in my curriculum vitae was too big, my math was rusting up, and I was looking too old, in my late twenties, for this very competitive game.
When I emerged from my last interview, I already knew—by theemphatic kindness with which my old professor showed me out—that my academic career was sunk. I walked down Exhibition Road in the rain, wondering what to do. As I passed the Natural History Museum the rain became torrential, and with a few dozen other people I ran into the museum to shelter. I sat myself down by the full-scale model of the diplodocus, and as I dried out I fell into a strangely contented state of crowd-watching. Frequently, large groups provoke in me a vague misanthropy. This time, however, the curiosity and wonder I saw in people seemed to ennoble them. All who walked in, whatever their age, were drawn to come and stand and marvel at that magnificent beast. I overheard conversations, and what interested me, apart from the enthusiasm, was the general level of ignorance. I heard a ten-year-old boy ask the three grownups he was with whether a creature like this one would have chased and eaten people. It was clear from the ready answers he received that the adults’ evolutionary timetable was badly out of kilter.
As I sat there, I began to think through the few disparate things I myself knew about dinosaurs. I remembered Darwin’s account, in the
Voyage of the Beagle
, of finding large fossilized bones in South America, and how crucial to his theory was the question of their age. He had been impressed by the arguments put forward by the geologist Charles Lyell. The earth was a lot older than the four thousand years defended by the church. In our own time, the cold-blooded/warm-blooded contest was being settled in favor of the latter. There was new geological evidence of various cataclysms that had disturbed life on Earth. That vast crater in Mexico could well have been caused by the meteor that ended the dinosaurs’ empire and gave the little ratlike creatures that scuttled at the monsters’ feet the chance to expand their niche and so permit the mammals—and therefore ultimately the primates—to flourish. There was also an attractive idea around that thedinosaurs had not been exterminated at all. They had bowed to environmental necessity and evolved into the harmless birds we feed in our back gardens.
By the time I left the museum I had a scheme for a book scrawled on the back of my interview appointment letter. I did three months’ reading and six months’ writing. The sister of my failed business partner was a picture researcher who kindly agreed to defer her fee. The book came out at a time when no dinosaur book could fail, and mine did well enough for me to be signed up for black holes. My working life began, and as the successes rolled in, so all other possibilities in science closed down on me. I was a journalist, a commentator, an outsider to my own profession. I would never get back to those days, heady in retrospect, when I was doing original doctoral research on the magnetic field of the electron, when I attended conferences on the problem of infinities in the renormalizable theories—not as an observer but as an active, though minor, participant. Now no scientist, not even a lab technician or college porter, would ever take me seriously again.
On this particular day, in my study with my coffee and sandwiches, and my failure to make progress with the smile, and Parry standing guard on the pavement, it came back to me again how I had ended up with this. From time to time I heard the click of the answering machine engaging. Every hour or so I went into the living room to check, and he was always there, staring at the entrance like a dog tied up outside a shop. On only one occasion was he talking on the phone to me. Mostly he stood still, feet slightly apart, hands in pockets, the expression on his face, as far as I could tell, suggesting concentration, or perhaps imminent happiness.
When I
When I emerged from my last interview, I already knew—by theemphatic kindness with which my old professor showed me out—that my academic career was sunk. I walked down Exhibition Road in the rain, wondering what to do. As I passed the Natural History Museum the rain became torrential, and with a few dozen other people I ran into the museum to shelter. I sat myself down by the full-scale model of the diplodocus, and as I dried out I fell into a strangely contented state of crowd-watching. Frequently, large groups provoke in me a vague misanthropy. This time, however, the curiosity and wonder I saw in people seemed to ennoble them. All who walked in, whatever their age, were drawn to come and stand and marvel at that magnificent beast. I overheard conversations, and what interested me, apart from the enthusiasm, was the general level of ignorance. I heard a ten-year-old boy ask the three grownups he was with whether a creature like this one would have chased and eaten people. It was clear from the ready answers he received that the adults’ evolutionary timetable was badly out of kilter.
As I sat there, I began to think through the few disparate things I myself knew about dinosaurs. I remembered Darwin’s account, in the
Voyage of the Beagle
, of finding large fossilized bones in South America, and how crucial to his theory was the question of their age. He had been impressed by the arguments put forward by the geologist Charles Lyell. The earth was a lot older than the four thousand years defended by the church. In our own time, the cold-blooded/warm-blooded contest was being settled in favor of the latter. There was new geological evidence of various cataclysms that had disturbed life on Earth. That vast crater in Mexico could well have been caused by the meteor that ended the dinosaurs’ empire and gave the little ratlike creatures that scuttled at the monsters’ feet the chance to expand their niche and so permit the mammals—and therefore ultimately the primates—to flourish. There was also an attractive idea around that thedinosaurs had not been exterminated at all. They had bowed to environmental necessity and evolved into the harmless birds we feed in our back gardens.
By the time I left the museum I had a scheme for a book scrawled on the back of my interview appointment letter. I did three months’ reading and six months’ writing. The sister of my failed business partner was a picture researcher who kindly agreed to defer her fee. The book came out at a time when no dinosaur book could fail, and mine did well enough for me to be signed up for black holes. My working life began, and as the successes rolled in, so all other possibilities in science closed down on me. I was a journalist, a commentator, an outsider to my own profession. I would never get back to those days, heady in retrospect, when I was doing original doctoral research on the magnetic field of the electron, when I attended conferences on the problem of infinities in the renormalizable theories—not as an observer but as an active, though minor, participant. Now no scientist, not even a lab technician or college porter, would ever take me seriously again.
On this particular day, in my study with my coffee and sandwiches, and my failure to make progress with the smile, and Parry standing guard on the pavement, it came back to me again how I had ended up with this. From time to time I heard the click of the answering machine engaging. Every hour or so I went into the living room to check, and he was always there, staring at the entrance like a dog tied up outside a shop. On only one occasion was he talking on the phone to me. Mostly he stood still, feet slightly apart, hands in pockets, the expression on his face, as far as I could tell, suggesting concentration, or perhaps imminent happiness.
When I
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