Hawking was a sy symbol of som something uniq uniquely British
When listing what they look for in a partner, most of my friends will mention things like honesty, goodness, kindness, intelligence. I always add one more: quantitative ability. Naturally, I’m chortled at for this seemingly unerotic preference, but the truth is, reader, I adore a mathematician and swoon at a physicist.
No doubt Freud could explain why I gravitate, if you will, towards sciencey men. My parents started out as scientists – my father was an astrophysicist and my mother a molecular biologist. They met doing their PhDs at Oxford. Many of their friends, around whom I grew up, were dorky but brilliant (in all senses) English physicists and geneticists.
As someone hopeless at maths and with completely different tendencies, I’ve always been both comforted and fascinated by people for whom the world is best explained at the molecular or atomic level. And now that I’m an academic historian, cocooned ever more in claret-scented huddles of humanities scholars, I find myself craving – and I mean craving – the company of those who make sense of nature in nature’s own code: numbers.
The death last week of Professor Stephen Hawking, Britain’s great cosmologist, offered a poignant opportunity for me to reflect not only on my own slightly mad love of maths and physics geniuses, but on what it was about Hawking – who shot to fame with his 1974 prediction that black holes emit heat – that made everyone else go properly gaga for a physicist as well.
The thing about Hawking, I realised, is that he was not simply a phenomenon. He was an English phenomenon, a symbol of what is unique about the way this country fosters a one-of-a-kind combination of eccentricity and genius. Friends of mine who grew up in France tell me that Hawking was always a source of total fascination to them; his combination of brains, eccentricity and the institutional freedom that allowed him to pursue physics with that single-mindedness doesn’t seem to exist outside Britain.
Yes, other countries produce celebrity intellectuals (nowhere more than France), but they’re generally all of a type: they wear cravats, threadbare jackets and turtle-rimmed specs, make bold, abstract statements, write incomprehensible books and play the game of university politics with gusto. Hawking, roaming Renaissance chapels and May Balls in his wheelchair with a speech synthesiser controlled by his cheek muscles, was a completely different proposition.
Indeed, as I chewed it further, I realised that Hawking was actually, to boil it down, a product of a distinctive Oxbridge culture. It’s no coincidence that his whole adult life was spent briefly at Oxford and then at Cambridge. These are places in which prodigies are left to get on with being prodigies, unhampered by the tiresome rules and regulations and requirements that drag at the heels of other academics.
Cambridge, the setting of Hawking’s greatest triumphs, is particularly beguiling for its mixture of the old (wealth, architectural beauty, an intellectual tradition that produced Newton and Milton) and the new (an obsession with, and ability to deliver, the vanguard of science and technology). Heck, I thrived there and I was just a middling 2.1 student of English literature; for a Hawking-level mind, however, there is no better place on earth.
As you can see, I’m a slightly fanatical defender of Oxbridge’s superiority. So I thought I’d better check with an insider that this thesis of genius-fostering actually holds. I emailed David Deutsch, the theoretical physicist, a founding father of the now major field of quantum computing and a Hawking-level genius himself who has spent his career at Cambridge and Oxford. As it happens David, who I’ve known since I was a child (he was one of those parental friends I mentioned), wrote back to me from Trieste, where he was mid-banquet after receiving a Dirac Medal, the Rolls-Royce of theoretical physics prizes.
David confirmed that the answer to the Oxbridge genius thesis is a firm “yes” (though he added that recently red tape and standardisation have begun chipping away even Oxbridge freedoms).
He emailed: “The traditional Oxbridge culture of academic life, for all its quasi-monastic weirdness and exclusionary tendencies, had the tremendous virtue of understanding the value of academic independence and eccentricity. This allowed it to nurture a steady stream of eccentric British physics geniuses who contributed immeasurably to human knowledge and welfare.” As well as Hawking, this long list includes Newton, Darwin, Turing, Watson, Crick and plenty more.
Hawking’s death has elicited outpourings mostly linked to his personal triumph in adversity. But it should also prompt us to reflect, with pride, on our ancient universities’ special understanding of the freedom required by scientific genius. We wouldn’t be half the country we are without that understanding – and we must fight to keep it.