Passed/Failed

An Education in the Life of Simon Singh,
Science Writer and Presenter

By Jonathan Sale
Independent Newspaper
05 April 2001

Simon Singh directed Fermat's Last Theorem on BBC2 and also wrote the book about this mathematical obsession. He has worked on Tomorrow's World on BBC1 and Horizon on BBC2. He is the author of The Code Book and presented The Science of Secrecy, about codes and code-breaking, on Channel 4.

Primary school: I must have been about 10 when I said I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. I didn't know what it meant but I ended up doing a PhD in particle (that is, sub-nuclear) physics.

At St John's Infants in Wellington, Somerset, my first year was happy, my second year was happy and my third year was pretty miserable because there was a really strict teacher. Once she got a chattering girl to stick her tongue out and close her eyes; then she got a large pair of scissors and snipped them together past the girl's ears. The girl was in floods of tears and we were terrified.

Mr Clarke at Beech Grove Junior School was the funniest teacher I ever had. He said: "We were a very musical family: even our sewing machine was a Singer." At the age of nine, that seemed enormously funny.

Secondary school: Wellington School, Somerset was a boys' direct grant which went independent and mixed while I was there. Wellington was fine. I had a great maths teacher, Mr Stephens, who taught me for seven years and in the Sixth Form had me for half of my entire timetable.

The worst thing was the rugby; I would wake up on a Tuesday and think: "I don't want to spend two hours in a muddy field." And cadets meant three hours of marching up and down. I was in the chess team; the highlight of my year was when the Somerset champion came to the school and played 20 of us at the same time; I got a draw off him once.

I went up to Cambridge for the entrance exam. The interviewer asked me what options I would like to take during the course and when I said history and philosophy of science, he frowned.

A bit later I was explaining that a scientist called Kekulé had a dream about a snake eating its own tail, and this inspired him, when he woke up, to reconsider the structure of the benzene molecule. He now realised that its atoms formed a circle. The interviewer said he hadn't heard that story and I said: "You would have done if you'd studied the history and philosophy of science." I didn't get in.

Then I went to Imperial College, London for an interview, where they put 12 of us in what we thought was a waiting room. Instead of calling us out individually, the interviewer came in and said: "You've all got the same offer two Cs," which was their way of saying they weren't going to make us jump through hoops.

This very reasonable requirement meant that I could enjoy stress-free A-levels and I got an A in maths, a B in further maths, an A in physics and a B in chemistry.

University: Imperial College is not renowned for its social scene - there were seven men to every woman but the teaching was astounding. Three of us started a newspaper for the hall of residence and in the second year started another newspaper, this time for the physics department. In my final year I became president of the union.

I got a 2.1 in physics and did a PhD at Cambridge University. I was attached to Emmanuel College, but for two of the three years I was in Geneva. There I worked at UA2 (Underground Area 2) of CERN, the particle physics laboratory, where I was looking for something called the "Top Quark".

The "Bottom Quark" had been discovered and, since quarks seem to come in pairs, we were trying to find the Top Quark by smashing together matter and anti-matter.

Did I end up discovering the Top Quark? No. But a few years after I had submitted my PhD, the Americans did find it and I told the story of the discovery on Tomorrow's World.