Freeman Dyson - Snobbery and the class system (18/157)

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American-British physicist and mathematician, Freeman Dyson, was born in England in 1923. Aged 25, he relocated to Cornell University and has become known for his achievements in the fields of solid state physics, nuclear engineering and quantum field theory. [Listener: Sam Schweber]

TRANSCRIPT: I was really very lucky. Of course I hated the class, well, the snobbery of the place. It was a very, very intensely intellectual place and there was in an intense intellectual snobbery there and a social snobbery as well. I mean we were all essentially middle class kids and we looked down not only at the working class, we looked down at the business class as well. In England the antagonism has always been very strong between the intellectual middle class and the business middle class. That's one of the causes of social problems in England. It's why Margaret Thatcher was always so down on the universities, because she came from the business middle class. But in any case, so we were in this very narrow intellectually snobbish surroundings, and surrounded with high medieval walls, literally, and so I always felt an intense hatred for the system, although I loved a lot of the people and I loved the life in the college, but nevertheless I had a very bad conscience about it and wanted to tear it down and let in some daylight from outside. So I always had this very ambivalent feeling about it. I hated a great deal of this sort of "old school tie" atmosphere that surrounded it, and I found only about fifty years later I've started to lose this hatred for it because, I mean, I've just become mellowed with time.

Видео Freeman Dyson - Snobbery and the class system (18/157) канала Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People