After shining as a physics student in Lahore, Saeed’s time at Cambridge University was markedly different – suddenly he was one of many top students, not the only one. In this part of his memoirs, he describes life at Cambridge, including his “quite stupid approach” to research, which included being too “idiotic” to admit he didn’t know how particular experimental equipment worked, turning up  in the lab at 3pm after spending hours at night on advanced mathematics in his room with the gas fire blazing, and feeling “embarrassed and ashamed” after getting pump oil into a cyclotron, which a technician then had to spend a full day and a half repairing.

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