The Last Samurai

The actor Robert Donat never made many films. There was The 39 Steps, in which he escaped across moors and jumped on and off moving trains; there was The Winslow Boy, in which he played a charismatic, controversial and highly paid barrister. In The Count of Monte Cristo he escaped from the Chateau d’If. In The Citadel he played a charismatic doctor who abandoned his ideals. In The Young Mr. Pitt he played a charismatic politician. There was also Goodbye Mr. Chips, in which he played a shy schoolmaster who always told the same jokes. Sib thought there were some others but she could never remember what they were. None of the films was scheduled to be on that night. The astronomer, Nobel Prize winner and Donat lookalike George Sorabji was on TV every Thursday at 9:00. Sometimes he liked to jump onto a rope ladder dropped from a helicopter, and sometimes he liked to stride up and down, eyes flashing, and explain the Pauli Exclusion Principle or the importance of the Chandrasekhar constant. He was never much like Mr. Chips.

Sorabji liked to say when asked (if not asked he would volunteer the information) that he was the descendant of a drugs baron. His great-grandfather had been a Parsi businessman in Bombay, and he had built up a fortune mainly in the opium trade. Far from being a social outcast he was a pillar of society and noted philanthropist, a man who had littered Bombay with schools and hospitals and repulsive pieces of statuary. Sorabji argued that similar benefits, only on a larger scale, would be the inevitable result of legalisation of drugs, which could be heavily taxed to pay for schools, hospitals and obscenely expensive telescopes.

The letters pages of the papers were full of heated exchanges between Sorabji and members of the public on the legalisation of drugs, astrology the pseudo-science, the absolute insignificance of our national heritage in comparison with the universe & consequent need for instant reallocation of funds to pay for obscenely expensive telescopes, and an impressive range of other subjects on which Sorabji held strong views. You could also hear Robert Donat in Winslow Boy mode on the radio or see him on TV. Last but not least he had won a Nobel Prize.

Sorabji had shared the prize with three other people; he had won it for physics because there isn’t a Nobel Prize for astronomy, and people who knew said that though he was a brilliant astronomer he hadn’t really won it for the thing he was brilliant at.

The thing he had been brilliant at was creating mathematical models of black holes, but the thing he had won the prize for was Colossus, a satellite for multi-wavelength astronomy which would never have got off the drawing board, let alone the ground, had it not been for Sorabji. Sorabji had extracted commitments for obscene amounts of money from the US, the EU, Australia, Japan and lots of other places that had never before thought of sponsoring a satellite, and he had helped to design ground-breaking telescopes for the satellite, which had caused the obscenely expensive project to go a heartstopping five times over budget. Then it went into orbit, and within three years information from the satellite had revolutionised understanding of quasars, pulsars and black holes.

Sorabji was interested in things that bored 90% of the country, and he had strong views with which 99% of the country strongly disagreed, but nobody held it against him. Some people said that say what you like he had the courage of his convictions, and some people said say what you like his heart is in the right place. They said he would lay down his life for his friends. Sorabji had once saved the life of a friend when, visiting the observatory at Mauna Koa, they had taken a helicopter up over a live volcano and crashed inside it, and he had rescued a member of his team, a Ugandan from the Lango tribe placed under house arrest by Idi Amin, by smuggling him out over the Kenyan border under a hail of bullets.

Sorabji had originally come to the attention of the British public through a programme called Mathematics the Universal Language. 99.99% of the British public were not interested in mathematics, but they were interested in the fact that Sorabji had succeeded in teaching mathematics to a boy from an Amazonian tribe when neither spoke a word of the other’s language, and in the fact that he had nearly laid down his life for his friend.

Sorabji had been en route to a conference on pulsars in Santiago when the plane made an unscheduled stop in Belem because of mechanical difficulties. Sorabji had taken a small local plane instead; it had crashed deep in the Amazonian rainforest, the pilot dead on impact, Sorabji rescued by a local tribe but stranded for six months.

At night he would look up at the brilliant Southern sky which could be seen from the clearing, thinking about how far away everything was and how long it took the light to reach him and how little time a man did have to observe the light as it came.