Victorian physics was largely Cambridge physics, and Cambridge physics was largely the creation of Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819–1903) and William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs (1824–1907). The Kelvin temperature scale, Stokes' parameters for polarised light, Stokes' law for a sphere moving through a viscous fluid: the language of today's physics quietly echoes yesterday's greatness. This chapter tries to recapture some of that greatness by placing the intertwined careers of Stokes and Kelvin within the broader story of Victorian physics and Victorian Cambridge University. Their collaboration and influence is symbolised by the fact that what is known as Stokes' theorem was suggested in a letter from Kelvin to Stokes and then set by Stokes as a question in a Cambridge examination taken by James Clerk Maxwell, generally acknowledged as the premier physicist of the century.

The careers of the two had close similarities. Both succeeded in Cambridge's Mathematical Tripos in the 1840s and obtained professorships that they would hold for more than five decades. Early research gained both election as fellows of the Royal Society of London in 1851. Thomson received a knighthood in 1867, Stokes was created a baronet in 1889, and Thomson was raised to the peerage in 1892, becoming Lord Kelvin. As elder statesmen of Victorian science, they occupied the presidency of the Royal Society for a decade, Stokes from 1885 to 1890 and Thomson from 1890 to 1895.

The University of Cambridge can point to a long roster of distinguished scientists and mathematicians who have been associated with its history over the past 400 years, since the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Their names include three of the greatest luminaries in the entire history of science: Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and James Clerk Maxwell. The link between the Cambridge present and the magnitude of past achievement is highlighted by the names given to institutions and buildings in the University: Darwin College, the Newton Institute, Harvey Court. This sense of continuity, that the work of the present age is linked to the traditions of the founding fathers, has prompted this collection of essays on Cambridge scientists, intended to interest a broad non-specialist readership within and beyond the University. But to the historian such associations, though beguiling, are problematic, suggesting sentiment or constructed ‘heritage’ rather than historical reality. Can figures of the early modern period – Isaac Newton, William Gilbert, William Harvey – be properly described as ‘scientists’? The term, with its resonances of professional specialisation, was only introduced (by another Cambridge notable, William Whewell) in 1834. Does Cambridge ‘science’ have a 400-year history, or is it a product of the professionalisation of science, of teaching and research, since 1850 and especially since 1900? Is there indeed a specifically Cantabrigian scientific culture? The three major scientific figures associated with the University illustrate some of the problems in defining Cambridge science.

Mary Cartwright never symbolised anything except herself, but her life echoed that of the generation of real and fictional ‘new women’ who after the First World War took the men on at their own games and trounced them. She was born in 1900 into a middle-class family with a tradition of public service. Her father was rector in a small Northampton village. Two of her brothers were killed in the First World War and one became deputy chairman of the British Steel Corporation.

She hesitated between history and mathematics at Oxford but chose mathematics. The first two years were hard, she found the lecture rooms overcrowded (they were filled with men returning from the war) and she felt herself ill prepared for the course. When she received only a second in the second year examination she seriously considered switching to history. However she persevered, and at the end of her third year an event occurred that was to change the course of her life.

Adam Sedgwick, geologist, was born in the village of Dent in the Yorkshire Dales on 22 March 1785. He died in Cambridge in 1873 at the age of eighty-eight. Translated from the Latin, his epitaph at Norwich Cathedral reads: ‘In Christ. To Adam Sedgwick, a Master among Philosophers, the Friend of Princes, the Delight of Little Ones, as One who Extended the Frontiers of Science, and was Fired with a Right Royal Love of Truth, whose Character was a Grand Simplicity, and whose Rock was the Faith of Christ, to Him, Once a Canon of the Church of Norwich, this Memorial is Raised by the Dean. 1873.’ Sedgwick would surely have wished to be remembered thus. Does his epitaph offer a fair assessment of the man? What was his character? How did he behave and think?

