Samira Ahmed in New Humanist: There is a painting of the late Peter Higgs, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, that hangs in a science building at the University of Edinburgh. It shows him staring out with a pencil in his shirt pocket. He’d told the artist Ken Currie that he only needed a pencil and paper for his work.
Currie spent time with Higgs in his Edinburgh flat, and told me in 2014 about Higgs’s extensive collection of vinyl records and “all sorts of books on painters which I noticed were arranged in alphabetical order”. He continued: “You go into his apartment in Edinburgh and it’s all very 70s retro stuff, there are all these lamps hanging over formica tables, and he’s got this amazing sound system but it’s a real sort of vintage job … so it’s like going back in time.”
Some of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers – Higgs, Freud, Einstein – reveal so much to us through the objects that surrounded them. Higgs’s passion for music and ordered thinking is apparent through his alphabetised collection. The lack of concern for updating his interior suggests a focus on what’s going on in his mind, rather than material possessions. There is a joy to knowing he waited 47 years for his theory to be verified by the Large Hadron Collider, but lived to see it and secure his Nobel Prize.
Another example is Hawking. Roger Highfield, whose book Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work explored the objects in the physicist’s Cambridge University office, described the contents as the biographical equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. It revealed not just his scientific papers, but also his determination, embodied in his last wheelchair, and his love of fame and jokes. The office held mementoes from filming with the likes of Monty Python and scientific bets signed with his thumbnail – revealing his playful self. Two model trains – the Mallard and the Flying Scotsman – are a sweet reminder of his childhood passion.
Not far from the heavy traffic of one of the main arterial roads into London, you can step inside the mind of Sigmund Freud. He lived the last year of his life in an elegant house and garden in Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead – now a museum. Already 81 when he moved there, Freud’s travel documents are framed in the hallway; a reminder of his escape as a Jewish intellectual from Vienna after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938.
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