Science Quote by Aaron Klug

Cambridge, in Klug's telling, isn't just a university town; it's the metropole. The line has the calm, matter-of-fact tone of someone describing a train timetable, which is exactly the point: empire and prestige worked best when they felt like logistics rather than ideology. If you were "from the Colonies or the Dominions", the route to legitimacy was prewritten. You didn't merely choose Cambridge; you moved along an institutional pipeline that turned peripheral talent into central authority.

The phrase "the place" does a lot of quiet work. It implies there were alternatives, but they weren't really alternatives if you wanted to be taken seriously. Then Klug tightens the aperture further: not even Cambridge broadly, but the Cavendish specifically. That's the physics Vatican, the lab whose mythology (Rutherford, Thomson, Crick and Watson nearby) functioned like a credentialing machine. Saying "one went" is social shorthand: this is what serious people did; deviation reads as amateurism.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, admiration for an ecosystem where ideas, instruments, and mentors clustered so densely that ambition could be converted into discovery. On the other, an unblinking picture of how knowledge hierarchies mirrored geopolitical ones. Talent flowed inward; recognition flowed outward. For a scientist born in Lithuania, raised in South Africa, and made in Britain, the sentence also reads as autobiography compressed into a rule: to do frontier physics, you had to pass through the center that defined where the frontier was.