Winston Churchill’s remarkable love of science

Churchill was the first British prime minister to appoint a scientific adviser, as early as the 1940s. He had regular meetings with scientists such as Bernard Lovell, the father of radioastronomy, and loved talking with them. He promoted, with public funds research, telescopes and the laboratories where some of the most significant developments of the postwar period first came to light, from molecular genetics to crystallography using X-rays. During the war itself, the decisive British support for research, encouraged by him, led to the development of radar and cryptography, and played a crucial role in the success of military operations.

Churchill himself had a scientific grounding that was hardly extensive but was nevertheless sound. As a young man he had read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and studied an introduction to physics: the essential things, we might say. He followed scientific advances with considerable interest, to the extent that in the 1920s and 1930s he wrote articles on popular science.