Sedgwick's family in the Dales can be traced to the thirteenth century. His father Richard was Vicar at Dent, which was a reasonably prosperous place in Adam's youth, in the days of the hand weavers and spinners; but, never industrialising, it declined in the nineteenth century, and it now does well chiefly by virtue of the tourist trade, the great granite Sedgwick memorial stone in the village centre being a major attraction, said to epitomise his character.

Adam was third of a family of seven. He attended the small ‘grammar school’ in Dent until he was sixteen and then had two years at the more prestigious Sedbergh School nearby.

British theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking is world-renowned for his discoveries on the nature of space and time, and as the author of A Brief History of Time, a science book with sales that broke many publishing records. Hawking achievement's are all the greater in view of his crippling illness which has left him without speech and only limited movement in his hands.

Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on 8 January 1942, precisely 300 years after the death of Galileo. He says of this remarkable coincidence, ‘I estimate that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day, and I don't know whether any of them became interested in cosmology’. He went to local schools, was slow at learning to read, and never stood out as a scholar. His father, a doctor, wanted Stephen to study medicine at university, and as a result the young Hawking studied very little mathematics in high school. However, he gained a place to study physics at Oxford University, where he was admitted to University College in 1959.

Stephen Hawking describes the Oxford of those days as being, ‘Very anti work – you were supposed either to be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a poor classification in the final examinations’. Hawking claims to have done no more than 1000 hours of studying in his entire three years at Oxford, and he attributes this lack of effort to an attitude of complete boredom and a feeling that nothing was worth the effort.

William Harvey was a student at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, entering in May 1593 at the age of fifteen and staying until 1599, when he was twenty-one. Harvey is the celebrated discoverer of the circulation of the blood. This was, and still is, simply the most important discovery about the anatomy and physiology of the human and animal body that has ever been made. All of our modern physiological understanding is based on this discovery. Harvey made the discovery on his own, in the course of his private researches in London sometime around 1618, and he was so overwhelmed by what he had discovered that it was not until ten years later, after repeatedly presenting it to the criticisms of his colleagues in the College of Physicians in London, that he could bring himself to publish it.

Harvey was born on 1 April 1578 in Folkestone in Kent, where his father was mayor on four occasions. Harvey was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and then he was awarded the Matthew Parker scholarship, which was restricted to boys from The King's School, and this took him to Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. This college had been founded out of Gonville Hall, a somewhat decayed hall for students, by John Caius (pronounced ‘Keys’), a celebrated physician, in 1557. At that time Caius (as the college is known for short) was the most medical of all the colleges of Cambridge or Oxford, with more people studying medicine there than at any other college.

Paul Dirac, the distinguished theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate of 1933, was for most of his active life closely related to Cambridge University. When he retired from his position as Lucasian Professor in 1969, he had been at the university for forty-six years. He then moved to Florida, but frequently returned to St John's college for visits. Although he travelled widely and often stayed at foreign universities, his home base was always Cambridge University. Yet Dirac was first of all his own, not a ‘Cambridge man’, and his great scientific accomplishments were only loosely connected with the Cambridge environment and his position at the university. His colleague Nevill Mott once remarked that, ‘He [Dirac] is one of the very few scientists who could work even on a lonely island if he had a library and could perhaps even do without books and journals.’

Dirac's scientific contributions covered several fields of theoretical physics, including cosmology and the theory of general relativity, but he is best known for his pioneering works in quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He made most of his remarkable discoveries as a young man, between 1925 and 1934, after which period of amazing creativity he increasingly moved away from mainstream physics. Had he died thirty-two years old, he would still be remembered as one of the greatest physicists ever, comparable to giants such as Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein.

The early history of the Cavendish Laboratory is best known for ground-breaking work in the study of atomic structure, but the birth of long-distance radio communication also stimulated research on the properties of the upper atmosphere which enabled such propagation to occur. Begun by E.V. Appleton, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in 1947 for his discovery of the ionosphere, radiophysics at the Cavendish was continued until 1939 by J.A. Ratcliffe and it was he who initiated radioastronomy in 1945. What triggered Ratcliffe's interest was an occasion in February 1942 when radar stations along the south coast were blinded by radio interference, initially thought to be jamming by enemy action, but later found to be radiation emitted by the sun when a large sunspot was present on the disk. Anxious to regenerate radiophysics at the end of the war, Ratcliffe attracted M. Ryle, a wartime colleague, back to the Cavendish and suggested that investigation of this new solar phenomenon might be an interesting project.

