The life and career of Lise Meitner, a pioneer of nuclear physics, was celebrated in a day of events at Churchill College Cambridge on 28 January. The symposium comprised three sessions – including one chaired by Graham – and, after dinner, a performance of the play ‘Curie_Meitner_Lamarr_Indivisible’.
Graham’s publishers in the UK, Faber, announced last Friday that they will be publishing his next book in early May 2019. Basic Books will publish it a few weeks later in the U.S. and Canada. Graham said: ‘It will be good to see the book in the stores, five years after I conceived it.’
Dirac performed onstage last week at the Orkney Science Festival, played by the actor and former physicist David Sumner.
Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest experts on gravity and cosmology of the twentieth century. Graham met him (over lunch) three times but never spoke to him – the awe was too great. But in the 1970s Graham did once come close to putting him in hospital ……
Hawking taking a zero-gravity flight in a reduced-gravity aircraft, 2007
Photograph: AP