When I studied astrophysics at QMC London in the 80s my head of department had been a student of Dirac. And Mike Green, who took over Hawking’s professorship at Cambridge, was one of the lecturers. Another had had been a student with Hawking. Green, who we called Boris for reasons I cannot remember, is one of the pioneers of Super String Theory, one of the better contenders for Grand Unified Theory.
All reflected glory, my only real achievement in physics – apart from a few students of mine who went one to be physicists, mathematicians and doctors – was discovering a galaxy in the IRAS data. But they were not hard to find, and I cannot even remember the NGC number.
I think JD’s mouth was open as he said it, so he was lying.