By 1946 Ryle had set up a primitive radio telescope and discovered that the sun was a continuous emitter of radio waves, in addition to the more intense outbursts associated with sunspots. More importantly, however, he demonstrated the existence of other celestial radio emitters, then called radio stars, and radioastronomy in Cambridge had begun. I joined Ryle's group in 1948 and this essay outlines the course of my personal research, leading to the discovery of pulsars in 1967, which has been ranked as one of the major astronomical breakthroughs of the past fifty years.

The twentieth century has witnessed a remarkable transformation in the scientific status, economic importance, and public visibility of biology. The new knowledge that lay behind this transformation was based upon scientific achievements that were made in research institutes and universities in many parts of the world beginning in the fifties. A major foundation for such success was laid when Francis Crick and James Watson, working at the time in Cambridge, suggested that deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA – the stuff of our genes – is constructed of two helical long-chain molecules wound around each other – the now-famous Double Helix. Their brief paper describing the structure in the journal, Nature, in 1953, has since become one of the most famous in the history of twentieth-century science.

The Double Helix, its structure suggestive of its function as repository of the specificities or ‘information’ of our genes and of the molecular mechanism by which the genes are duplicated, supplied the foundation upon which could be built our understanding of genetics at the molecular level. It clinched the debate already under way in favour of the nucleic acids rather than the proteins as the substance of the genes, and inspired the search for the hereditary codescript in which the genes are written. Along with the revelations of the molecular structure of the proteins, this new knowledge has made possible the development of molecular tools with which to manipulate the genetic material for the benefit of medicine and agriculture, diagnostic tests to guide preventive medical advice, and an identity test – DNA fingerprinting – to aid forensic science.

THE HARDY-LITTLEWOOD PARTNERSHIP

The mathematical collaboration of Godfrey Harold Hardy and John Edensor Littlewood is the most remarkable and successful partnership in mathematical history. From before the First World War until Hardy's death in 1947 these mathematical giants produced around one hundred joint papers of enormous influence covering a wide range of topics in pure mathematics. Whereas many other mathematicians have collaborated on a short-term basis, there are no other examples of such a long and fruitful partnership.

Hardy and Littlewood dominated the English mathematical scene for the first half of the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, mathematical life in England, especially in pure mathematics, had been dwarfed by developments on the Continent, and although Cambridge had produced some outstanding applied mathematicians, such as James Clerk Maxwell, George Gabriel Stokes, and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), there were few pure mathematicians of world class other than Arthur Cayley in Cambridge and James Joseph Sylvester in Oxford. The situation changed with Hardy and Littlewood, who created a school of mathematical analysis unequalled throughout the world. As one contemporary colleague observed: ‘Nowadays, there are only three really great English mathematicians, Hardy, Littlewood, and Hardy-Littlewood.’

As frequently happens in collaborative partnerships, the styles and personalities of the two men were very different. Both were mathematical geniuses, completely devoted to their subject, and with many interests in common.

Frederick Gowland Hopkins has gone down in history as ‘the father of British biochemistry’, and it was largely through his efforts that the Cambridge Department of Biochemistry became a centre of world renown. The department was established in 1914 and Hopkins was its first Professor, until his retirement at the age of eighty-two in 1943. Between the two world wars, Hopkins and his colleagues put into place an exceptionally wide-ranging programme of biochemical research, developed degree course teaching and research training in the subject, and hosted visiting researchers from every continent. By the time of Hopkins' death in 1947, some seventy-five former members of the department had been elected to professorial chairs worldwide.

