The Big Read: Great reckonings in little rooms

If you think science and romance cannot mix, go and watch the third-best movie yet made.

I speak of A Theory Of Everything, the powerful biopic about the world's most well-known living scientist, Stephen Hawking.

I was moved, of course, by the youthful devotions of a couple in the face of a relationship that would come to be defined by the terrible burden of motor neuron disease.

I delighted in the lively portrayal of university life and the moments of discovery and recognition for this brilliant physicist confined to a wheelchair. All of that.

But there is a moment that is so powerful, so transforming and so relevant to South Africa today that I have come to memorise those precious lines.

At one stage in the movie, Professor Dennis Sciama takes his student, Hawking, to the world-famous Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. They enter the special place and the mentor says the unforgettable words: "This lab is where JJ Thomson discovered the electron, where Rutherford split the atom." Then, as the prof leaves the lab: "Oh, and close the door as you leave."

I get goose bumps just writing these words. There is nothing you can possibly teach a student that can so inspire that young person than to reset their horizons for what is possible in terms of their own achievements.

The professor is not merely giving Hawking historical information; those two facts about Thomson and Rutherford he could have acquired from a book. He wants to place him in the heart of two of the greatest discoveries of that century so he can touch, smell, feel and taste the power of discovery.

But there is more. The prof wants Hawking to know he expects his young student to do the same - make a great discovery that will turn the scientific world on its head.

"One of the great rewards of this job," says Sciama, "is that you never know from where the next great leap forward is going to come, or from whom."

Those words would have little meaning if uttered in a normal lecture hall or in a telephone call. They mean everything in the place where the discoveries happened.

I've been thinking a lot about the social environments in which people learn and do their academic work. As I pack my bags to return home after three months of bliss at Stanford University, where I completed a new scholarly book, something became crystal clear: it is not the immense literary resources locked up in the libraries or the distance from management meetings on my home campus. It is the environment - a space of intellectual ferment, of excited researchers, of smart students and academics, of feeling you are living at the frontiers of your discipline.

Halfway through my stay at Stanford I received an e-mail from a professor here. He matriculated from Pretoria Boys High School and won the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in computational biology.

Let me stick my neck out and say he would not have won the ultimate prize in science if he'd been at a South African university. He did it, like a few other South African-born scientists, working in intellectual environments that created in their minds a sense of hunger, ambition and aspiration. The standard set was not to pass but to discover.

If only our schools got this core message right. That the role of the teacher is not to prepare students for mindless tests but to create that sense of awe about the natural world around them, that hunger to solve problems, and that capacity to dream about doing great things.

Look at the walls of a science class or lab in South Africa and you will see the lack of an intellectual environment to puzzle, inspire and drive young minds.

If only our universities stopped treating undergraduate students with contempt - "only so many of you will get through the first semester in chemistry" - and created environments in which students become creators rather than consumers of other people's knowledge.

Sciama leaves the lab. Hawking looks around at the empty lab. He goes to the blackboard and picks up a piece of chalk. He looks at the board, then puts the chalk down. The only instruction is "close the door as you leave".

The second-best movie yet made is Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and at the top of the pile is the intellectual blockbuster Finding Nemo.