The Paula Scale

Two rooms, two years, both in England. Cambridge, nineteen twenty-nine. Ludwig Wittgenstein has just returned to Trinity after six years away. He came in nineteen eleven at twenty-two, the son of one of the wealthiest...

Paris, nineteen sixty-nine. Samuel Beckett is sixty-three. He has just been given the Nobel Prize in Literature. Suzanne, his wife, called it a catastrophe. He agreed. He will not go to Stockholm. He will not give a...

Two rooms, two decades. Pasadena, nineteen fifty-one. Jack Parsons is thirty-seven. His security clearance has been permanently revoked. The man who co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and invented the castable...

Cinecittà, spring nineteen ninety-three. Federico Fellini is seventy-three. He has just received an honorary Oscar -- Sophia Loren handed it to him in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, and he said one name: Giulietta. She...

Toronto, late nineteen eighty-one. Glenn Gould is forty-eight. He has just come back from the last recording sessions ever held at Columbia's Thirtieth Street Studio in New York. The studio is being closed. Gould...

Cambridge, England, nineteen sixty. Lise Meitner is eighty-one. She has recently retired here to be near her nephew Otto Frisch. She is sorting sixty years of correspondence -- letters from Hahn, from Planck, from Bohr...

Vienna, spring 1905. Ludwig Boltzmann is sixty-one. He holds two chairs at the University of Vienna -- theoretical physics, and the philosophy of science chair that Ernst Mach vacated after a stroke. His lectures fill...

London, autumn eighteen fifty-two. Ada, Countess of Lovelace, is thirty-six -- the same age at which her father, whom she never knew, was found in a rented house in Missolonghi. Her physicians are evasive, which she...

Paris, spring 1934. Marie Sklodowska-Curie is sixty-six. She has just come in from the courtyard where a fresh delivery of pitchblende residue is waiting, and she is already at her bench at the Radium Institute -- a...

Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California. May 1960. Theodore Maiman is thirty-two. Two weeks ago, on the sixteenth of May, he wrapped a ruby crystal the size of a fingertip in a spiral of xenon flashlamp, cooled...

Cambridge, February 2016. Stephen Hawking is seventy-four and has just heard the news that direct evidence for gravitational waves has been recorded by the LIGO collaboration -- two black holes merging one point three...

Ithaca, New York, February 1990 and a hotel room in Stockholm, April 1972. Two men at two different tables, two decades apart. Carl Sagan is fifty-five and has just persuaded NASA to turn the Voyager 1 camera around...

Riverside Drive, New York. Late summer 1973. Hannah Arendt is sixty-six years old, has just returned from Aberdeen where she became the first woman to deliver the Gifford Lectures, and is in her apartment with the...

Paris, 1967. Jacques Tati is sixty years old, his masterwork is finished, and he has just lost everything. Playtime is in the can. He shot it in seventy millimetre. He built an entire city for it -- Tativille, fifteen...

Chicago, September 1954. Enrico Fermi is fifty-three and has just returned from teaching the summer school at Varenna on the Italian lakes. He still walks to the office at the University of Chicago every morning. He...