Sir Stephen Hawking's funeral reflected his peculiarly academic strand of eccentricity

At five minutes to two on Saturday in central Cambridge you could have heard an atom collide on the usually bustling King’s Parade. Following 76 mournful chimes of the bells of Great St Mary’s on Market Square the crowds who’d gathered to mourn the university's most lauded son of the quantum physics age fell silent. Then there was the faint hum of engines and two police motorcycles puttered at sepulchral pace past the open doors of the university church, and behind them the hearse ferrying Professor Stephen Hawking on his final journey through the city “that he loved so much and which loved him”. The cortege would have passed the Corpus Chrisiti Chronophage (a golden, time-eating, cicada clock),...