By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
This past summer I began reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It’s actually taking me rather a long time. Hawking published the book in 1988 and wrote it, supposedly, to make complex concepts in theoretical physics accessible to a wider audience. Wider audience, perhaps, but not a general audience, I would argue.
In the meantime, however, I’ve discovered a much easier to read Pelican Book in the Cathedral Library: The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans (1877-1946). (It’s a 1937 abridgement of the first edition of 1930.) Jeans achieved in 1930 what Stephen Hawking attempted in the 1980s: making ‘science a best-seller, gathering together the main lines of recent scientific discoveries into a comprehensive picture of the exciting universe around us, describing its astonishing mysteries in language that everybody can understand.’
Both Hawking and Jeans acknowledged that, whether one likes it or not, to write about the universe is to write about God. Jeans, an agnostic, described how modern physics reduces the universe to two kinds of waves, matter and radiation or light, and concluded, ‘the whole story of its creation can be told with perfect accuracy and completeness in the six words, ‘God said, “Let there be light”’. For Hawking, an atheist, God was a metaphor: ‘If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of reason – for then we should know the mind of God’.
Sir James Jeans studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and made important contributions to our knowledge of quantum theory and radiation; he has things named after him, including a ‘length’ and an ‘instability’. In retirement, he married his second wife, Susi Jeans (1911-1993), who was a professional organist. And here we discover a link with Exeter Cathedral: Susi Jeans transcribed a manuscript (in the library at Christ Church, Oxford) of organ music by John Lugge, organist at Exeter Cathedral from 1609 to 1665. Her research eventually led her to Exeter Cathedral; in 1958 she published an article on the musical life at Exeter from 1600 to 1650. She begins, ‘It was with great excitement that I first stepped into the Cathedral Library at Exeter’ – what a commendation!