While Hopkins' legacy is celebrated among biochemists, his career in Cambridge did not run a uniformly smooth path. Before he acquired his own department, Hopkins had to struggle very hard to find the time, laboratory space and resources to do the biochemical research he wanted to pursue in the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory. Later, in the 1920s, concerted efforts were made to place the leadership of his department in other hands, albeit unsuccessfully. In both cases, Hopkins' particular ambitions for biochemistry went far beyond the expectations, or indeed wishes, of his peers. Here I shall outline these ambitions, the contexts within which Hopkins pursued and defended them, and some of the obstacles that faced him.

FROM PHYSIOLOGY TO BIOCHEMISTRY

Hopkins was trained in analytical chemistry and subsequently qualified at medical school.

PREVIEWS OF CUNNING ABSTRACTIONS

What did it mean to set out to construct a cyborg around 1950 in America? We are not talking engineering specs here, although it should go without saying that everything, hardware included, matters when it comes to easing into the American cybernetical sublime. It was a further testimonial to the planned science regime of World War II that the immediate postwar era found itself awash in auspicious gizmos. The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Labs; magnetic disk storage was implemented at the National Bureau of Standards in 1951; the first magnetic durm memory was installed in a computer for, the lineal predecessor of the National Security Agency in 1950 (Bamford, 1982, p. 99); magnetic core memories were innovated at Project Whirlwind at MIT in the early 1950s.

Our explicit narrative of the constitution of modern economics begins with John von Neumann because I believe, with the benefit of a little additional hindsight and the provision of some previously neglected evidence, he will come to be regarded as the single most important figure in the development of economics in the twentieth century. It would initially appear I am not alone in this conviction. Roy Weintraub (1985, p. 74), suggests, “Von Neumann's [1937] paper is, in my view, the single most important article in mathematical economics.” Mohammed Dore (in Dore, Chakravarty, & Goodwin, 1989, p. 239) asserts that “John von Neumann changed the way economic analysis is being done.” Nicholas Kaldor ventured, “He was unquestionably the nearest thing to a genius I have ever encountered” (ibid., p. xi). Jurg Niehans's textbook (1990, p. 393) states flatly, “In the second quarter of the twentieth century, it happened for the first time that a mathematical genius made fundamental contributions to economic theory.” Given the spread of game theory throughout the core microeconomics curriculum since 1980, it would appear a foregone conclusion that von Neumann should be revered as the progenitor of that tradition and, thus, of microeconomic orthodoxy at the end of this century.

INHUMAN, ALL TOO INHUMAN

Once the nascent postwar neoclassical orthodoxy had divaricated out-ward from Cowles and Chicago and MIT to the rest of the nation and beyond, the garden-variety negative reaction to these doctrines was that they were too “methodologically individualist,” too solipsistic, or, if you happened to be put off from the rhetoric surrounding the formalism, too “selfish.” On any given Saturday night, so the scuttlebutt went, it would invariably be the neoclassical economist who would be the last to offer to pay for a round of drinks, and the first to insist that everyone get separate checks. Many postwar economists wore these epithets as badges of honor, testimony to their thick skins and their though-minded attitudes toward the bitter truth. They had learned a thing or two from RAND about “thinking the unthinkable.”

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY?

It is quite the spectacle to observe how postwar economists, those hard-boiled beady-eyed realists, so eager to unmask the hidden self-interest lurking behind every noble sentiment, undergo a miraculous transubstantiation when the topic turns to their own motivations. When summoned to reflect on their personal successes, they regularly cite such lofty goals as the alleviation of pain, the augmentation of the general welfare, the abolition of injustice, and the advancement of human understanding (Szenberg, 1992). It is on its face a singularly amazing accomplishment, as if some new Augustine had unearthed the philosopher's stone capable of conjuring agape out of avarice, leaving him alone zaddick in a non-zero-sum world. It would be too much of a distraction from our present itinerary to inquire exactly how the prestidigitation is accomplished in every case, or indeed to even ask whether the individuals in question truly believe it deep down in the recesses of their psyches; but, nevertheless, it will serve to explain one very striking lacuna in the modern treatment of the history of economics. No one seems to want to ask the quintessential economic question about the modern economics profession – Who pays? Qui bono?

In this respect the historians of the physical sciences have been simultaneously more bold and more incisive.