The Old Cavendish

This was much more exciting than the colleges. The lab building was unfortunately closed for repairs, so we weren't able to go inside. But we lingered in the street outside and took pictures, awestruck and giddy at the same time, like pilgrims at a holy site. Or teenage girls outside a hotel where the Beatles were staying.

We'd been talking about James Clerk Maxwell and Ernest Rutherford in our class, and this was their lab! This is where J.J. Thomson discovered the electron! This is where Crick and Watson (and Franklin) discovered the double helix! I felt smarter just being in the same neighborhood.

St John's College

This is certainly different. Most of the older buildings in the Oxford colleges are constructed in the same yellowish Cotswold stone, which gives a kind of architectural unity to the city center. There are many brick buildings in Oxford of course, but I've never seen one quite like this. I think of brick as being a newer material, but the Tudor-style brick and stone of the main gate on the left dates from the very early 16th century, around the time of the college's founding in 1511.

The building on the right, on the other hand, is the Old Divinity School at St John's, and that dates from the late nineteenth century, exactly as you would expect.

Trinity College

Trinity was founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, whose statue adorns the Great Gate, in the picture on the right. (One thing that did strike me about what little I saw of the Cambridge colleges was how many statues they had adorning their facades, which you don't see much of in Oxford.)

The Great Court, on the left, is described as the largest enclosed courtyard in Europe. It's famous for the Great Court Run, the attempt to run all the way (339 metres, 371 yards) around the court before the clock can finish striking twelve. (This was depicted in Chariots of Fire, although Harold Abrahams never actually made the run.)

The fact that it's called the Great Court, rather than the Great Quad, is one of the little language differences between the two universities, like calling the person who cleans your room a scout (Oxford) or a bedder (Cambridge), and your classes tutorials (Oxford) or supervisions (Cambridge). What you are most likely to notice in this picture is how brown it is. I think it only rained once the entire month I was in England, and not for very long, and though Yorkshire was still fairly green, even there we skipped a planned visit to a waterfall on the excursion to the Dales because there wasn't any actual water in the falls.

King's College

If you don't know a lot about the Gothic and neo-Gothic architectural details (and I really don't) this college which dominates the center of Cambridge looks very similar to Magdalen College in Oxford, which was founded around the same time.

That's the famous chapel on the right.

These streets, for example

One obvious difference between the two locations is size: Oxford is much larger and more urban. The city center with most of the college buildings is surrounded by miles of ordinary English neighborhoods with homes and businesses on every side. (I've heard people say that Cambridge is a university first and a town second, and Oxford is the other way around.)

But in the city centers, they are a lot alike. These two Cambridge streets—Free School Lane, by the old Cavendish Laboratory, and Trinity Street, home to the college—could easily be plopped down in the middle of Oxford.

Cambridge

Punts on a river. It's the Cam, not the Cherwell, and that's the original Mathematical Bridge rather than the replica at the Iffley Lock in Oxford, so this must be Cambridge.

I only spent an afternoon there, so have no real standing to list the similarities and differences between the two college towns (not that that has ever stopped me.)

I had a couple of dreams this week when a bad cough was disrupting my sleep where I was wandering through the streets of Oxford, completely lost, and finally realized I didn't know where I was because I was actually in Cambridge, not Oxford. But honestly unless I was standing in front of one of the colleges or the Corpus Clock or this bridge, I probably wouldn't know the difference.

The Cherry Orchard

I've just noticed for the first time that I never downloaded any of the pictures I took on our second weekend excursion, to Stratford-upon-Avon, so all I have from that day are phone pictures of the RSC theatre before the performance of The Cherry Orchard.

I don't think this is any great loss; the world does not need another picture of Shakespeare's Birthplace, and it saves me from any obligation to sort through them and see if any are worth sharing.

The pictures are gone because my camera was stolen, along with everything else in my purse, from a Starbucks in London. Obviously I managed to get myself back to New York despite having no credit cards, no cash, no phone, and no house keys, thanks to a lovely friend who swooped in and gave me a shoulder to cry on plus a much-needed loan, but it was not an experience I ever want to repeat.

As for The Cherry Orchard, I enjoyed the performance though I did think it emphasized the comedy at the expense of the underlying sadness. And the seats in the galleries at the RSC theatre are wickedly uncomfortable, with so little legroom even a 16th century audience would have felt cramped. My 20th century knees were outraged, but even those of my classmates with healthy joints were complaining.

I am home

And I am recovering from a nasty cold, so I absolutely do not have the energy or inclination to go into my misadventures and misfortunes in London.

I will start posting pictures from the field trip to Cambridge at some point, maybe today, maybe not. But since I definitely feel like the back end of something, these fuzzy sheep butts in Avebury seem appropriate.

Anti-vaxxers in World War I

The museum also had some very interesting exhibits on the fight against typhoid, and vaccination efforts during World War I. These flyers are all too familiar.

[W]e poison our men (against their will) with the most horrible contamination human folly ever devised...Our brave troops have to fight GERMANS IN FRANCE and GERM THEORISTS AT HOME...A Crime Against Personal Liberty—Individual Safety—Common Sense.

Also at the History of Science museum

This beautiful astrolabe belonged to Elizabeth I, a gift from her childhood friend Sir Robert Dudley.

Einstein's blackboard

For our final field trip, we stayed in Oxford and visited the History of Science museum. This is their prize exhibit--a blackboard used by Einstein for a lecture in Oxford in 1931. (In case you can't make it out, he was talking about general relativity and the size of the universe.)

Some of the Oxford dons who had attended his first lecture decided to preserve the blackboards from the second lecture; there were originally two, but one was accidentally erased. Einstein was not pleased. He wrote in his diary: The lecture was indeed well-attended and nice. [But] the blackboards were picked up. (Personality cult, with adverse effect on others. One could easily see the jealousy of distinguished English scholars. So I protested; but this was perceived as false modesty.) On arrival [back in Christ Church] I felt shattered. Not even a cart-horse could endure so much!

A different view from the observatory

That's London in the distance.

The Canary Wharf neighborhood, which I remember as being nothing much, is now a new finance center. I would never have recognized this as being part of London if I didn't already know it was. Forty years ago, none of those buildings were there.

The building in the foreground, with the long rows of columns on either side, is a former royal residence called the Queen's House, which is now an art museum.