Why We Stand On the Shoulders of Giants ; Gravity, Radioactivity, Dna... And How Isaac Newton's Old University Became the Centre of the Modern World

Summary

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In 1209 or thereabouts a small group of scholars fled from the already flourishing University of Oxford and journeyed across England to Cambridge. Seven hundred and fifty-five years later, in 1964, my 19-yearold self made the even longer journey from Kendal, the little northern town where I was born and brought up. I took the train, pulled by an asthmatic steam engine, and changed at Bletchley for the Oxford and Cambridge line. I travelled with a large cabin trunk and even larger hopes and dreams.

No one is quite sure why (or indeed, to be honest, exactly when) that original group of scholars left Oxford. Or why they chose Cambridge, with its flat and dreary landscape and vile climate of damp, fog and cold.

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Extract

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Why We Stand On the Shoulders of Giants ; Gravity, Radioactivity, Dna... And How Isaac Newton's Old University Became the Centre of the Modern World

Maybe they were fleeing the plague. Or the heavy hand of the town or church authorities. Or perhaps they were just escaping their Oxford colleagues, who were behaving impossibly as usual. But, whatever the reason, their migration led to the foundation of the University of Cambridge. My University of Cambridge.

Cambridge has just passed its eight-hundredth anniversary, making it older than Parliament, and older indeed than any other British institution, apart from the monarchy and the ...

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