looking at cool old stuff?

No. It's tragic. No, I remember there being sort of, sometimes there was stuff around the house

and, you know, like stuff that would fill people with horror these days, like my dad had a few

swords lying around and those

kinds of things. But, no, it really didn't impact much upon me.

Rafe was your father? Yeah. He was quite notable in his field.

It was, yes. I mean, he was, you know, he was a senior figure in archaeology. He sort of credited

with having invented rescue archaeology, this thing whereby when a builder is about to build something, there's a requirement that the archaeologists get to go in first. So he was kind of, for many years, he was a hate figure in the building profession because actually, you know, they don't like the fact that they have to get delayed by waiting for the archaeologists to do their thing. But because he was, this was, I guess, of 1960s and there were a huge amount of building going on in the city of London. And the city of London was kind of his area. And so he was really pushing for there to be a lot of archaeology done, you know, before these new buildings were going up just to see what was there before it was covered up forever. So he's a big figure in that. And then later in his career, there was this kind of paradigm shift in archaeology that he was largely responsible for, which is that at the time, people thought, you know, whenever you found anything in archaeology, they'd always try and find a rational explanation from it. And his argument was very often there isn't a rational explanation that quite often things are done for ritual reasons, that there's actually, you's actually some quasi-religious or ritual thing that you're doing. Can you give an example? So for example, the classic example of this is shoes under floors, old shoes found under floors. Quite often when you're renovating an old house, you'll find there are shoes under the floor. The rational explanation is while somebody lost a shoe. But actually, it doesn't really hold water because, you know, if you lost a shoe, you're not going to replace the floorboards before checking whether there's a shoe underneath it, right? And so nowadays, the generally expected explanation is it's a kind of a ritual thing, that there's some kind of, you're making some kind of deposit to some God or other, and that that's

the reason why very often when you look in an old house now, you'll find shoes hidden behind walls or under floors. So I'm imagining archaeology loomed reasonably large in your life. Was it something that interested you at all as a youngster? I'm certainly awful in all of this, but no, it all just went way over my head.

I wasn't that, you know, into it at all.

And, you know, it all just went way over my head.

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