Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.
But if no classics as in Chaucer’s day,
At least my modern pieces shall be cheery
Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory.
—W. H. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron”

Ah, my Lord of Birmingham, come in, sit on the fire and anticipate the judgement of the Universal Church.
—The Rt. Rev. Herbert Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham

I like the company of men of science: they are not excessively intellectual in their hours of leisure and they give good dinners.
—The Rt. Rev. E. W. Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham[1]

In the fall of 1957, I began what turned out to be a two-year membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. This was a banner time for physics. In 1956, the Chinese-born American physicists T. D. Lee and C. N. Yang noted in several papers that what is called “parity symmetry”—the symmetry between left- and right-handed descriptions, a cornerstone of physics up to that point—had never been tested in the sort of weak interactions that are responsible for the instability of many elementary particles. They proposed several experiments and, when these were performed, they demonstrated that, in these interactions, the symmetry was indeed violated. This was a sensational discovery and all of us were gripped by its implications. In the fall of 1957, Lee and Yang, who were both at the Institute, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Soon after my arrival, I studied