Interview covers D. W. Sciama's background of father; discouraged by father to go into science; early reading in science; early desire to be a Fellow at Trinity College; early interest in philosophy at influence of lectures by Wittenstein; switch in graduate school from statistical mechanics to cosmology; interest in Mach's principle; desire to understand the "great questions"; desire to impose order on the universe; poor grades as an undergraduate student at Cambridge; job in a government research laboratory called Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE); readmittance to Cambridge by Hartree; business agreement with father to withdraw from graduate school if unable to get research fellowship to Trinity; influence of Fred Hoyle, Herman Bondi, and Thomas Gold; rebellious nature of Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold; Dirac as thesis advisor; attraction of the steady state model; reaction to hostile evidence against the steady state theory; predictive power of the steady state theory relative to the big bang model; preference for flat universes (in big bang models) because of Mach's principle; Sciama's influence on Dicke and Wheeler regarding Mach's principle; motivation of interest in Mach's principle and its discussion in the Bondi-Gold paper on the steady state; work with Martin Rees in plotting the spatial distribution of quasars and initial intention of defending the steady state model; personality of Martin Rees; giving up the steady state model after the calculation with Rees; approach to advising students; advice given to students Brandon Carter and Stephen Hawking; general scorn of physicists toward cosmology in the 1950s; recognition of cosmology by physicists after the cosmological prediction of the number of neutrino types; introduction to and attitudes toward the horizon and flatness problems; attitude toward the inflationary universe model; problem in appreciating those problems because so few people in the field; problem with inflationary universe model having so many variations and being oversold; reasons why the inflationary universe model has been so influential; reaction to de Lapparent, Geller, and Huchra's work on large-scale inhomogeneities; problems if inhomogeneity in cosmic background radiation not found with factor of 10 improvementin detection limits; discussion of dark matter and missing mass; current state of mess of inflationary universe model; interplay of theory and observation in cosmology, particularly in the number of types of neutrinos; reasonableness of extrapolating physics back to the very early universe; outstanding problems in cosmology: the cosmological constant, fate of the universe, dark matter, galaxy formation; ideal design of the universe; belief in the strong anthropic principle; belief that Penrose and Hawking are wrong in their proposal of very special initial conditions for the universe; question of whether the universe has a point.