Existential emptiness; the tragi-comedy of McEwan’s Solar.

You see people like Michael Baird all the time at scientific conferences; pudgy, balding, slightly unkempt,  full of their own self importance.  But Baird, like many academics, was a lazy man; a one discovery wonder.  As an Oxford post-doc, he revised  one of Einstein’s theories, an achievement of brilliance that... Read more »