"Freda Warrington - A Taste of Blood Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Warrington Freda)

Neville gave a dismissive chuckle. "He will insist on calling me
that. You must understand it's only a nickname. I'm not a professor,
though I was nearly elected to a physics chair in 1919; dashed
influenza epidemic got me and I almost died of it." He tapped his

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A Taste


chest. "Never been quite right since. Anyway, Trinity made me a
lifetime research fellow instead and it suits me better. I do just as
much lecturing and coaching as I want, and the rest of my time's my
own to play with atoms and numbers."
He led Karl round the laboratory, showing him various pieces of
equipment; a vacuum pump, a gold-leaf electroscope, a liquid air
machine, a Wilson cloud chamber, a scintillation counter. The
devices with which wondrous discoveries had been made looked
smaller and more primitive than Karl had imagined.
"And this is the mass spectrograph." Dr Neville rested his hand on a
black cylinder mounted on a wooden stand and connected to the
thick coiled arc of an electromagnet. "We use it for separating
isotopes. This is what we're working on at present, the structure of
radioactive elements. From studying the very tiniest components of
matter we hope to understand the processes that take place inside
stars. The ultimate aim is to uncover the laws that govern the
universe itself, the whole of nature." He gazed into the air, then his
attention snapped back to Karl. "Dashed ambitious, eh? What it
really consists of is a lot of infuriating fiddling about and infinite
amounts of patience, which I lack. I'm a bad experimenter, really.
That's why I need Henry and Charlotte to carry on with things if I
want to go off into a flight of speculative thought about something.
Still interested?"
"Naturally," said Karl. "More than I can say."
"I gather you're a musician."
"I was."


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A Taste


"Never studied science at all?"
"I have, but not at university. Only as a layman."
"But now you want to become a scientist?"
"No," said Karl. "Like you, I simply want to understand the
universe."
George Neville was staring at Karl, a faraway look in his eyes. His
irises were milky silver. "You see, you could—ah—you could apply
to one of the colleges and start with the mathematical tripos, but… "
"What I should like is to learn from you, Dr Neville," said Karl. "If I