Recollections of Rutherford and the Cavendish

A cat may look at a king, and in Cambridge in the 1930’s there were many kings—eminent, renowned or celebrated in the sphere of learning and yet in Cambridge quite homely figures. Cambridge was their home, as it was ours, the lowly undergraduates. There was Hardy the “pure” mathematician, Housman the scholar‐poet, Keynes the economist, Gowland‐Hopkins the “father” of biochemistry, Wittgenstein the iconoclast of philosophy, Eddington, Dirac and many others. We might only occasionally see, and seldom hear, these illustrious individuals, but their presence gave us a sense of living in history. Education at Cambridge seemed, then, to be more a matter of inspiration by example than instruction by precept.

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