My grandfather slowly lost his mind. He became convinced he had been moved into care, so my mother and I drove him around one afternoon on the pretext of returning him home. Back where we started, he briefly felt reassured. He smiled as he walked through the front door, his back to the autumn sun.
He would have been delighted this month at the news that Britain is to build a new kind of power station. Grandpa, you see, was a physicist and he took out the world’s first patent on a nuclear fusion reactor.
George Paget Thomson taught at Aberdeen University, where ideas about atomic structure occupied his mind. During the Second World War, the government approached him to lead a study into the
© Times Newspapers Limited 2022.
Registered in England No. 894646. Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF.