The beautiful, inspiring, peaceful, and scintillating Cambridge

If I could start my education again, I would want to go to Cambridge.  Everything about Cambridge was awe-inspiring to me.  From their beautiful old buildings, sense of tradition, deep rooted history in science, cobblestone streets, the winding river Cam, and of course, their small schools, one-on-one advisors, and dedication to breaking the mould of what hoop-jumping education can look like.  I was all ready to sign up for my next degree - in anything - right there and then.

And I saw the apple tree.  The tree grown from the one in Newton's orchard.  The tree that helped Newton articulate his law of gravity.  One piece of what makes him the greatest physicist to date.  The tree was right there.

And the offices, and grounds, and buildings, and books, and churches, and microscopes, and instruments.  The smell of old University buildings reminds me of the history they hold.  Oh the people who walked those halls.  Newton.  Rutherford.  Bohr.  Hawking.  I felt inspired.  I just wanted to sit there and take it in.

Cambridge University is made up of 31 colleges.  They don't specialize in any one thing, and you don't apply to any one degree program.  You just apply to ONE of the 31 colleges.  You can't apply to more than one.  The biggest of them has a total of 1300 students - undergrads and grads combined.  That is, the BIGGEST of the Cambridge colleges is smaller than Sullivan Heights.  With old classic buildings, history and amazing professors, the possibilities are endless.  We visited two of these 31 colleges - Trinity (home to Isaac Newton) and King's College.  Both were beautiful and awe-inspiring.  David, our amazing guide, took us through the details of the school and its history, and really brought it all to life for us.

After our tour and a quick lunch, we sought after a bus station to take us west out to the famous Cavendish Laboratory, that I talked about in my post here.  We had tickets to attend a lecture on modern Physics, but due to the long walks, trying to figure out the bus system, and the struggle for 17 people to eat lunch in under 30 minutes, we missed it and had to settle for wandering through the building and checking out the general Physics demonstrations in the building at the Cambridge Science Festival.  This didn't turn out to be too bad though - because upstairs there were cabinets and displays full of items that you would normally find in a museum.  Tons of artifacts from the early days of Chemistry, the original electron microscope (cut in half so you could see the inside) and much more.  I wandered through the Physics labs and wondered what it must have been like to get a Physics education HERE.  Honestly, I felt intimidated.  And inspired.

Following our time at Cavendish, we took a 30 minute stroll through the country along the back paths towards another of Cambridge's MANY buildings - the Sir Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematics.  Here we had tickets for a lecture by Professor Ian Stewart on the Mathematical Patterns that caused animal markings (such as leopard's spots or zebra's stripes).  Biology and Physics - perfect for me, right?  WRONG.  You see - as much as I was excited and wanted to set a good example - I had been up since 6am (and it was not 3:45pm) and already logged 12 km of walking, and then was placed in a room that was SUPER hot.  So instead of really "hearing" him, I was just focused on staying awake.  And I wasn't doing a very good job.  Then again, neither were many of the students.  So as much as we were hoping for an amazing, jaw-dropping, one-of-a-kind, Cambridge lecture, this experience fell a little flat.

But all in all, Cambridge was amazing.  I wish that we would have had more time there, more time with our guide David, who was outstanding, more time to see more of the colleges, the Wren library, and more of the history of this great place.  But there is always next time.

On the train at Kings Cross, ready to go to Cambridge

Trinity College, including Newton's apple tree, and our group 

Kings College, Trinity college Chapel, and the Cambridge Senate Buildings

Kings College Chapel

Cavendish Lab

Sir Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematics

What I'm most looking forward to: Cambridge University & Cavendish Laboratory

While I am so excited for everything we will see and do on our upcoming trip to London, I think I am most excited to see the Cambridge University and Cavendish Laboratory.  There is something extraordinary about being able to stand in the places where something significant has happened.  I could argue that all our destinations harbour moments of significance, in history, literature, popular culture, and of course, science.  But for me, Cambridge University and Cavendish Lab take the cake.

Cavendish Laboratory is the home of Watson and Crick. It is where they worked together to discover the structure of DNA (and then won the nobel prize).

Thomson, credited for discovering the electron and the first isotope, went on to win the nobel prize for his work in Chemistry.

Rutherford, father of nuclear physics, became the director of the lab in 1919, after discovering the nucleus of the atom and discovering the concept of radioactive decay and half life (while working in Canada, for which he won the Nobel Prize).  Under his leadership, Chadwick became the first person to split the nucleus in a fully controlled matter, as well as discovered the neutron and measured its mass.

Maxwell is the father of electromagnetism.  He is credited for the second biggest unification theory in Physics (and the third greatest Physicist of all time).  His work on electromagnetic fields, the movement of light, the existence of radio waves and more make his work so significant in the study of Physics.

But of course the number one physicist of all time is the great Sir Isaac Newton.  He spent much of his life here, formatting laws of Mathematics, Optics and Motion - and was dubbed the father of Modern Physics.  It was having tea and sitting in the gardens where he first questioned why is it things fall to the earth with the consistent rates of acceleration.  Newton's apple tree (or a great grandchild of the original) is still on the grounds to this day.

Of course Cambridge is also home to more recent scientists, like Sanger, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, for sequencing Insulin and determining the amino acids upon which it was built, and of course the slightly more famous Stephen Hawking, scientist with a focus on back holes and the big bang theory, (and a few more huge theories trying to unify all Physics) and current Director of Research at the Centre of Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge.

Sir Isaac Newton, in a letter to Sir Robert Hooke once wrote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."  And Cambridge is home of many giants.  And I am so excited to stand where they stood.