The Birmingham-Cornell Pipeline

After the end of the war, Rudolf Peierls and Hans Bethe returned to their homes at Cornell and the UK. Although Peierls had attractive offers from a number of universities, including Oxford, Manchester, London and Cambridge, he chose to remain at Birmingham.³⁶⁰ He had come to Birmingham in 1937 as the first professor of Mathematical Physics and had set himself the task of establishing a school devoted to both first-class research and first-class teaching. The war had put the effort on hold, but as soon as Peierls returned to Birmingham he re-engaged in the process. Virtually from scratch he built a school of mathematical physics, or theoretical physics as it would be called later, which was arguably the best in the country and which could compete with any in Europe and with most others globally. He had clear ideas of what he regarded as important for a prosperous theoretical physics community in the UK: a balanced flexible system that provided good training and high standards without prejudicing against students outside Oxbridge …