This is the house where Isaac Newton was born, and where, as a young man, he began the work that changed how humanity understands the universe. Newton was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. He discovered the laws of gravity and motion, explaining why the planets orbit the Sun and why objects fall to the ground. He invented a whole new branch of mathematics, calculus. He worked out that white light is made of all the colors of the rainbow. His ideas became the foundation of modern physics, and they held for more than two hundred years, until Einstein built on them in the twentieth century. Nearly everything about how we understand motion, force, and the sky above us starts with this man, and this man started here, in a small farmhouse in the English countryside.
Yesterday we spent the afternoon in the university departmental museums, the Sedgwick, the Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Zoology. Today we came back for the other half of Cambridge: the colleges themselves, the churches, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the river Cam. The weather was fine, which suited a day spent mostly on foot and outdoors.
The thing that makes Cambridge different from most universities is how it is put together, and it helps to know that the structure has changed over time. For the first six hundred years, the colleges were the university. There was no central organization to speak of. Each college was a self-contained world: it housed its students, fed them, and taught them, one fellow sitting with two or three students in a room, working through the material face to face. The university itself was little more than an examining body that set the tests and awarded the degrees. All the real teaching happened inside the colleges.
That changed in the nineteenth century, when the sciences outgrew what any single college could provide. A chemistry laboratory, a physics workshop, a medical school, these needed space and equipment no college dining hall could hold. So the central university expanded. It built lecture theatres and laboratories, hired its own teaching staff, and organized them into departments and faculties grouped under six broad schools: Arts and Humanities, Biological Sciences, Clinical Medicine, Humanities and Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Technology. Today there are over 150 departments. The newer universities that grew up in the same period were built on this department model from the start. Cambridge kept both systems running side by side.
So today a student at Cambridge belongs to two things at once. A department is where you study your subject, attend lectures, and do your research, the way any modern university works. A college is where you live, eat, socialize, and still receive that old form of small-group teaching, now called a supervision, typically two or three students with a tutor, still considered one of the best teaching methods in the world. There are 31 colleges, each self-governing, each with its own land, buildings, income, and rules. Some are old and very rich: Trinity, founded by Henry VIII, is wealthier than many small countries. Some are recent and modest: Robinson was founded in 1977. They range from Peterhouse, the oldest, founded in 1284, to colleges that did not exist when the people who teach in them were born. Twenty-nine of the thirty-one admit undergraduates.
When you walk through Cambridge and see the grand gatehouses and courts and chapels, you are looking at the colleges, not the university. The university has no single campus. Its departments are scattered through the city, in lecture halls and laboratories that sit among and between the colleges. The colleges are the physical face of Cambridge, and it is the colleges you visit.
Cambridge is a small city, around 150,000 people, on the River Cam about fifty miles north of London. People have lived on the spot since the Bronze Age, and it was a trading center under the Romans and the Vikings. But its name has meant one thing for eight hundred years: The University.
One of the museums we visited told the story of how that began. In 1209, in Oxford, a woman was killed. The town authorities could not seize the scholar thought responsible, so they arrested two or three of his associates and hanged them. Many of Oxford scholars left soon after. Some walked east, to the edge of the fens, to a prosperous little trading town called Cambridge. That flight is the founding of Cambridge. No charter, no founder, no ceremony. The university began as a group of academics with nowhere else to go, and it grew, over eight centuries, into the fourth-oldest surviving university in the world. The rivalry between the two places, still played out every year in the boat race, goes back to that killing.
The oldest of the thirty-one colleges, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284. Medieval courts and chapels stand next to Victorian museums and plain modern laboratories, all in the same few streets. King’s College Chapel, begun in 1446, is one of the finest buildings in Britain. A short walk away are the ordinary-looking labs where the electron, the nucleus of the atom, and the structure of DNA were worked out. The place holds its centuries side by side.
Cambridge has long been one of the addresses where the modern understanding of the world was built. Newton was at Trinity, and his notebooks are still in the library there. Darwin studied here and sent the specimens from his voyage back to his Cambridge teachers. Maxwell built the Cavendish Laboratory, Thomson found the electron in it, and Rutherford split the atom. Crick and Watson found the shape of DNA. Stephen Hawking was a fellow at Gonville and Caius for fifty-two years. The people connected to the university have won well over a hundred Nobel Prizes. For a small city, it has done a great deal of the world’s thinking.
Our first stop in England was Sutton Hoo, a low ridge of grassy burial mounds above the River Deben in Suffolk, a few miles from the coast. Edith Pretty owned this land and wondered what lay under the mounds she could see from her house, so she paid for a dig. Basil Brown was the self-taught local man she brought in to do it, and in 1939 he cut into the largest mound and found the imprint of a ninety-foot ship, with the richest early medieval Anglo-Saxon grave ever found in Britain inside it. What they uncovered changed what we know about the people who lived here fourteen hundred years ago.
