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Exams and friends at Winchester College

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Coming to Winchester
Freeman Dyson Scientist
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[Q] Prep school meant it really literally prepared you to...

It was preparing you for then... for what the English call the public school which is really the private school, which was where my father was teaching and which happened to be where we lived and... so when I came home to Winchester, as a boarder in the... at the school in Winchester, I wasn't living at home, but I was with a family close by. And Winchester was, of course, an intellectual hot house. We were the... the boys were highly selected, there was a very stiff competitive exam to get in, the intellectual standards were very high, and so we just enjoyed ourselves enormously there. That was for me... also a very lucky thing.

Freeman Dyson (1923-2020), who was born in England, moved to Cornell University after graduating from Cambridge University with a BA in Mathematics. He subsequently became a professor and worked on nuclear reactors, solid state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology. He published several books and, among other honours, was awarded the Heineman Prize and the Royal Society's Hughes Medal.

Listeners: Sam Schweber

Silvan Sam Schweber is the Koret Professor of the History of Ideas and Professor of Physics at Brandeis University, and a Faculty Associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of a history of the development of quantum electro mechanics, "QED and the men who made it", and has recently completed a biography of Hans Bethe and the history of nuclear weapons development, "In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist" (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Tags: Winchester College

Duration: 53 seconds

Date story recorded: June 1998

Date story went live: 24 January 2008