The Last Samurai

He put a hand on my shoulder and laughed, shaking his head. I don’t know how I could have missed it, he said shaking his head and laughing, you’re exactly what I was at that age—

I did not know what to say.

He said: Did she tell you—

I said: She never told me anything. I looked in an envelope that said To Be Opened In Case Of Death. She doesn’t know—

He said: What did it say?

I said it did not say very much.

He said: And you live here? I don’t quite understand— she’s still in Australia, isn’t she, there was an article just the other day—

I said: I’m staying with my grandmother.

I thought he would be bound to see through this.

He said: Of course. Stupid of me, she’d have had to do something like that.

He said: So you go to school here? You see her in the summers?

I said I didn’t go to school, I was just working independently.

He said: I see. He looked again at the pages of problems and smiled, and he said: All the same I wonder if that’s wise?

And he said suddenly: Tell me what you know about the atom.

I said: Which atom?

He said: Any atom.

I said: An atom of ytterbium has 70 electrons, a relative atomic mass of 173.04, a first ionization energy of 6.254 electrovolts—

He said: That’s not quite what I meant. I was thinking more about the structure—

I thought: What happens if I explain the structure?

I said: The structure?

He said: Tell me what you know.

I explained what I knew and I explained why I did not think it made sense to say that if it were not for electric charge we could walk through walls.

He laughed and he began asking more questions. When I got a question right he would laugh; when I did not know the answer he would explain, waving his hands. It was a bit like the show except that his explanations were more complicated and sometimes he would write a mathematical formula on a piece of paper and ask if I understood it.

At last he said: We’ve got to get you into a school. Put you into the right school and there’ll be no stopping you. What do you say to Winchester?

I said: Couldn’t I just go straight to Cambridge?

He stared at me and then laughed again, slapping his knee. He said: Well you don’t want for effrontery!

I said: You said you knew university students who couldn’t do this.

He said: Yes, but they’re not very good university students.

Then he said: Well, it depends what you want to do. Do you want to be a mathematician?

I said: I don’t know.

He said: If you want to—if you’re sure that’s what you want to do—you might as well get on with it, the sooner the better. If you want to do any kind of science there are other considerations. Look at poor old Ken.

I said: What about him?

He said: Well just look at him! They cut our contribution to ESA last year, so he can’t get on HERSCHEL. He can’t get on it, his graduate students can’t get on it, now they’re stuck trying to scramble aboard elsewhere, you can imagine the kind of research record the department is going to have now the government has made it impossible for them to do any research, well what kind of funding do you think they’ll get if they don’t produce any research?

He was looking at me very seriously, the way he had looked when he had written formulae on a piece of paper that he would not have expected most people to understand. He said: Any science is expensive and astronomy is more expensive than most.

He said: More expensive than most and less likely to get any money from industry.

He said: If you need hundreds of millions of pounds sooner or later you are going to have to talk to people who don’t understand what you’re doing and don’t want to understand because they hated science at school. You simply can’t afford to cut yourself off.

I could think of two things to say. One was that I was not actually cut off because I was taking classes at Bermondsey Boys Junior Judo. The other was OK.

I said: OK.

He said: You say that but you don’t understand. You think because you’re clever you can understand anything. I don’t suppose anything like this is going to give you problems— and he glanced at my paper. You need to be able to understand things you’re going to find almost impossible to believe. If you don’t learn to believe them now it will be too late.