The Last Samurai

He told the head that he knew quite a lot about science and mathematics, and the head said what this showed was that he was completely undisciplined. As he had covered most of the mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics of the O-level syllabus, however, those periods could be used to catch up on what he had missed.

Sorabji ran away from the school 27 times and was sent back each time.

The first time he ran away was at night. He looked up at the Northern sky; it was like going from a Bond Street jeweller to a street trader hawking chips of glass on cheap velvet. The moon was 240,000 miles away and that was far enough. The second time he ran away was just after dawn. He made his way along a canal to the next town and he saw an orange ball of flame shimmering through the trees and it was 93 million miles away. He made it all the way to his father’s house in London, but then he was sent back to the school. He kept running away and being sent back to the school and soon everything in the solar system was too close.

He was obsessed with distance. He had read of stars whose light had left them millions of years ago, and he had read that the light we see may come from stars now dead. He would look up and think that all the stars might now be dead; he thought that they were so far away there would be no way to know.

It was as if everything might really already be over.

One day he found a book on astronomy in the school library. Because he was interested in distance and the deaths of stars he turned first to a chapter on stellar evolution, and the book fell open on something called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which used brightness and temperature to plot the evolution of stars. Sorabji had never seen anything so wonderful in his life. He had never imagined that a piece of knowledge so wonderful could exist in the universe.

He kept looking at the page thinking: Why have I never heard of this before? Why doesn’t everyone know about this? He sometimes said later how strange it was being at the school, knowing that no one had ever tried to give this glorious piece of information to the boys but instead forced them to spend hours turning perfectly good English poems into atrocious Latin ones. He said the frightening thing was thinking of how many other wonderful things there might be which were kept from them at the school. He had run away one last time and put himself in for A-levels independently and got the As and got into Cambridge, and he had never forgotten the things that were kept from people at school.

I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn’t work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32. Five billion people on the planet, I’d tried one. And at least someone who’d run away from school 27 times would not leap to conclusions because I had left school at the age of six.

I was about to get excited and think This is it when I suddenly thought Wait just a minute.

I said to Sib: You know that story about the Ugandan from the Lango tribe

Sib said: Yes

I said: Is it actually true?

Sib said as far as she was aware

I said: But how do you know?

Sib said: Well there was an interview when Dr. Akii-Bua got an honorary degree from Oxford and he said he would not be there to tell the tale without the extraordinary heroism of Dr. Sorabji.

I said: And what about the volcano?

Sib said she had once read an interview of the man with the broken arm describing what it was like falling back into the volcano and then seeing Sorabji climb down inside the rim. She said: Why do you ask. I said I just wondered. I didn’t ask about Pete because I had seen Mathematics the Universal Language myself. Pete called Sorabji that maniac and that lunatic, but he never said Sorabji hadn’t saved his life.

All the evidence suggested that Sorabji was not only brilliant but a genuine hero. The question was whether I really had the nerve to go up to someone who was not only a hero but a scientific genius.

At first I thought I was not going to be able to do it. But then I thought if you’re a coward you deserve what you get. You deserve what you’ve got.

When I decided I was going to have to do it I realised I would have to be prepared. There was no point in going up to a Nobel Prize winner and saying the kind of thing that would make him think Sesame Street was about the right level.

The problem was that it was hard to know what would be enough. Finally I decided to do Fourier analysis and Laplace transforms and Lagrangians and I would also learn the periodic table because I had been meaning to do it for a long time and I would also learn the Lyman, Balmer, Paschen and Brackett hydrogen series because of Sorabji’s early interest in spectroscopy and maybe that would be enough.